Academic Performance Quotes

Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not.… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.”5.2

13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.

Grad school was a mistake, but now it's too late to back out of it because my self-worth is unbreakably tied to my academic performance, and what would even be left of me if I decide to drop out?

One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students' academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are merely passive recipients of their teachers' influence.

Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, 'the United States of America.' But it is hardly strange. Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind. We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen. Washington himself appreciated Paine at his true worth. Franklin knew him for a great patriot and clear thinker. He was a friend and confidant of Jefferson, and the two must often have debated the academic and practical phases of liberty. I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles. Although the present generation knows little of Paine's writings, and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of it. Truth is governed by natural laws and cannot be denied. Paine spoke truth with a peculiarly clear and forceful ring. Therefore time must balance the scales. The Declaration and the Constitution expressed in form Paine's theory of political rights. He worked in Philadelphia at the time that the first document was written, and occupied a position of intimate contact with the nation's leaders when they framed the Constitution. Certainly we may believe that Washington had a considerable voice in the Constitution. We know that Jefferson had much to do with the document. Franklin also had a hand and probably was responsible in even larger measure for the Declaration. But all of these men had communed with Paine. Their views were intimately understood and closely correlated. There is no doubt whatever that the two great documents of American liberty reflect the philosophy of Paine. ...Then Paine wrote 'Common Sense,' an anonymous tract which immediately stirred the fires of liberty. It flashed from hand to hand throughout the Colonies. One copy reached the New York Assembly, in session at Albany, and a night meeting was voted to answer this unknown writer with his clarion call to liberty. The Assembly met, but could find no suitable answer. Tom Paine had inscribed a document which never has been answered adversely, and never can be, so long as man esteems his priceless possession. In 'Common Sense' Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again. It must be remembered that 'Common Sense' preceded the declaration and affirmed the very principles that went into the national doctrine of liberty. But that affirmation was made with more vigor, more of the fire of the patriot and was exactly suited to the hour... Certainly [the Revolution] could not be forestalled, once he had spoken. {The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}

What is currently under discussion in our national hysteria about failing academic performance misses the point. Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.

We so often hear the expression “freedom is not free,” but what exactly does that mean? It means that freedom isn’t a young woman in an open field with her head tilted toward the sun. It’s more likely a young woman sitting at home, studying, even though she’d much rather be out with her friends. It’s a young man, getting accepted into a highly ranked university on the basis of his outstanding academic performance. Freedom is personal responsibility. It’s the sacrifices we make personally so that we may afford our lives certain privileges. Ronald Reagan famously said, “Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

Modern education has been plagued by utilitarianism for a very long time, and both teachers and students have come to think that schools should teach only what will be useful in the pursuit of a career. At the same time, we deplore the poor academic performance of our students in comparison with students of other countries.

She had had such an unhappy childhood and she had only to picture some poor child suffering in a similar way for her heart to sink. Of course, she knew that she would never punish her child for poor academic performance. She would not comment on her child’s lack of good looks either. Nor would she ever tell her son or daughter as her mother had once told her that she was only staying in a bad, destructive relationship for their sake.

Extroverts get better grades than introverts during elementary school, but introverts outperform extroverts in high school and college. At the university level, introversion predicts academic performance better than cognitive ability.

To be a scholar study math, to be a smart study magic.

Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. I don't know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing wide open. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake, that only makes sense when there is some LSD actually swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you to know what it is taken to mean. LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to everyone of these essences, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!' all the time, which is LSD's most distressing and least endearing side effects. ...Music in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy 'music making', all that grain of human performance...transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fi speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making. The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set to its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close.

The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony. We already have a national curriculum locked up in the seven lessons I have just outlined. Such a curriculum produces physical, moral, and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its hideous effects. What is currently under discussion in our national hysteria about failing academic performance misses the point. Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.

At the university level, introversion predicts academic performance better than cognitive ability.

Grad school was a mistake, but now it’s too late to back out of it because my self-worth is unbreakably tied to my academic performance, and what would even be left of me if I decided to drop out?

Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable,” the researchers wrote. “Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not.… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.

Extroverts get better grades than introverts during elementary school, but introverts outperform extroverts in high school and college. At the university level, introversion predicts academic performance better than cognitive ability. One study tested 141 college students’ knowledge of twenty different subjects, from art to astronomy to statistics, and found that introverts knew more than the extroverts about every single one of them.

Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade. We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off. And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.

We have nothing against playing video games; they have many good features and benefits. Our concern is that when they are played to excess, especially in social isolation, they can hinder a young man's ability and interest in developing his face-to-face social skills. Multiple problems, including obesity, violence, anxiety, lower school performance, social phobia and shyness, greater impulsivity and depression, have all been associated with excessive gaming. The variety and intensity of video game action makes other parts of life, like school, seem comparatively boring, and that creates a problem with their academic performance, which in turn might require medication to deal with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which then leads to other problems down the road in a disastrous negative cycle...

Not that parents are alone in their extreme behavior. That have more than enough company among school boards and high-ranking politicians who think if you "fix the schools, they'll fix the kids." So, in Gadsden, Alabama, school officials eliminated kindergarten nap time in 2003 so the children would have more test-prep time. Two hours away in Atlanta, school officials figured that if you eliminated recess, the kids will study more. And just in case those shifty teachers try to sneak it in, Atlanta started building schools without playgrounds. "We are intent on improving academic performance," said the superintendent. "You don't do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars." Meanwhile, Georgia's governor wanted the state to give Mozart CDs to newborns because research showed Mozart improved babies' IQs (which later proved to be mythical research). Right behind him is Lincoln, Rhode Island, where they canceled the district spelling bee because only one child would win, leaving all others behind, thus violating the intent of No Child Left Behind--or, as they might say in Lincoln, no child gets ahead.

At the university level, introversion predicts academic performance better than cognitive ability. One study tested 141 college students’ knowledge of twenty different subjects, from art to astronomy to statistics, and found that introverts knew more than the extroverts about every single one of them.

There is good reason to believe that general intelligence is likely to be associated with better judgment. Intelligence is correlated with good performance in virtually all domains. All other things being equal, it is associated not only with higher academic achievement but also with higher job performance.

motivation predicts higher academic performance, fewer criminal convictions, and better employment outcomes. Children who have a so-called “rage to master”—a term coined by Ellen Winner to describe the intrinsic motivation to master a specific domain—are more likely to be successful in any number of endeavors, from art to science.

The black conservatives claim that the decline of values such as patience, deferred gratification, and self-reliance have resulted in the high crime rates, the increasing number of unwed mothers, and the relatively uncompetitive academic performances of black youth. And certainly these sad realities must be candidly confronted. But nowhere in their writings do the new black conservatives examine the pervasiveness of sexual and military images used by the mass media and deployed by the advertising industry in order to entice and titillate consumers. Black conservatives thus overlook the degree to which market forces of advanced capitalist processes thrive on sexual and military images.

Grades are just entered into a computer like everything else is entered into a computer. Computers can be hacked.

If you look at this development from the perspective of a university president, it’s actually quite sad. Most of these people no doubt cherished their own college experience—that’s part of what motivated them to climb the academic ladder. Yet here they were at the summit of their careers dedicating enormous energy toward boosting performance in fifteen areas defined by a group of journalists at a second-tier newsmagazine. They were almost like students again, angling for good grades from a taskmaster. In fact, they were trapped by a rigid model, a WMD.

JB's friends were poets and performance artists and academics and modern dancers and philosophers -- he had, Malcolm once observed, befriended everyone at their college who was least likely to make money -- and their lives were grants and residencies and fellowships and awards. Success, among JB's Hood Hall assortment, wasn't defined by your box-office numbers (as it was for his agent and manager) or your costars or your reviews (as it was by his grad-school classmates): it was defined simply and only by how good your work was, and whether you were proud of it.

One can imagine many patients being turned off by the words fecal transplant or, as researchers call it in their academic papers, “fecal microbiota transplantation.” The slang used by some doctors (“shit swap”) is no better. But Borody, after years of performing this procedure, believes he has finally come up with a less disturbing name. “Yes,” he says, “we call it a ‘transpoosion.

Still, our guilt over leaving people behind nips at our heels, at every new station that we reach. For instance, whenever there is a convening at an academic conference, invariably some young radical person will get on the mic to ask, “Who isn’t in the room? Who are we excluding?” These questions matter, but they can also be deeply annoying because very often they are a performance of middle-class angst.

The theory is that immersion in the history of one's own group will overcome feelings of racial inferiority both by instilling pride in past ethnic accomplishments and by providing ethnic role models to inspire future performance. Telling black children how marvelous old Africa was will make them work harder and do better. But does study of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome improve the academic record of Greek-American and Italian-American children? Not so that anyone has noticed. Why is it likely to help black children, who are removed from their geographical origins not by 50 years but by 300?

