<p>texaspg #350, I don’t buy that in the slightest. Frankly, it sounds silly to me. Have you ever actually met an 18-year-old who showed wisdom? I know the some of the faculty in the sciences at Stanford. They are innovative without exception. Without exception, they know a whole lot more than any of the 18-year-olds in their classes. So much more that it’s just preposterous to pretend otherwise. No one thinks that the students are “empty vessels.” But the faculty members (in the sciences for sure, and in all of the fields, I would think) know how much their capabilities deepened from the time that they were entering freshmen to the time they completed their Ph.D.s, and from that point to the present.</p>
<p>PG, if you don’t mind answering a somewhat personal question, I am curious. I know from your earlier posts that you did well in mathematics in college, while having a social life. Did you ever obtain a mathematical result that made your heart pound? Or that made you jump up and down with excitement? I do mean these questions literally.</p>
<p>Sure, lookingforward #379, I remember “the fuss and muss back in our day about how sports and the teamwork/resilience, etc, enhanced skills and prep for future opps for young men?”</p>
<p>I just didn’t buy it, and still don’t. I thought it was another example of men defining as valuable whatever they did, that women did not do.</p>
<p>QuantMech, sometimes I think you’re just pulling our legs. You can dismiss a performance of a symphony orchestra as just “entertainment,” but also talk about mathematical results that make your heart pound?</p>
<p>To throw a little wrinkle in things, I’m not actually convinced that Pinker’s students aren’t coming to lecture because they need to rehearse for the play or go to Zurich with their acapella group. Obviously, direct conflicts between courses and ECs happen, but if half of a class isn’t coming, I wouldn’t assume that all of them have other commitments that could plausibly be considered more important than attending class. I would guess that there are plenty of students who just weren’t in the mood for class that day, and a certain amount who don’t go to class any more than they need to to get a respectable grade.</p>
<p>As I tried to suggest in posting the list of ECs at Cambridge, even admitting on purely academic grounds nets a group of highly involved people - some of whom, I suspect, are willing to skip a lecture for an EC-related reason on occasion. And that’s fine - I think it would have been nuts, and shown a real lack of good priorities for Hanna to bow out of the Hilary Clinton trip because it would make her miss philosophy lecture. Someone who would do that is indeed narrow, no matter how intellectually impressive. The question posed by Pinker’s remark on spotty attendance isn’t whether or not highly intelligent students should be involved in ECs, but to what extent students should be SELECTED on the basis of things like ECs, and how much changing that equation might affect the intellectual climate on campus. </p>
<p>Note that I’m asking “to what extent” ECs should matter, not “should ECs matter at all.” Unlike Pinker, I like holistic admissions. My time at both elite campuses and CC, however, has made me think that both the floor for “academically qualified” and the standards for how impressive one has to be in other areas to compensate for meaningfully less impressive academics should be raised. </p>
<p>apprenticeprof, your post raises this question for me: if Harvard emphasized ECs less in admissions, would that necessarily result in better attendance at Pinker’s lectures? Is it really the case that students who are really serious about academics attend class more regularly (especially if the course is an elective)?</p>
<h1>360 I thought the point of these sorts of speeches was that students are expected to engage and participate in their own education. Maybe they do the reading, even when it doesn’t impact GPA. The point isn’t a famous professor in front of a large lecture class giving a lecture anyone, anywhere, could download from on-line. Or read the prof’s publications. They don’t need to attend college for that experience imho.</h1>
<p>There is a thread going on about whether HS teachers should grade all the math homework, or whether going over it in class with opportunities for questions to be answered is adequate. Mainly the issue is giving students tools to teach themselves. I thought the point of college was access to tool collection. Again - just my opinion as an outsider looking on</p>
<p>Has anyone here ever learned and grown and improved thru discussions with their children? Or is valuable knowledge and wisdom passed down solely from those with terminal degrees, multiple publications, and narrow areas of interest to those without them? </p>
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<p>I disagree with my kids view points most of the time. However, I disagreed with what my parents thought at their age too and so I give them the benefit of doubt that they could be right and I have no idea. Listening is a very hard skill and I have mastered only about 10%.</p>
<p>“We trust you already have wisdom, and we want to help you cultivate it to your highest potential.”<br>
By the time you form a class at an elite, I think holistic has narrowed it down, as best it can, within limits, to as many as possible with (age-appropriate) wisdom that can then be cultivated, in many respects, per that college’s visions and those of classmates. We aren’t talking now about some mythical bottom 25% composed of dumb jocks, underwhelming URMs and discretionary admits. And, of course, what a kid actually does on campus remains to be seen.</p>
<p>The problem is more that, when looking at all those high performing applicants, not all of them show wisdom, any sort of expansive thinking or self-testing beyond the hs four walls, and some “same old.” Not to say there is something magical about every S freshman. But put some mighty ones together and the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. </p>
