Malcolm Gladwell might have the best job in the world.
In the introduction to his podcast, Gladwell identifies that the subject matters are driven by “whatever is on my mind.” Not a bad way to start a research path. As if that wasn’t cool enough, it seems that just about anyone he wants to talk to about what intrigues him is willing to answer his call. Even in certain cases where he has publicly criticized an organization or individual, he gets invited to chances for them to explain themselves and “help him better understand where they’re coming from.”
One of the areas that has continually fascinated Gladwell is the Education system. So, after concluding several different podcast episodes over the course of seven years, he decided to collect the works and combine them into a single audiobook experience. This, in and of itself, was an evocative exploration of the media landscape. There is an ongoing debate about whether or not audiobook listening counts as “reading” (it most certainly does), but how do we consider a “book” made up of multi-media cuts, unbound in any form? Gladwell, who most consider to be primarily a writer, forces us to ask what exactly it means to create and distribute information to the public. After all, if the ultimate goal of writing a book is to convene a conversation, he does an unmistakably successful job here.
In I Hate the Ivy League, Gladwell looks at a number of structures within our understanding of higher learning, trying to understand how we prioritize school in this country. For most of the past three decades, the path to college and beyond was fairly well articulated: succeed in class in high school, apply to the best college you can get into, graduate with a flashy name-brand diploma, and advance into the workforce prepared to thrive. The reality, though, isn’t that simple. Gladwell explores the intricacies of US News and World Report’s rankings of universities, the ways that colleges are undermined for accepting students from lower socioeconomic brackets, and the challenges of donating huge sums of money to the most privileged of institutions that often don’t need the help. But perhaps the most interesting and problematic chapter/episode focused on the LSAT, the test that undergirds the law school admissions process.
In his exploration, Gladwell uses the analogy of the tortoise and the hare. The LSAT prioritizes hares; the test provides a time challenge that is inherently supposed to provide pressure and stress. The problem is, in most cases, the legal profession actually benefits the tortoises, those who are able to work diligently and thoroughly without missing any details. The result is a test that fairly poorly predicts success in the profession it hopes to perpetuate, leading top law schools from missing out on some of the best applicants, and forcing those applicants to miss out on opportunities. If the only way onto the Supreme Court is through Harvard, and Harvard demands an excellent LSAT score, then not only individuals but the nation as a whole are deprived of those who have the right skillset for the law, but the wrong one for the test.
These are the kinds of systematic challenges that continually plague the American people. In a country as vast and diverse as ours, we need to create a structure that will allow for better talent identification and better access for those with limited resources. If it were only a matter of providing opportunity to those who would benefit greatly from social mobility, that would be enough. But there is also a huge need in our country for the best and the brightest, and we can ill afford to continue to turn down those invitations to the kinds of learners who aren’t as obvious as we would like.
I Hate the Ivy League is a sweeping examination of an education system that all Americans value, but few know how to actually leverage. At a time when the challenges we face are growing exponentially more complicated, Gladwell reminds us that we have to examine all the ways that the system functions, in order to fully parse how we can make a meaningful impact. America’s education system has the unique opportunity to benefit not only the learners but also the nation as a whole, and we would be foolish to accept an ecology as deeply flawed as the one we currently have.
The first step toward fixing a problem is identifying we have one. And Gladwell’s intrigue points us at exactly how we can do a better job of creating a learning environment that would benefit us all.
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