We have created a culture of reading poverty in which a vicious cycle of aliteracy has the potential to devolve into illiteracy for many students. By allowing students to pass through our classrooms without learning to love reading, we are creating adults (who then become parents and teachers) who don't read much. They may be capable of reading well enough to perform academic and informational reading, but they do not love to read and have few life reading habits to model for children.

One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation

Students who only know how to perform well in today’s education system—get good grades and test scores, and earn degrees—will no longer be those who are most likely to succeed. Thriving in the twenty-first century will require real competencies, far more than academic credentials.

The idea of an achievement gap means there is a disparity in academic performance between groups of students; implicit in this idea is that academic achievement as measured by statistical instruments like test scores and dropout rates is the only form of academic “achievement.” There is an even more sinister implication in achievement-gap talk—that disparities in academic achievement accurately reflect disparities in intelligence among racial groups. Intellect is the linchpin of behavior, and the racist idea of the achievement gap is the linchpin of behavioral racism.

Rosenthal went on to study precisely that – what expectation mean for our children. In one line of research he showed that teachers´ expectations greatly affect their students´ academic performance, even when the teachers try to treat them impartially. For example, he and a colleague asked schoolkids in eighteen classrooms to complete an IQ test. The teachers, but not students, were given results. The researchers told the teachers that the test would indicate which children had unusually high intellectual potential. What the teachers didn’t know was that the kids named as gifted did not really score higher than average on the IQ test – they actually had average scores. Shortly afterwards, the teachers rated those not labeled gifted as less curious and less interested than the gifted students – and the students´ subsequent grades reflected that. But what is really shocking – and sobering – is the result of another IQ test, given eight months later. When you administer IQ test a second time, you expect that each child´s score will vary some. In general, about half of the children´s scores should go up and half down, as a result of changes in the individual’s intellectual development in relation to his peers or simply random variations. When Rosenthal administered the second test, he indeed found that about half the kids labeled “normal” showed a gain in IQ. But among those who´d been singled out as brilliant, he obtained a different result; about 80 % had an increase of at least 10 points. What´s more, about 20 % of the “gifted” group gained 30 or more IQ points, while only 5 % of the other children gained that many. Labeling children as gifted had proved to be a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy.

It would be impossible to understand the persistence and vehemence of these arguments against test scores without understanding the political purpose they serve. Arguments that test scores under-estimate the subsequent academic performance of minority students (1) serve to justify preferential admissions of minority students and (2) permit denial that these are in fact preferential policies, by enabling the claim to be made that different admissions standards merely adjust for the “unfairness” of the tests. In reality, the tests are not unfair. Life is unfair and the tests measure the results.

It was entirely possible that the parents of all the students in the institute were dealing with the most crucial life problems right now. Some might be going through a divorce. Some fighting a grave illness. Somebody might be in the middle of a custody battle, somebody else expecting a child. And all of them would prefer to think that their grown children were getting an education at a decent, albeit provincial, institution of higher learning. And no one would suspect that the success of their endeavors, their health, and even their very lives depended on the academic performance of their forgotten children, abandoned in Torpa.

rigor mattered. Koreans understood that mastering difficult academic content was important. They didn’t take shortcuts, especially in math. They assumed that performance was mostly a product of hard work—not God-given talent. This attitude meant that all kids tried harder, and it was more valuable to a country than gold or oil.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” (Whitehead)[43

Darwin enjoyed every advantage of upbringing, but continually pained his widowed father with his lackluster academic performance. “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family,” his father wrote in a line that nearly always appears just about here in any review of Darwin’s early life. Although his inclination was to natural history, for his father’s sake he tried to study medicine at Edinburgh University but couldn’t bear the blood and suffering. The experience of witnessing an operation on an understandably distressed child—this was in the days before anesthetics, of course—left him permanently traumatized. He tried law instead, but found that insupportably dull and finally managed, more or less by default, to acquire a degree in divinity from Cambridge.

The one exception to this is online brainstorming. Groups brainstorming electronically, when properly managed, not only do better than individuals, research shows; the larger the group, the better it performs. The same is true of academic research—professors who work together electronically, from different physical locations, tend to produce research that is more influential than those either working alone or collaborating face-to-face.

Reducing identity threat is not sufficient to overcome real skill and knowledge deficits in school. To do that, students have to have the opportunity to acquire the relevant skills and knowledge. They need good instruction and the chance to apply themselves to critical material, sometimes for long periods of time. But it’s equally true that for ability-stereotyped students, reducing identity threat is just as important as skill and knowledge instruction. It may not be sufficient, but it is necessary. That is, no amount of instruction, no matter how good it is, can reduce these deficits if it doesn’t also keep identity threat low. Without that, threat will always have first claim on students’ attention and mental resources. So neither approach—providing instructional opportunities or reducing identity threat—is sufficient, by itself, to improve academic performance, especially for ability-stereotyped students. Both are necessary.

Andrew Ross makes sense of this sad artifice [decreasing academic pay] by explaining that academics of all ranks, along with artists, are uniquely willing to tolerate exploitation in the workplace. Ross claims that scholars' readiness "to accept a discounted wage out of 'love for their subject' has helped not only to sustain the cheap labor supply but also to magnify its strength and volume. Like artists and performers, academics are inclined by training to sacrifice earnings for the opportunity to exercise their craft." (p. 64)

The current decline in educational achievement is, like most things, multiply determined. The evidence points, first, to about 50-100 years of genetic decline in ability. It doesn’t take much–perhaps a one-point decline every 30 years–to reduce substantially the percentage in the upper range of IQ. With our present mean IQ of 100, 1 person in 250 would exceed an IQ of 140. If, however, the average dropped to 85, you’d have only 1 in 8,000 who would exceed an IQ of 140. We must suppose that academic standards are much affected by the percentages of high IQ individuals, and that their becoming more scarce will lower academic performance. So part of the remedy for this problem definitely lies in eugenic practices. But there are some environmental factors as well, such as the failure to do “streaming” in schools, in which children of much the same ability level are put together. And I think something in the way of general idleness and slackness has gotten into the system since the 1960s which could account for a part of the decline, particularly in the more precise subjects like mathematics.

the firing of nerves in the amygdala, thereby dampening fear. Laughter, then, can help to temper negative emotions. And while all this might seem of purely academic interest, it could prove helpful when your partner breaks his leg at 19,000 feet in a blizzard on a Peruvian mountain. It is not a lack of fear that separates elite performers from the rest of us. They’re afraid, too, but they’re not overwhelmed by it. They manage fear. They use it to focus on taking correct action. Mike Tyson’s trainer, Cus D’Amato, said, “Fear is like fire. It can cook for you. It can heat your

Following this rejection, and Sagan’s failure to secure tenure at Harvard, scientists developed a new term: the Sagan effect. One’s popularity with the general public was considered inversely proportional to the quantity and quality of one’s scientific work, a perception that, in Sagan’s case at least, was false. He published, on average, once monthly in peer-reviewed publications over the course of his thirty-nine-year career—a total of five hundred scientific papers. More recent research suggests that scientists who engage the public tend to be better academic performers as well.

The term ‘political correctness’ has evolved out of the Marxist and Freudian philosophies of the 1930s to become a tool for multicultural-ism, multisexualism, multitheism, and multi-anythingism. It was created to discourage bias and prejudiced thinking that discriminates against an individual or group. It has become society’s way of not offending anyone, whether it is an individual, a group, or a nation. In many instances, however, it is a simple, disarming way of ignoring or deflecting the truth about a situation. Today, the use of political correctness has become so abused that anyone who voices his or her opinion contrary to ‘politically correct think’ is immediately tagged with some form of disparaging label, such as racist and bigot. This exploitation has gotten so out of control that this name-calling accusation is used as a simple and mindless means to manipulate academic, social, or political discussion. The result is a social paranoia which discourages free thought and expression. It’s like living in a totalitarian state in which you are afraid to say what you think. Now who wants to suffer that? So people keep quiet. Their opinions are held captive to fear. How handy for the Islamo-fascists, the American-hating, Jew-killing, Israel-destroying, women-abusing, multireligious-intolerant Muslims. Oh! Excuse me. Did I say something not quite PC? This social paranoia is similar to the attitude that developed in the late 1980s and 1990s, when people became so concerned about children’s self-esteem that failure could not be acknowledged or misbehavior corrected. ‘Now, let’s not hurt their feelings’ was the standard approach. This degree of concern led to teachers giving passing grades for poor performance and youth sport activities where no one kept score. And what has been the fallout of all that psychobabble? High school kids who can’t read their diploma or make change for a dollar, internationally embarrassing scholastic performance scores, and young adults ill equipped to face the competitive lifestyle the world has to offer. They are left watching the television show The Apprentice, not competing to be an apprentice. America got itself into a mess by not upholding the high standards and expectations it once had, instead giving in to mediocrity; and we’re getting into a mess now with political correctness.