<p>So, my young friend, now a senior, had started two ventures by the end of soph year- with peers. Not with profs and not related to his academic coursework. Both were good ideas that drew attention and made some $ but would have taken some maturity to refine. But they were a springboard (a very Stanford-ish springboard) into intern opportunities in a more established tech-y environment. He is a very bright kid who pursued quantum before college. His scores were ok- maybe 2050?, with superiority in math. And plenty of self-testing in his teens, both related to intellectual-type challenges and his interests.</p>
<p>I have learned and grown (and been challenged and changed) through discussions with my children. Strikingly so. It’s not all about stats, degrees, things we can rank hierarchically. </p>
<p>I did think “wisdom” a poor choice of words and it was jarring to me. If it was a deliberate and conscious choice,with regard to the standard dictionary definition, I have no earthly idea what the speech was about.T</p>
<p>ETA I was assuming “wisdom” meant “intelligence” which I am seeing as a synonym in some places. Intelligence equals potential to me, not accomplishment in and of itself.</p>
<p>I assume that you are not joking, Hunt, in #363? I am not “dismissing” the performance of a symphony by classifying it as entertainment <em>for me.</em> I said from the get-go that it is a different experience for a musician to listen to a symphony performance than it is for me, because we don’t hear music in the same way. It is a different experience again for a musician to perform in a symphony orchestra, rather than just hearing it. But for me, listening to a symphony is entertainment. I would also classify performing in a musical ensemble as entertainment for a student who is not really serious about music.</p>
<p>I am sure that there are posters on CC who have had the experience that a mathematical result makes their hearts pound. This was literal, too.</p>
<ol>
<li> Professors know a lot more than their students, for sure. However: </li>
</ol>
<p>(a) Universities like Stanford don’t actually offer their undergraduate students a whole lot of professor time, and during the short time allotted to undergraduates the professor’s attention tends to be divided among many students. There’s nothing evil or wrong about that; it’s efficient. In contrast, undergraduates tend to spend a whole lot of time with other undergraduates, in circumstances such that they are paying a lot of attention to one another. It is definitely in the university’s interest to convince students that the latter is a very important element of the value the university provides.</p>
<p>(b) Knowing a lot more does not necessarily make them good people, people you would want your child associating with. My famous, brilliant advisor was a horrible lecher, a hypochondriac, and tremendously whiny. He was sensational on the page and behind a lectern, but really not someone worth hanging out with a lot. (He did give me some good advice at times, and interesting gossip, and I didn’t have to worry about him hitting on me because I wasn’t the right sex.) Spending more time with faculty is not a pure positive. </p>
<p>© Often, students help each other in important ways understand what the faculty is trying to teach.</p>
<ol>
<li> “Purely brilliant students.” I have spent a lot of time around elite universities and the people who populate them, and I haven’t met that many people I would term “purely brilliant,” students or faculty. The people I have met who are purely brilliant aren’t hard to identify. At all. So I am skeptical of the notion that there are tons of purely brilliant, middle-class or low SES students out there who are missing out on Harvard because Harvard can’t identify them.<br></li>
</ol>
<p>In most urban settings, and some rural areas, too, there are many organizations that make it their business to try to find and to cultivate talented kids from low-resource backgrounds, and to hook them up with elite colleges. Of course, their coverage is not complete, and their track record is not perfect. So, I suppose that somewhere out in Willa Cather country there is a kid who gets great grades in school then goes home, feeds the cattle, fixes the irrigation pump, and thinks brilliant thoughts which, if properly shaped by education, would revolutionize physics. And maybe she gets missed. Those are the breaks.</p>
<p>I swear, I may believe in these kids more than the average bear. (Of course, I also know they can be dumb- or dumb and smart at the same time. Or turn out to be disappointing adults. It’s life.) Keep an open mind about the word “wisdom.” He did suggest it needs to be cultivated. Insert a parallel word, if you must. It was a speech. Think broadly about what we see as wisdom. It’s not always a greybeard or the PhD teaching at H or someone with perfect thinking in all respects. It can be representative, not literal. </p>
<p>“Made my heart pound” is a little hyperbolic, but yes, QM, I loved my major, I loved the work, and I got genuinely geeked out over things. I am easily the kind who could take college classes for fun the rest of my life. </p>
<p>Uh, alh, wisdom is broader than what is found in books, in classrooms and in labs. </p>
<h1>372 I wonder if your brilliant advisor would 1) be hired today, 2) be kept on unless changing his ways. I hope we can expect better behavior. At least some expose it. For what that’s worth. It does at least seem to me expectations and standards are much higher.</h1>
<p>adding: pg -this isn’t Alice in Wonderland. We have to agree on definitions to have a sensible discussion. The common definition of wisdom means already having lots of knowledge. Sure knowledge exists in lots of forms, but if you already have all the academic knowledge, there is not much reason to go to college except as a sort of finishing school.</p>
<p>Professors know a lot more than their students, for sure. Reminds me of one question on the MMPI/Mn Multiphasic Personality Inventory: something about bosses being smarter than workers. Was it, “Editors are smarter than journalists” -? </p>
<p>deleted. I’m already a horrible thread hog here today.</p>
<p>Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting in fruit salad. All the profs at Stanford are knowledgeable in the extreme. The wisest ones don’t take themselves or their interests too seriously.</p>