High school valedictorian Erica Goldson explains the secret of her success:
I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it.
This is from her valedictory address to her fellow graduates; you can read the entire speech on her blog.
What do you think?
Being a young person around this person’s age, I feel sympathize, if not empathize, with this girl and her fear of the future. I also agree that the educational system may encourage young people to memorize certain facts just to pass a test. From that I disagree.
“We are more than robotic bookshelves, conditioned to blurt out facts we were taught in school.” Well, yes some students do this. However, I feel as if learning mathematics and economics has enriched my world. I see more clearly now and can think about things more thoughtfully.
“The saddest part is that the majority of students don’t have the opportunity to reflect as I did.”
This statement seems a little arrogant to me. If I was a peer listening to this speech I would have said, “You don’t think I’ve thought of these questions? Maybe we came to different conclusions but I never thought of them.
And the quote you put up, is it not possible that not all people who “doodle” and “writing lyrics” were actually just slackers. Not everyone who is a rebel is a genius.
Sorry to write for so long but this just seems like another teenage girl making a “shocking” speech at her graduation, just like all of them. Teenagers are just like that. Trust me. I was one not too long ago :)
I came top in class in the UK (I think that’s the analouge of valedictorian), and I had plenty of time for music, doodling, coding, astrophysics (read: star gazing). How much homework and tests do American kids do?
Hey, if ‘how to succeed in life’ ends up requiring the same blueprint as ‘how to succeed in high school’…good on her.
“You’ve been told during your high school years and your college years that you are now about to enter the real world, and you’ve been wondering what it’s like. Let me tell you that the real world is not college. The real world is not high school. The real world, it turns out, is much more like junior high. ..” http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9902E4D9163FF933A25755C0A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2
If she’s managed to notice the distinction between learning to learn and learning for a test then she’s probably done a fair bit of leanring to learn as well.
@Tony Cohen: Well yes but this depends very much on what we count as “succeeding/success”.
I have to give her major props for reading this as a grad speech, but I’m not impressed by the actual “tragic realization” she claims to have uniquely arrived at. I heard exactly the same message from every one of my habitual pot-smoking friends in high school. To me, adding a Mencken quote doesn’t make it any more enlightened.
She lost me here:
“And now here I am in a world guided by fear, a world suppressing the uniqueness that lies inside each of us, a world where we can either acquiesce to the inhuman nonsense of corporatism and materialism or insist on change. We are not enlivened by an educational system that clandestinely sets us up for jobs that could be automated, for work that need not be done, for enslavement without fervency for meaningful achievement. We have no choices in life when money is our motivational force.”
She identifies a great reason for promoting the creation of charter schools where new educational techniques can be applied, and competition can take place.
She sounds like the converse of the emo tortured no-talent singer-songwriter who likes to think that he could’ve been the star QB or the valedictorian if he had wanted to.
You don’t become a great artist by doodling in class. She likes to think that to explain away her lack of extracurricular talents. She’s not open to the possibility that she could’ve still been valedictorian while developing other talents. Plenty do.
Sure, Scalia would say that. In contrast, Bowling for Soup tells me that the real world IS high school, and high school never ends. So who ya gonna believe?
In support of the BFS theory, a legislator friend revealed to me the difference between life in the legislature and life in high school: bigger lockers.
Wanker.
Sadly, she’s both right and wrong. The odds of success are much higher if you do what they tell you. She probably got into a better college than these people, and her ability to focus on things that seem trivial and get them done can make her a lot of money. (Like going through all the minutiae required to land a government contract.)
It reminds me a little bit of Jeffrey Pfeffer’s article in the July HBR [http://hbr.org/product/power-play/an/R1007G-HCB-ENG] where he talks about how there are all of these business success books where CEOs claim you should be yourself, white washing their own histories, when, in reality, manipulative use of power is a much more effective way to get ahead.
I can’t back this up with any sort of stat, but I have heard many times that C/C+ students in college (that actually graduate) make more money lifetime than their peers with A/A- averages because they are spending more time building social skills and forging bonds with fellow classmates.