THE ABSENT ELEMENT IS what is expressed in the final sentence of the prayer recorded in Acts 4: “Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders” (v. 30). What gains unbelievers’ attention and stirs the heart is seeing the gospel expressed in power. It takes more than academic rigor to win the world for Christ. Correct doctrine alone isn’t enough. Proclamation and teaching aren’t enough. God must be invited to “confirm the word with signs following” (see Heb. 2:4). In other words, the gospel must be preached with the involvement of the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven.

It has been suggested that genders or even sexual distinctions among the Classic Maya were fluid and, in the jargon of present-day academic language, “performed” or “inscribed,” as though physical attributes could be reconfigured by force of will or caprice of thought (e.g., R. Joyce 2000a:6–10, 64–66, 78–79, 178). The distinction here between gender, a series of learned habits and attitudes linked with sex, and sex itself, a biological property, is basic, although a number of scholars have begun to assert that the latter, too, is culturally conditioned (Gosden 1999:146–150; cf. Astuti 1998:46–47; Stein 1992:340–350).

Clearly historical events have varying degrees of intensity. Some may almost fail to impinge on true reality, that is, on the central, most personal part of a person's life. Others can wreak such havoc there that nothing is left standing. The usual way in which history is written fails to reveal this. '1890: Wilhelm II dismisses Bismark.' Certainly a key event in German history, but scarcely an event at all in the biography of any German outside its small circle of protagonists. Life went on as before. No family was torn apart, no friendship broke up, no one fled their country. Not even a rendezvous was missed or an opera performance cancelled. Those in love, whether happily or not, remained so; the poor remained poor and the rich rich. Now compare that with '1933: Hindenburg sends for Hitler.' An earthquake shatters sixty - six million lives. Official academic history has nothing to tell us about the differences in intensity of historical occurrences. To learn about that, you must read biographies, not those of statesmen but the all too rare ones of unknown individuals. There you will see that one historical event passes over the private (real) lives of people like a cloud over a lake. Nothing stirs, there is only a fleeting shadow. Another event whips up the lake as if in a thunderstorm. For a while it is scarcely recognisable. A third may, perhaps, drain the lake completely. I believe history is misunderstood if this aspect is forgotton (and it is usually forgotton).

Karen Arnold, a researcher at Boston College, followed eighty-one high school valedictorians and salutatorians from graduation onward to see what becomes of those who lead the academic pack. Of the 95 percent who went on to graduate college, their average GPA was 3.6, and by 1994, 60 percent had received a graduate degree. There was little debate that high school success predicted college success. Nearly 90 percent are now in professional careers with 40 percent in the highest tier jobs. They are reliable, consistent, and well-adjusted, and by all measures the majority have good lives. But how many of these number-one high school performers go on to change the world, run the world, or impress the world? The answer seems to be clear: zero. Commenting

FV: Hasn't all art, in a way, submitted to words - reduced itself to the literary...admitted its failure through all the catalogues and criticism, monographs and manifestos — ML: Explanations? FV: Exactly. All the artistry, now, seems expended in the rhetoric and sophistry used to differentiate, to justify its own existence now that so little is left to do. And who's to say how much of it ever needed doing in the first place? [...] Nothing's been done here but the re-writing of rules, in denial that the game was already won, long ago, by the likes of Duchamp, Arp, or Malevich. I mean, what's more, or, what's less to be said than a single black square? ML: Well, a triangle has fewer sides, I suppose. FV: Then a circle, a line, a dot. The rest is academic; obvious variations on an unnecessary theme, until you're left with just an empty canvas - which I'm sure has been done, too. ML: Franz Kline, wasn't it? Or, Yves Klein - didn't he once exhibit a completely empty gallery? No canvases at all. FV: I guess, from there, to not exhibit anything - to do absolutely nothing at all - would be the next "conceptual" act; the ultimate multimedia performance, where all artforms converge in negation and silence. And someone's probably already put their signature to that, as well. But even this should be too much, to involve an artist, a name. Surely nothing, done by no-one, is the greatest possible artistic achievement. Yet, that too has been done. Long, long ago. Before the very first artists ever walked the earth.

If there are so many successful public enterprises, why do we rarely hear about them? It is partly because of the nature of reporting, whether journalistic or academic. Newspapers tend to report bad things – wars, natural disasters, epidemics, famines, crime, bankruptcy, etc. While it is natural and necessary for newspapers to focus on these events, the journalistic habit tends to present the public with the bleakest possible view of the world. In the case of SOEs, journalists and academics usually investigate them only when things go wrong – inefficiency, corruption or negligence.Well-performing SOEs attract relatively little attention in the same way that a peaceful and productive day in the life of a ‘model citizen’ is unlikely to make front-page news. There

In a longitudinal study of college students, freshmen were evaluated for fixed mindsets or growth mindsets and then followed across their four years of enrollment. When the students with fixed mindsets encountered academic challenges such as daunting projects or low grades, they gave up, while the students with growth mindsets responded by working harder or trying new strategies. Rather than strengthening their skills and toughening their resolve, four years of college left the students with fixed mindsets feeling less confident. The feelings they most associated with school were distress, shame, and upset. Those with growth mindsets performed better in school overall and, at graduation time, they reported feeling confident, determined, enthusiastic, inspired, and strong.

Daniel Levitin is one of the world’s leading experts on how music influences the brain. He would be appearing with the conductor Edwin Outwater and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, which would play Beethoven. Levitin would explain how the music was affecting the audience’s collective brain. Levitin was no disinterested academic. He had had a serious career as a musician, performing with Sting, Mel Tormé, and Blue Öyster Cult, consulting with Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan, and having been recording engineer for Santana and the Grateful Dead. Then he—like Kahn—made a big switch and become a research psychologist, investigating how music interacts with the brain. He was now head of McGill University’s Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise and author of This Is Your Brain on Music.

This interplay of military and academic motives became ingrained in the Internet. “The design of both the ARPANET and the Internet favored military values, such as survivability, flexibility, and high performance, over commercial goals, such as low cost, simplicity, or consumer appeal,” the technology historian Janet Abbate noted. “At the same time, the group that designed and built ARPA’s networks was dominated by academic scientists, who incorporated their own values of collegiality, decentralization of authority, and open exchange of information into the system.”90 These academic researchers of the late 1960s, many of whom associated with the antiwar counterculture, created a system that resisted centralized command. It would route around any damage from a nuclear attack but also around any attempt to impose control.

Hardy reinforces his narrative with stories of heroes who didn’t have the right education, the right connections, and who could have been counted out early as not having the DNA for success: “Richard Branson has dyslexia and had poor academic performance as a student. Steve Jobs was born to two college students who didn’t want to raise him and gave him up for adoption. Mark Cuban was born to an automobile upholsterer. He started as a bartender, then got a job in software sales from which he was fired.”8 The list goes on. Hardy reminds his readers that “Suze Orman’s dad was a chicken farmer. Retired General Colin Powell was a solid C student. Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, was born in a housing authority in the Bronx … Barbara Corcoran started as a waitress and admits to being fired from more jobs than most people hold in a lifetime. Pete Cashmore, the CEO of Mashable, was sickly as a child and finished high school two years late due to medical complications. He never went to college.” What do each of these inspiring leaders and storytellers have in common? They rewrote their own internal narratives and found great success. “The biographies of all heroes contain common elements. Becoming one is the most important,”9 writes Chris Matthews in Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero. Matthews reminds his readers that young John F. Kennedy was a sickly child and bedridden for much of his youth. And what did he do while setting school records for being in the infirmary? He read voraciously. He read the stories of heroes in the pages of books by Sir Walter Scott and the tales of King Arthur. He read, and dreamed of playing the hero in the story of his life. When the time came to take the stage, Jack was ready.

Finnish education appears paradoxical to outside observers because it seems to break a lot of the rules. In Finland, “less is more.” Children don’t start academics1 until the year they turn seven. They have a lot of recess (ten to fifteen minutes every forty-five minutes, even through high school), shorter school hours than we do in the United States (Finnish children spend nearly three hundred fewer hours2 in elementary school per year than Americans), and the lightest homework load of any industrialized nation. There are no gifted programs, few private schools, and no high-stakes national standardized tests. Yet over the past decade, Finland has consistently performed at the top on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to fifteen-year-olds in nations around the world. While American children3 usually hover around the middle of the pack on this test, Finland’s excel.

[There is] no direct relationship between IQ and economic opportunity. In the supposed interests of fairness and “social justice”, the natural relationship has been all but obliterated. Consider the first necessity of employment, filling out a job application. A generic job application does not ask for information on IQ. If such information is volunteered, this is likely to be interpreted as boastful exaggeration, narcissism, excessive entitlement, exceptionalism [...] and/or a lack of team spirit. None of these interpretations is likely to get you hired. Instead, the application contains questions about job experience and educational background, neither of which necessarily has anything to do with IQ. Universities are in business for profit; they are run like companies, seek as many paying clients as they can get, and therefore routinely accept people with lukewarm IQ’s, especially if they fill a slot in some quota system (in which case they will often be allowed to stay despite substandard performance). Regarding the quotas themselves, these may in fact turn the tables, advantaging members of groups with lower mean IQ’s than other groups [...] sometimes, people with lower IQ’s are expressly advantaged in more ways than one. These days, most decent jobs require a college education. Academia has worked relentlessly to bring this about, as it gains money and power by monopolizing the employment market across the spectrum. Because there is a glut of college-educated applicants for high-paying jobs, there is usually no need for an employer to deviate from general policy and hire an applicant with no degree. What about the civil service? While the civil service was once mostly open to people without college educations, this is no longer the case, and quotas make a very big difference in who gets hired. Back when I was in the New York job market, “minorities” (actually, worldwide majorities) were being spotted 30 (thirty) points on the civil service exam; for example, a Black person with a score as low as 70 was hired ahead of a White person with a score of 100. Obviously, any prior positive correlation between IQ and civil service employment has been reversed. Add to this the fact that many people, including employers, resent or feel threatened by intelligent people [...] and the IQ-parameterized employment function is no longer what it was once cracked up to be. If you doubt it, just look at the people running things these days. They may run a little above average, but you’d better not be expecting to find any Aristotles or Newtons among them. Intelligence has been replaced in the job market with an increasingly poor substitute, possession of a college degree, and given that education has steadily given way to indoctrination and socialization as academic priorities, it would be naive to suppose that this is not dragging down the overall efficiency of society. In short, there are presently many highly intelligent people working very “dumb” jobs, and conversely, many less intelligent people working jobs that would once have been filled by their intellectual superiors. Those sad stories about physics PhD’s flipping burgers at McDonald's are no longer so exceptional. Sorry, folks, but this is not your grandfather’s meritocracy any more.

Unlike most preachers in the medieval era, Francis was conflicted and sometimes even hostile toward academics and theologians. He believed that book knowledge was like material possessions — too much of it occasioned pride and got in the way of simple devotion to Jesus. (In The Last Christian, Adolf Holl imagined Francis meeting Augustine, Barth, Aquinas, and Bultmann in heaven for the first time and asking them what they would be without their books. When they can’t come up with an answer, Francis says, “Without your books perhaps you might have become Christians” [p. 63].) When Francis preached, he avoided theological arguments and polemics like the plague. Rather, his preaching was more autobiographical than intellectual, more performative than argumentative, more spontaneous than scripted, more genuine than contrived, more about transformation than about information. The endgame was to help his listeners find peace, reconciliation, and shalom with God, themselves, others, and creation. As Francis said, “We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.

Darwin and Nietzsche were the common spiritual and intellectual source for the mean-spirited and bellicose ideological assault on progress, liberalism, and democracy that fired the late-nineteenth-century campaign to preserve or rejuvenate the traditional order. Presensitized for this retreat from modernity, prominent fin-de-siècle aesthetes, engages literati, polemical publicists, academic sociologists, and last but not least, conservative and reactionary politicians became both consumers and disseminators of the untried action-ideas. Oscar Wilde and Stefan George were perhaps most representative of the aristocratizing aesthetes whose rush into dandyism or retreat into cultural monasticism was part of the outburst against bourgeois philistinism and social levelling. Their yearning for a return to an aristocratic past and their aversion to the invasive democracy of their day were shared by Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose nostalgia for the presumably superior sensibilities of a bygone cultivated society was part of their claim to privileged social space and position in the present. Although they were all of burgher or bourgeois descent, they extolled ultra-patrician values and poses, thereby reflecting and advancing the rediscovery and reaffirmation of the merits and necessities of elitism. Theirs was not simply an aesthetic and unpolitical posture precisely because they knowingly contributed to the exaltation of societal hierarchy at a time when this exaltation was being used to do battle against both liberty and equality. At any rate, they may be said to have condoned this partisan attack by not explicitly distancing themselves from it. Maurice Barrès, Paul Bourget, and Gabriele D'Annunzio were not nearly so self-effacing. They were not only conspicuous and active militants of antidemocratic elitism, but they meant their literary works to convert the reader to their strident persuasion. Their polemical statements and their novels promoted the cult of the superior self and nation, in which the Church performed the holy sacraments. Barrès, Bourget, and D'Annunzio were purposeful practitioners of the irruptive politics of nostalgia that called for the restoration of enlightened absolutism, hierarchical society. and elite culture in the energizing fires of war.

By now Soros had melded Karl Popper’s ideas with his own knowledge of finance, arriving at a synthesis that he called “reflexivity.” As Popper’s writings suggested, the details of a listed company were too complex for the human mind to understand, so investors relied on guesses and shortcuts that approximated reality. But Soros was also conscious that those shortcuts had the power to change reality as well, since bullish guesses would drive a stock price up, allowing the company to raise capital cheaply and boosting its performance. Because of this feedback loop, certainty was doubly elusive: To begin with, people are incapable of perceiving reality clearly; but on top of that, reality itself is affected by these unclear perceptions, which themselves shift constantly. Soros had arrived at a conclusion that was at odds with the efficient-market view. Academic finance assumes, as a starting point, that rational investors can arrive at an objective valuation of a stock and that when all information is priced in, the market can be said to have attained an efficient equilibrium. To a disciple of Popper, this premise ignored the most elementary limits to cognition.

The belief in the magical power of language is not unusual, both in mystical and academic literature. The Kabbalists -- Jewish mystics of Spain and Palestine -- believed that super-normal insight and power could be derived from properly combining the letters of the Divine Name. For example, Abu Aharon, an early Kabbalist who emigrated from Baghdad to Italy, was said to perform miracles through the power of the Sacred Names." "What kind of power are we talking about here?" "Most Kabbalists were theorists who were interested only in pure meditation. But there were so-called 'practical Kabbalists' who tried to apply the power of the Kabbalah in everyday life." "In other words, sorcerers." "Yes. These practical Kabbalists used a so-called 'archangelic alphabet,' derived from first-century Greek and Aramaic theurgic alphabets, which resembled cuneiform. The Kabbalists referred to this alphabet as 'eye writing,' because the letters were composed of lines and small circles, which resembled eyes." "Ones and zeroes." "Some Kabbalists divided up the letters of the alphabet according to where they were produced inside the mouth." "Okay. So as we would think of it, they were drawing a connection between the printed letter on the page and the neural connections that had to be invoked in order to pronounce it." "Yes. By analyzing the spelling of various words, they were able to draw what they thought were profound conclusions about their true, inner meaning and significance.

Bookish folk aren’t what they used to be. Introverted, reserved, studious. There was a time when bookish folk would steer clear of trendy bars, dinner occasions and gatherings. Any social or public encounters would be avoided at all costs because these activities were very un-bookish. Bookish people preferred to stay in, or to sit alone in a quiet pub, reading a good book, or getting some writing done. Writers, in fact, perhaps epitomised these bookish traits most strongly. At least, they used to. These days, bookish people, such as writers, are commonly found on stage, headlining festivals, or being interviewed on TV. Author events and performances have proliferated, becoming established parts of a writer’s role. It’s not that authors have suddenly become more extroverted – it’s more a case that their job description has changed. Of course, not all writers are bookish. Not in the traditional sense of the word anyway. Some are well suited for public life, particularly those from certain academic backgrounds where public speaking is encouraged and confidence in social situations is shaped and formed. These writers may even be termed ‘gregarious’, and are thus happy being offered up for speaking engagements, stage discussions and signings. Good for them. But the others – the timid, shy and mousy authors – they’re being thrust into the limelight too. That’s my lot. The social wipeouts. Unprepared and ill-equipped to face our reader audience. What’s most concerning is that no one is offering us any guidance or tips. We’re expected to hit the ground running, confident and ready, loaded with banter, quips and answers. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

YouTube: Dr. Samuel T. Francis — “Equality Unmasked" (American Renaissance Conference, 1996) 19:40 Egalitarianism has become an ideology that that protects, serves and rationalizes the interests of the elites that hold power in Western society, just as doctrines like the divine right of kings served the interests of monarchies and aristocracies before the French Revolution. ... I think that understanding egalitarianism as the ideology of an elite is important for several reasons. In the first place it puts the Marxists and radicals of the Left in an entirely different light from the one in which they like to present themselves--that of rebels against the system. Invariably, when Marxist groups protest against racism, they argue that racism is the tool of capitalism, that a capitalist ruling class promotes racism in order to justify the exploitation of non-whites and to keep white and non-white proletariats divided. But in reality, there is no truth whatsoever in this theory. If it were true, we would expect academics like Rushton and Levin, Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein to have received millions in grants from large corporations and foundations. In fact, they receive little or nothing. The truth is that when Marxists and self-described radicals denounce what they call "racism," they are in fact performing as the ideological vanguard of the real elites that hold power and possess enormous vested interests in egalitarianism and environmentalism. It is the radical egalitarians and anti-hereditarians who are the real running dogs of the system, and not those who challenge egalitarianism and environmentalism. And it is the hereditarians like Rushton and Levin who are the real radicals, or even revolutionaries who challenge the lies and mythologies with which entrenched powers always mask themselves.