I’ve also had a conversation with a VP of a large nationwide company in which he told me that when he was a manager he would hire people with high GPA’s on their resume for task oriented jobs (customer service, accounting, etc.) because they have a track record of doing as they are told. However he said those people rarely “climb the ladder” beyond middle management because they don’t know how to create.
Last point, George Bush had a C average and he was a 2 term president. I’d imagine the GPA for most congressmen and senators is below the 3.0 range.
No one told her she she had to become valedictorian (though I’m sure her parents were proud).
I did pretty well in high school by studying hard but I think I had a fairly good balance between work and play. Ended up being in the top 10% of high school students in my year in Australia. Part of that is having a natural affinity to maths and science, part of that was becoming the drone rote learner that she describes. In my spare time, I played guitar (poorly), read novels that interested me, went to the beach with friends and watched alot of crappy TV. Once all studies were over, I really appreciated the liberated feeling of doing whatever I want.
There is no doubt that the education system is imperfect but I would say that the problems stem more from passing students who can’t read than rewarding diligent teenagers for their hard work.
It’s ok to not make studying your life. Just because she OCD’d in her senior year doesn’t mean that the rest of us are destitute to cleaning floors because we didn’t game the system as perfectly as she did.
I think she takes it a little too far, but she does have a good point. I’m not all that far out of college (and high school), but everyone knows that there are large differences between being intelligent, learning, and doing well in school.
Intelligence, in my experience, contributes the most to academic success (good grades) at the very lowest levels of education: elementary school. This is because much of the foundational things that are taught at this level are entirely non-subjective and can be quickly intuited by someone of higher intelligence.
Learning seems to have a relatively low impact on academic success, because most of the learning that people actually do in relation to their real lives is not tested in school and conversely, much of the learning done in school is useless in real life. There just isn’t a whole lot of overlap. I would add that the most important learning people do is done outside of school, or around the edges of what’s done in school, so it unfortunately has very little impact on academic success.
Doing well in school is a skill and a process. There are a number of strategies to it, many of which I feel can actually inhibit learning and personal development. Memorization and regurgitation help students a great deal, but they’re rarely useful in real life to the degree that schooling encourages them. There are also tactics that help students “stand out” and perform well. These include course and instructor selection as well as engaging in activities which signal effort to an instructor, such as asking questions or coming to office hours. I know a fair number of people just out of college who now work under me who have, unfortunately, mistaken these signalling activities that help in school with useful real-life skills when they really only serve to hurt their professional performance, since they’re seen as incompetent and a burden on their colleagues.
This sums up my thoughts on public education as it exists today:
http://www.libertarianminds.com/john-taylor-gatto-on-the-consequences-of-public-education
It resonates well with my own experiences.
To add to that I will say, while this girl is definitely an intelligent and critical-thinker for her age, I don’t share the same experiences in regard to “studying my ass off” / “sacrificing leisure” to do well. I hardly studied at all and I got mostly As with the occasional B. All you had to do was pay attention and do your homework (which usually isn’t too much and there is always a lot of time in school to get it done – lunch/free periods).
Looks to me like she’s rocking the boat after stepping ashore.
That’s interesting. I do think there’s something to be said about the the part you quote, but not so much with the rest. I wonder how much of the speech came from her own free thinking inspired by her english teacher and how much was inspired by her english teacher’s thinking.
Maybe she was the best at doing what she was told, or maybe she actually likes to learn.
It reminded me of a conversation I had with my brother a few years back. I blogged about it here:
http://ourdinnertable.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/education-the-answer-is-in-the-feedback-loop/
“I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme.”
Take back her diploma; she’s not a slave because she was not coerced into her actions.
Steve,
I’ve actually been debating this girl for a few days on facebook. She’s pretty much typical Marx influenced college student. That will pretty much explain the speech.
i think she is young, a dash pompous, and i liked her zen master quote. i wonder if she understood it?
does she think that all of her classmates (including herself) are destined for some sort of greatness? i would wager that she thinks some of them will be bagging groceries at wal-mart.
she clearly put effort into this speech. i think she saw it as extra-credit.
ahh irony, you temptress…
you weaver of hopes and dasher still.
you suffer no fool.
That is why we need to separate schooling and testing. So that schooling can evolve to be more educating than testing.