The third serious problem the culture of customer service as we know it creates is turning every profession into a customer service tool to generate profits. In doing so, we risk the loss of creativity, quality, and critical thinking in many walks of life. Nowhere is this risk clearer and more damaging than viewing students at different educational institutions as customers, and nowhere this trend has been happening more rapidly than at schools, colleges, and universities, especially at private institutions. There is severe damage done to creativity and critical thinking when all students want is an A, and in fact feel entitled to get it since they (or their parents) are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend elite schools. Many educators are under enormous pressure to give students grades they do not deserve in order to avoid receiving bad student evaluations (or to ensure getting good ones). This pressure is intensifying as academic jobs become increasingly contingent and precarious, where teaching staff are hired under short contracts only renewed based on so-called ‘performance,’ which is often measured by student evaluations and enrollment. When this happens, academic and intellectual compromises and corruption increase. Colleagues at elite American universities have been pressured to give students grades no lower than a B, with the explanation that this is what is ‘expected.’ Rampant grade inflation is unethical and unacceptable. Unfortunately, when graduate instructors resist professors’ instructions to fix grades by grading according to independent criteria of intellectual merit, they may be verbally chastised or worse, fired. This humiliation not only reinforces the norm of inflating grades, it also bolsters the power of the tenured professors who instruct their teaching assistants to do it.

Besides, it’s not as big a deal as people make it out to be. You just have to be prepared to answer any question on any of the four hundred books you’ve read so far in graduate school. And if you get it wrong, they kick you out,” she said. He fixed her with a look of barely contained awe while she stirred the salad around her plate with the tines of her fork. She smiled at him. Part of learning to be a professor was learning to behave in a professorial way. Thomas could not be permitted to see how afraid she was. The oral qualifying exam is usually a turning point—a moment when the professoriate welcomes you as a colleague rather than as an apprentice. More infamously, the exam can also be the scene of spectacular intellectual carnage, as the unprepared student—conscious but powerless—witnesses her own professional vivisection. Either way, she will be forced to face her inadequacies. Connie was a careful, precise young woman, not given to leaving anything to chance. As she pushed the half-eaten salad across the table away from the worshipful Thomas, she told herself that she was as prepared as it was possible to be. In her mind ranged whole shelvesful of books, annotated and bookmarked, and as she set aside her luncheon fork she roamed through the shelves of her acquired knowledge, quizzing herself. Where are the economics books? Here. And the books on costume and material culture? One shelf over, on the left. A shadow of doubt crossed her face. But what if she was not prepared enough? The first wave of nausea contorted her stomach, and her face grew paler. Every year, it happened to someone. For years she had heard the whispers about students who had cracked, run sobbing from the examination room, their academic careers over before they had even begun. There were really only two ways that this could go. Her performance today could, in theory, raise her significantly in departmental regard. Today, if she handled herself correctly, she would be one step closer to becoming a professor. Or she would look in the shelves

For Kaminer, argument and persuasion could no longer be operative when belief and subjective experience became the baseline proofs that underwrote public and private assertions. No speaker or writer was under any obligation to answer his or her critics because argument and testimony were fatefully blurred. When reasoned impiety was slowly being banished from public dialogue, political responsibility would inevitably wane. In the warm bath of generalized piety and radical plurality, everyone could assert a point of view, an opinion, and different beliefs, but no one was under any obligation to defend them. Whereas cultural studies scholars saw themselves contesting dominant forms of discourse and hegemonic forms of thinking, Kaminer saw them participating in a popular embrace of an irrational Counter-Enlightenment. Like Andrew Ross, Kaminer cited Franz Mesmer as an important eighteenth-century pioneer of twentieth-century alternative healing techniques. Mesmer’s personal charisma and his powers of psychic healing and invocation of “animal magnetism” entranced the European courts of the late eighteenth century. Mesmer performed miracle cures and attracted a devoted, wealthy following. Despite scandals that plagued his European career, the American middle class was eager to embrace his hybrid of folk practices and scientific-sounding proofs. Mesmerism projected an alternative mystical cosmology based upon magnets and invisible flows of energy. Mesmer, who was said to control the invisible magnetic flow of forces that operated upon human and animal bodies, built upon a network of wealthy patrons who were devoted to the powers of a charismatic leader, Mesmer himself. Mesmer’s manipulation of magnets and hands-on healing evoked for the French court the ancient arts of folk healing while it had recourse to ostensibly modern scientific proofs. Historian of the French eighteenth century Robert Darnton insisted that mesmerism could not be dismissed as mere quackery or charlatanism but represented a transitional worldview, one that bridged the Enlightenment and the particular forms of nineteenth-century Romanticism that followed.

Robert Rosenthal found a way. He approached a California public elementary school and offered to test the school’s students with a newly developed intelligence-identification tool, called the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition, which could accurately predict which children would excel academically in the coming year. The school naturally agreed, and the test was administered to the entire student body. A few weeks later, teachers were provided with the names of the children (about 20 percent of the student body) who had tested as high-potentials. These particular children, the teachers were informed, were special. Though they might not have performed well in the past, the test indicated that they possessed “unusual potential for intellectual growth.” (The students were not informed of the test results.) The following year Rosenthal returned to measure how the high-potential students had performed. Exactly as the test had predicted, the first- and second-grade high-potentials had succeeded to a remarkable degree: The first-graders gained 27 IQ points (versus 12 points for the rest of the class); and the second-graders gained 17 points (versus 7 points). In addition, the high-potentials thrived in ways that went beyond measurement. They were described by their teachers as being more curious, happier, better adjusted, and more likely to experience success as adults. What’s more, the teachers reported that they had enjoyed teaching that year more than any year in the past. Here’s the twist: the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition was complete baloney. In fact, the “high-potentials” had been selected at random. The real subject of the test was not the students but the narratives that drive the relationship between the teachers and the students. What happened, Rosenthal discovered, was replacing one story—These are average kids—with a new one—These are special kids, destined to succeed—served as a locator beacon that reoriented the teachers, creating a cascade of behaviors that guided the student toward that future. It didn’t matter that the story was false, or that the children were, in fact, randomly selected. The simple, glowing idea—This child has unusual potential for intellectual growth—aligned motivations, awareness, and behaviors.

In the 1990s legal scholar and public policy advocate Wendy Kaminer published a brace of books engaged with the New Age cultures of recovery and self-help. She represented an Old Left perspective on new superstition, and although she was of the same generation as the cultural studies scholars, she did exactly what Andrew Ross warned academics and elites against. She criticized the middlebrow, therapeutic culture of self-help for undermining critical thinking in popular discourse. She encouraged the debunking of superstition, deplored public professions of piety. Her books were polemical and public interventions that were addressed to the maligned liberal and more or less thoughtful reader who took an interest in the issues of the day. In some ways, her writing was a popularization of some of psychoanalytic theory scholar, sociologist, and cultural critic Philip Rieff’s and Richard Hofstadter’s critiques of a therapeutic culture of anti-intellectualism.77 She speculated that the decline of secular values in the political sphere was linked to the rise of a culture of recovery and self-help that had come out of the popularization of New Age, countercultural beliefs and practices. In both I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions and Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety, Kaminer publicly denounced the decline of secular culture and the rise of a therapeutic culture of testimony and self-victimization that brooked no dissent while demanding unprecedented leaps of faith from its adherents.78 Kaminer’s work combined a belief in Habermasian rational communication with an uncompromising skepticism about the ubiquity of piety that for her was shared by both conservatives and liberals. For Kaminer, argument and persuasion could no longer be operative when belief and subjective experience became the baseline proofs that underwrote public and private assertions. No speaker or writer was under any obligation to answer his or her critics because argument and testimony were fatefully blurred. When reasoned impiety was slowly being banished from public dialogue, political responsibility would inevitably wane. In the warm bath of generalized piety and radical plurality, everyone could assert a point of view, an opinion, and different beliefs, but no one was under any obligation to defend them. Whereas cultural studies scholars saw themselves contesting dominant forms of discourse and hegemonic forms of thinking, Kaminer saw them participating in a popular embrace of an irrational Counter-Enlightenment. Like Andrew Ross, Kaminer cited Franz Mesmer as an important eighteenth-century pioneer of twentieth-century alternative healing techniques. Mesmer’s personal charisma and his powers of psychic healing and invocation of “animal magnetism” entranced the European courts of the late eighteenth century. Mesmer performed miracle cures and attracted a devoted, wealthy following. Despite scandals that plagued his European career, the American middle class was eager to embrace his hybrid of folk practices and scientific-sounding proofs. Mesmerism projected an alternative mystical cosmology based upon magnets and invisible flows of energy. Mesmer, who was said to control the invisible magnetic flow of forces that operated upon human and animal bodies, built upon a network of wealthy patrons who were devoted to the powers of a charismatic leader, Mesmer himself. Mesmer’s manipulation of magnets and hands-on healing evoked for the French court the ancient arts of folk healing while it had recourse to ostensibly modern scientific proofs. Historian of the French eighteenth century Robert Darnton insisted that mesmerism could not be dismissed as mere quackery or charlatanism but represented a transitional worldview, one that bridged the Enlightenment and the particular forms of nineteenth-century Romanticism that followed.

Since Ivy League admissions data is a notoriously classified commodity, when when Harvard officials said in previous years that alumni kids were just better, you had to take their word. But then federal investigators came along and pried open those top-secret files. The Harvard guys were lying. This past fall, after two years of study, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) found that, far from being more qualified or equally qualified, the average admitted legacy at Harvard between 1981 and 1988 was significantly LESS qualified than the average admitted nonlegacy. Examining admissions office ratings on academics, extracurriculars, personal qualities, recommendations, and other categories, the OCR concluded that "with the exception of the athletic rating, [admitted] nonlegacies scored better than legacies in ALL areas of comparison." In his recent book, "Preferential Policies", Thomas Sowell argues that doling out special treatment encourages lackluster performance by the favored and resentment from the spurned. His far-ranging study flits from Malaysia to South Africa to American college campuses. Legacies don't merit a word.

With the nutrition professionals constantly contradicting and criticising each other, it is no wonder that few large collaborative studies or projects get funded. I know from personal experience that many academics seeking funds for a project deliberately omit to mention an important diet component because they know that it will be heavily criticised by colleagues. Although there are a huge number of small studies performed and paid for each year, the standard of research compared to other fields is lagging far behind. Most studies are still cross-sectional and observational, full of possible biases and flaws; a few are superior observational studies followed over time, and only a tiny fraction are the gold-standard randomised trials in which subjects are randomly allocated to one foodstuff or diet and followed for long durations.

We thought requesting grades and transcripts was a blunt instrument to get at smarts. And it did weed out the disappointing number of people who lied about their records. But in 2010, our analyses revealed that academic performance didn’t predict job performance beyond the first two or three years after college, so we stopped requiring grades and transcripts except from recent graduates.

These things are bad for you: sex, high-rise buildings, chocolate, lack of exercise, dictatorship, racism! No, au contraire! Celibacy damages the brain, high-rise buildings bring us closer to God, tests show that a bar of chocolate a day significantly improves chilren's academic performance, exercise kills, tyranny is just a part of our culture so I'll thank you to keep your cultural-imperialist ideas off my fucking fiefdom, and as for racism, let's not get all preachy about this, it's better out in the open than under some grubby carpet. That extremist is a moderate! That universal right is culturally specific! This circumcised woman is culturally happy! That Aboriginal whistlecockery is culturally barbaric! Pictures don't lie! This image has been faked! Free the press! Ban nosy Journalists! The novel is dead! Honor is dead! God is dead! Aargh, they're all alive and they're coming after us! That star is rising! No, she's falling! We dined at nine! We dined at eight! You were on time! No, you were late! East is West! Up is down! Yes is No! In is Out! Lies are Truth! Hate is Love! Two and two makes five! And everything is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.

Lenin's difficulty with Marxian revisionism and those who accorded an important role to liberals is symptomatic of a doctrinal and psychological problem peculiar to Marxism and absent in the old narodnik creed. Marx had revealed the systematic necessity of class exploitation. Capitalism was by its very nature savagely unjust. Since most revolutionaries were not simply thinking machines looking for the most rational foundation for production and distribution but possessed of "religious" attitudes, or, in any case, of a sense of mission, they found in Marx and Engels the description of a morally intolerable system in which the wealth of the few could only be gotten at the expense of the poverty of the many. On the other hand, Marx posited the necessary contribution of each historical phase to economic and social progress. The bourgeoisie and their liberal institutions could not disappear from history until they had developed the forces of production as far as they could, when the onset of the inevitable and fatal crisis of capitalism would occur. Capitalism was a necessary evil on the way to socialism. But Marx had no blueprint for its many historical variations, only his laws of capitalism and their consequences. Neither he nor Engels had a revolutionary timetable either, and it was possible for their followers to lapse into a purely "scientific" and morally slothful type of Marxism, an academic Marxism without a sense of urgency about revolutionary tasks to be performed. On the other hand, the most morally mobilized would find ways to hasten capitalism's final hour, even while separating themselves from the narodniki, whose revolutionism was "unscientific." Thus, during a period of mainly doctrinal debates and sectarianism, revolutionaries who were temperamentally quite close to each other engaged in combat; but when the real revolutionary moment arrived, they often found themselves working together.

Making a simple plan that sets out when, how and where you are going to follow through on your intentions has been shown to be effective at helping people to eat more fruit, increase public transport use, reduce discrimination, get more exercise, diet, improve academic performance, quit smoking and recycle more.13

The prescribing of stimulants to ADHD youth began to take off in the 1980s, and today, thirty years later, studies have failed to show that this treatment helps children grow up and thrive. In a 2012 op-ed published in the New York Times, Alan Sroufe, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, told of this bottom-line finding: “To date, no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships, or behavior problems, the very things we want to improve…. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.

A (house)wife now performs the tasks once distributed between servants of different rank or undertaken by the maid of all work. Her ‘core’ jobs are cleaning, shopping, cooking, washing-up, laundering and ironing.44 She also looks after her children, frequently cares for aged parents or other relatives, and is sometimes incorporated to a greater or lesser degree as an unpaid assistant in her husband’s work. This aspect of being a wife is visible in many small shops or in the activities of the wives of clergymen and politicians, but the same service is provided, less visibly, to husbands in all kinds of occupations. A wife, for example, contributes research assistance (to male academics), acts as hostess (to a business man’s clients), answers the phone and keeps the books (for a small business man).45 However, as Christine Delphy has argued, to list the tasks of a housewife tells us only so much. The list cannot explain why exactly the same services can be bought in the market, or why a particular task is performed without pay by a wife, yet she would get paid for providing the service if she worked, for example, in a restaurant or for a firm of contract cleaners.46 The problem is not that wives perform valuable tasks for which they are not paid (which has led some feminists to argue for state payment or wages for housework). Rather, what being a woman (wife) means is to provide certain services for and at the command of a man (husband). In short, the marriage contract and a wife’s subordination as a (kind of) labourer, cannot be understood in the absence of the sexual contract and the patriarchal construction of ‘men’ and ‘women’ and the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres.

They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” —Mexican proverb There are some secrets we don’t share because they’re embarrassing. Like that time I met Naval Ravikant (page 546) by accidentally hitting on his girlfriend at a coffee shop? Oops. Or the time a celebrity panelist borrowed my laptop to project a boring corporate video, and a flicker of porn popped up—à la Fight Club—in front of a crowd of 400 people? Another good example. But then there are dark secrets. The things we tell no one. The shadows we keep covered for fear of unraveling our lives. For me, 1999 was full of shadows. So much so that I never wanted to revisit them. I hadn’t talked about this traumatic period publicly until April 29, 2015, during a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). What follows is the sequence of my downward spiral. In hindsight, it’s incredible how trivial some of it seems. At the time, though, it was the perfect storm. I include wording like “impossible situation,” which was reflective of my thinking at the time, not objective reality. I still vividly recall these events, but any quotes are paraphrased. So, starting where it began . . . It’s the beginning of my senior year at Princeton University. I’m slated to graduate around June of 1999. Somewhere in the next six months, several things happen in the span of a few weeks. First, I fail to make it to final interviews for McKinsey consulting and Trilogy software, in addition to others. I have no idea what I’m doing wrong, and I start losing confidence after “winning” in the game of academics for so long. Second, a long-term (for

A host of studies show that because of subtle bias, women have to perform better than their male counterparts to be seen as performing equally. In response to this, women often work harder than their male counterparts, spending more time on preparatory work. In other words, we learn (consciously or unconsciously) that diligent preparation is a pretty good strategy for succeeding, as best we can, in a professional and academic world where we’ll often be underestimated.

so that's - that's probably why self-esteem is a wash - that, on the one hand, it could be seen as, well, that means you'll go and take the initiative, but on the other, maybe you won't. If you're already great, why should you do anything? You know, another example that illustrates this is, in the U.S., the ethnic group that has the lowest self-esteem is Asian-Americans. Those are the kids with the best academic performance, the adults with the highest educational attainment, lowest unemployment rate. It - of course, it's a cultural thing, but it really does really demonstrate in one piece of data how this idea that you have to be supremely self-confident to succeed just isn't true.

Become an Expert Instead of a Planner “(An) exclusive use of analytical rationality tends to impede further improvement in human performance because of analytical rationality’s slow reasoning and its emphasis on rules, principles, and universal solutions. Second, bodily involvement, speed, and an intimate knowledge of concrete cases in the form of good examples is a prerequisite for true expertise.” (Flyvbjerg 2001, 15)

Neuroscience was becoming "this thing we all do" — go to conferences, write papers, apply for grants. It was losing its intrepidity. All the finger tapping, the feeble reaches, the cartographic expeditions in the scanner—this was not behavior. John Hughlings Jackson divined enduring wisdom about the motor system without conducting a single experiment; I could sense John Krakauer’s wheels spinning the same way, as he groped for the right track. “It’s about being intellectual rather than academic,” he said.

The second is what psychologists call the mere-exposure effect: doing something many times makes us believe we have become good at it – completely independent of our actual performance

She doesn’t share my belief that the perfect pen or pencil can improve my academic performance.

The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’. This was an academic paper published in 2017 which proposed that: The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.14

There is another way. Over the last sixty years, study after study has found that a healthy sense of control goes hand in hand with virtually all the positive outcomes we want for our children. Perceived control—the confidence that we can direct the course of our life through our own efforts—is associated with better physical health, less use of drugs and alcohol, and greater longevity, as well as with lower stress, positive emotional well-being, greater internal motivation and ability to control one’s behavior, improved academic performance, and enhanced career success.8 Like exercise and sleep, it appears to be good for virtually everything, presumably because it represents a deep human need. Our kids are “wired” for control,

But where do these ideas come from? They are all derived from the writings of the Middle Ages—not works of academic theology, which generally were critical of such highly visual and dramatic approaches, but the popular religious literature of the age, which took pleasure in a powerful narrative of Satan’s being outmanoeuvred and outwitted by Christ.[615] According to these popular atonement theories, Satan had rightful possession over sinful human beings. God was unable to wrest humanity from Satan’s grasp by any legitimate means. Yet what if Satan were to overstep his legitimate authority, and claim the life of a sinless person—such as Jesus Christ, who, as God incarnate, was devoid of sin? The great mystery plays of the Middle Ages—such as the cycle performed at York in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—dramatised the way in which a wily and canny God tricked Satan into overstepping his rights, and thus forfeiting them all. An arrogant Satan received his comeuppance, to howls of approval from the assembled townspeople. A central theme of this great popular approach to atonement was the “Harrowing of Hell”—a dramatic depiction of the risen Christ battering the gates of hell, and setting free all who were imprisoned within its realm.[616] All of humanity were thus liberated by the death and resurrection of Christ. In Narnia, Edmund is the first to be saved by Aslan; the remainder are restored to life later, as Aslan breathes on the stone statues in the Witch’s castle. Lewis’s narrative in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe contains all the main themes of this medieval atonement drama: Satan having rights over sinful humanity; God outwitting Satan because of the sinlessness of Christ; and the breaking down of the gates of Hell, leading to the liberation of its prisoners. The imagery is derived from the great medieval popular religious writings which Lewis so admired and enjoyed.

A group of Spanish academics has unveiled a methodology for measuring purpose directly that tracks three constituent factors: the extent to which employees understand, identify with, and contribute to the purpose.

If you are the father of a kid or teen, please know that you play an enormous role in the life of your daughter or son. Your words will shape their destiny and have a long-lasting impact. If you are the father of a daughter, I have a special request of you: Affirm your daughters. Not just by words and gestures, but by intentional and consistent actions that send the message you are there for them. The research is clear. Fathers play a pivotal role in their daughter’s self-image, self-esteem, and body image. Studies also show that girls with close and affirming relationships with their fathers are more likely to have self-confidence, perform better academically and have more successful career advancement.

But traveling faster than light would require infinite energy; it is possible on paper, not in practice. More recently, physicists have theorized other ways that physical travel into the past could be achieved, but they are still exotic and expensive. A technological civilization thousands or more years in advance of our own, one able to harness the energy of its whole galaxy, could create a wormhole linking different points in the fabric of spacetime and send a spaceship through it.8 It is an idea explored widely in science fiction and depicted vividly in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar. But all this is academic for our purposes. For Gleick, what we are really talking about with time travel is a thought experiment about the experiencer—the passenger—in a novel, disjointed relationship to the external world. We can readily perform feats of “mental time travel,” or at least simulate such feats, as well as experience a dissociation between our internal subjective sense of time and the flux of things around us and even our own bodies.9 According to Gleick, part of what suddenly facilitated four-dimensional thinking in both popular writing and the sciences was the changing experience of time in an accelerating society. The Victorian age, with its steam engines and bewildering pace of urban living, increased these experiences of dissociation, and they have only intensified since then. Time travel, Gleick argues, is basically just a metaphor for modernity, and a nifty premise upon which to base literary and cinematic fantasies that repair modernity’s traumas. It also shines a light on how confused we all are about time. The most commonly voiced objection to time travel—and with it, precognition—is that any interaction between the future and past would change the past, and thus create a different future. The familiar term is the grandfather paradox: You can’t go back in time and kill your grandfather because then you wouldn’t have been born to go back in time and kill your grandfather (leaving aside for the moment the assumed inevitability of wanting to kill your grandfather, which is an odd assumption). The technical term for meddling in the past this way is “bilking,” on the analogy of failing to pay a promised debt.10 Whatever you call it, it is the kind of thing that, in Star Trek, would make the Enterprise’s computer start to stutter and smoke and go haywire—the same reaction, in fact, that greets scientific claims of precognition. (As Dean Radin puts it, laboratory precognition results like those cited in the past two chapters “cause faces to turn red and sputtering noises to be issued from upset lips.”11) Information somehow sent backward in time from an event cannot lead to a future that no longer includes that event—and we naturally intuit that it would be very hard not to have such an effect if we meddled in the timeline. Our very presence in the past would change things.

...an astonishing blend of cultural history, multi-arts criticism, and memoir, moving with dazzling fluency across the hybrid worlds of visual and performance art, dance and music-theater, and experimental just-about-everything... Coe celebrates the mad pioneers of America’s most surreal cultural era in a gorgeous, insightful prose that matches their marvels.”        - Todd London, This Is Not My Memoir (with Andre Gregory, FSG) “...Compiled from published and unpublished writings, this volume reflects Coe’s extraordinary ability to craft smart journalistic profiles of epochal theater and dance artists with the Olympian sweep of an academic researcher and more than a streak of gonzo memoirist.”       - Don Shewey, Critic and Writer “...a truly personal opus and one that captivates as well as inspires... brimming with imagery and rich pathos that never seem over-indulgent or forced... Coe's book is certain to delight anyone who picks it up."        - Robert Buccellato, the US Review of Books "...a bit of Norman Mailer with a splash of Joan Didion, but all in all, the book has an eclectic style all its own. It’s postmodernism with a smirk and a twinkle. If you were there, you’ll be glad to go back again. If you weren’t there, you’re going to feel as if you were."        - Des McAnuff, Playwright, Songwriter, Director

In one study, researchers asked hundreds of middle school students to rank the values their parents prioritized. Half of the values centered on achievement, such as attending a good college, excelling academically, and having a successful career. The other half focused on character traits, such as being respectful, helpful, and kind. Adolescents who reported that their parents valued character traits as much as or more than their performance exhibited greater mental health, enjoyed higher levels of achievement, and engaged in less rule-breaking behavior than peers who believed their parents were primarily focused on how they were performing

Whatever the reason, the existence of some persistent investment factors is today accepted by almost every (if not all) financial economist and investor. In an ingenious bit of marketing, factors are often called “smart beta.” Sharpe himself grew to hate the term, as it implies that all other forms of beta are dumb.10 Most financial academics prefer the term “risk premia,” to more accurately reflect the fact that they think these factors primarily yield an investment premium from taking some kind of risk—even if they cannot always agree what the precise risk is. An important milestone was when Fama and his frequent collaborator Ken French—another Chicago finance professor who would later also join DFA—in 1992 published a paper with the oblique title “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns.”11 It was a bombshell. In what would become known as the three-factor model, Fama and French used data on companies listed on the NYSE, the American Stock Exchange, and the Nasdaq from 1963 to 1990 and showed that both value (the tendency of cheap stocks to outperform expensive ones) and size (the tendency of smaller stocks to outperform bigger ones) were distinct factors from the broader market factor—the beta. Although Fama and French’s paper termed these factors as rewards for taking extra risks, coming from the father of the efficient-markets hypothesis, it was a signal event in the history of financial economics.12 Since then academics have identified a panoply of factors, with varying degrees of durability, strength, and acceptance. Of course, factors do not always work. They can go through long fallow stretches where they underperform the market. Value stocks, for example, suffered a miserable bout of performance in the dotcom bubble, when investors wanted to buy only trendy technology stocks. And to DFA’s chagrin, after small caps enjoyed a robust year in DFA’s first year of existence, they would then undergo a long, painful seven-year period of trailing dramatically behind the S&P 500.13 DFA managed to keep growing, losing very few clients, partly because it had always stressed to them that stretches like this could happen. But it was an uncomfortable period that led to many awkward conversations with clients.

The seminal paper in the field was published in 1991 by William Sharpe, whose theories underpinned the original creation of the index fund, and was bluntly titled “The Arithmetic of Active Management.”16 This expanded on Sharpe’s earlier work, and addressed the suggestion that the index investing trend that was starting to gain ground at the time was a mere “fad.” The paper articulated what Sharpe saw as two iron rules that must hold true over time: The return on the average actively managed dollar will equal that of a dollar managed passively before costs, and after costs the return on that actively managed dollar will be less than that of a passively managed dollar. In other words, mathematically the market represents the average returns, and for every investor who outperforms the market someone must do worse. Given that index funds charge far less than traditional funds, over time the average passive investor must do better than the average active one. Other academics have later quibbled with aspects of Sharpe’s 1991 paper, with Lasse Heje Pedersen’s “Sharpening the Arithmetic of Active Management” the most prominent example. In this 2016 paper, Pedersen points out that Sharpe’s assertions rest on some crucial assumptions, such as that the “market portfolio” never actually changes. But in reality, what constitutes “the market” is in constant flux. This means that active managers can at least theoretically on average outperform it, and they perform a valuable service to the health of a markets-based economy by doing so. Nonetheless, Pedersen stresses that this should not necessarily be construed as a full-throated defense of active management. “I think that low-cost index funds is one of the most investor-friendly inventions in finance and this paper should not be used as an excuse by active managers who charge high fees while adding little or no value,” he wrote.17 “My arithmetic shows that active management can add value in aggregate, but whether it actually does, and how much, are empirical questions.

Can one unearth above-average fund managers, who can consistently or over time beat the market? Once again, the academic research is gloomy for the investment industry. Using the database first started by Jim Lorie’s Center for Research in Security Prices, S&P Dow Jones Indices publishes a semiannual “persistence scorecard” on how often top-performing fund managers keep excelling. The results are grim reading, with less than 3 percent of top-performing equity funds remaining in the top after five years. In fact, being a top performer is more likely to presage a slump than a sustained run.18 As a result, as Fernando’s defenestration highlighted, the hurdle to retain the faith of investors keeps getting higher, even for fund managers who do well.* In the 1990s, the top six deciles of US equities-focused mutual funds enjoyed investor inflows, according to Morgan Stanley.19 In the first decade of the new millennium, only the top three deciles did so, and in the 2010–20 period, only the top 10 percent of funds have managed to avoid outflows, and gathered assets at a far slower pace than they would have in the past.

And your worker who ‘kisses ass’ is seen as management material not because they give their all to the company, but because they spend that effort they would otherwise give to the company on looking like they give it all to the company. They spend it on all the little social games instead, and because effort spent on the metagame is focused entirely about the appearance of virtue, it overshadows those who are actually performing the primary task, it overshadows actual virtue. And this is how human hierarchical structures end up working. This is why the people who end up in authority are generally not those focused on whatever the purpose of the community is, but those who are focused on achieving positions of authority. This is why you have career politicians, why administrators end up pulling ten times the salary of a surgeon or an academic under their administration, why performing well in an exam or a test is not actually the same as being good at the thing the exam is supposed to be testing. Because the metagame outweighs the game.

People with high hope,64 a frame of mind we’ve been moving toward with our explorations, have been shown to have better65 : Psychological adjustment Academic performance and achievement Physical health and wellness Athletic performance Coping skills for illness and loss Social-emotional problem-solving Interpersonal relationships

Going to Moscow was a dream for us,' Ilich said years later. He and his younger brother started the course within weeks of Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia to crush the heady 'Prague Spring'. But they soon found that discipline at the cosmopolitan university, whose 6000 students were all selected through the Communist Party of their country of origin, was as stifling as its modernist architecture. Drab grey concrete blocks squatted around a charmless artificial pond. The only dash of colour was a map of the world painted on to the façade of one block in a valiant attempt to symbolise the ideals of the university: from an open book, symbol of learning, a torch emerges, issuing multicoloured flames that spread like waves across the planisphere. Perhaps Ilich drew some comfort from glancing up at the mural as, huddled against the rigours of the Russian winter and wearing a black beret in tribute to Che Guevara who had died riddled by bullets in October of the previous year, he trudged across the bleak square on his way to lectures. Coincidentally, the base of the flame is very close to Venezuela. Rules and regulations governed virtually every aspect of Ilich's life from the moment he started the first year's induction course, which was designed to flesh out his knowledge of the Russian language and introduce him to the delights of Marxist society before he launched into his chosen subjects, languages and chemistry. Like father, like son. Ilich rebelled against the rules, preferring to spend his time chasing girls. He would often crawl back to his room drunk. His professors at the university, some of them children of Spanish Civil War veterans who had sought refuge in Moscow, were unimpressed by his academic performance. 'His name alone, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, was so strange that people were curious about him,' relates Kirill Privalov, a journalist on the newspaper Druzhba (Friendship) which was printed at the small university press, and an acquaintance of Ilich. The Venezuelan's escapades, wildly excessive by the standards of the university, only fanned people's interest. 'llich was not at all the typical student sent by his country's Communist Party, nothing to do with the good little soldier of Mao who laboured in the fields every summer. He was a handsome young man although his cheeks looked swollen, and he was a great bon viveur. Flush with cash sent by his parents, Ilich could afford to spend lavishly on whisky and champagne in the special stores that only accepted payment in hard currencies and which were off-limits to most people. More Russian than the Russians, the privileged student and his friends would throw over their shoulders not only empty glasses but bottles as well. The university authorities, frustrated in their attempts to impose discipline on Ilich, reasoned that his freedom of action would be drastically limited if the allowance that his father sent him were reduced. But when they asked Ramírez Navas to be less generous, the father, piqued, retorted that his son had never wanted for anything. 'The university had a sort of vice squad, and at night students were supposed either to study or sleep,' recounts Privalov. "One night the patrol entered Ilich's room and saw empty bottles of alcohol and glasses on the table, but he was apparently alone. The squad opened the cupboard door and a girl who was completely drunk fell out. She was naked and was clutching her clothes in her hands. They asked her what she was doing there and she answered: 'I feel pity for the oppressed.' She was obviously a prostitute. Another time, and with another girl, Ilich didn't bother to hide her in the cupboard. He threw her out of the window. This one was fully dressed and landed in two metres of snow a foor or two below. She got up unhurt and shouted abuse at him.

Black students at a predominantly white university, for example, might be particularly prone to feel that they don’t fit in or belong at that university, especially if they experience an academic setback, as many students do in their first semester. If so, then an intervention designed to redirect their narratives from “I don’t fit in here” to “Everyone experiences bumps in the road” might increase their sense of belonging and improve their academic performance. To find out, researchers conducted a study with black and white first-year students at a predominantly white university. In the treatment condition, the students received statistics and read interviews with upper-class students indicating that most students worry that they don’t belong when they begin college, but that these worries lessen over time. To reinforce this message, the students wrote a speech illustrating how this lesson applied to them; that is, how their own worries about belonging were likely to be temporary. They delivered this speech in front a video camera, ostensibly so that it could be shown to future students at their school. Participants in the control group underwent the same procedure, except that they learned that social and political attitudes change over the course of one’s college career—they heard nothing about changes in one’s sense of belonging. The entire session lasted only an hour. Yet, as with other story-editing interventions, it had dramatic long-term effects on the black students’ performance and well-being. Those who got the message about belonging, relative to those in the control group, believed they fit in better at college, became more engaged in college academically (by studying more, attending more review sessions, and asking more questions in class), and achieved better grades in the rest of their college careers. Not only that, but on a questionnaire they completed right before they graduated, black students who had received the “belonging” intervention reported that they were in better health, had visited a doctor fewer times, and were happier than did black students in the control group. The “belonging” message had no effect on the white students, because most of them already felt that they fit in at their university.22