Hype ahoy! Malcolm Gladwell has a new book coming

Jason Kottke reports that Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, has finished his new book: "I've learned that the subject of this book is the future of the workplace with subtopics of education and genius."

Hopefully, Malcolm's views on the future of the workplace will just cause businesses to waste money on Gladwell-promoted fads that they would have wasted on something else stupid anyway. (And I presume that the living people that Malcolm uses to illustrate his theories about geniuses won't, actually, be geniuses, but that's trivial, too.)

On the other hand, the thought of Malcolm and the Educartel teaming up enthusiastically to subject America's children to whatever brainstorm Malcolm will credulously endorse is alarming indeed.

A recent interview with Malcolm in the Toronto Globe and Mail is not reassuring:

When you say that the cognitive demands of the workplace will be growing, what do you mean?

We will require, from a larger and larger percentage of our work force, the ability to engage in relatively complicated analytical and cognitive tasks. So it's not that we're going to need more geniuses, but the 50th percentile is going to have to be better educated than they are now. We're going to have to graduate more people from high school who've done advanced math, is a very simple way of putting it.

Unfortunately, it seems like we're heading in the opposite direction in terms of test scores and math literacy. How do we turn that around?

There's a cheap solution, which Canada has actually excelled at, which is simply to import your brains. As the son of an Englishman who came to Canada to teach math, the Gladwells [and myself] are part of that earlier cheap solution. So that's one route, and we can continue to do that, there's nothing stopping us. And Canada will not become less desirable over time; I suspect that 10 years from now, Canada will be an even more desirable location for lots of people from less-developed countries.

The logical corollary of this is to not do what America is doing and allow in lots and lots of people whose children drag down the 50th percentile. For example, California, the state where, by far, immigrants make up the highest percentage of the population, famously imports lots of foreign math nerds to work in Silicon Valley. Yet the new 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress results show that California public school students as a whole are way down near the bottom of the 50 states in math skills among 4th graders (fourth from the bottom) and 8th graders (fifth from the worst).

How much do you want to bet, though, that Malcolm won't get around to mentioning that? And risk getting Watsoned and losing all those $50k corporate speaking gigs?

But you can't keep doing that forever. At a certain point you have to address what's going on with the people who are already here. ... We have to look at models of other countries that have successfully taught those kinds of skills to a broader percentage of the population, like Korea and Japan. If you look at their education systems, they have shown it is perfectly possible to create a much more mathematically literate work force.

So that's why Japanese and Koreans at home do so much better at learning math than they do in America! Oh, wait ... they don't. They do good both here and there.

How about just looking at the educational system in North Dakota (2nd in 8th grade math scores behind Massachusetts) versus the educational system in Washington D.C. (far below any of the 50 states in test scores)? There must be some amazing discovery we could make about the differences in their educational systems that produce such vastly different outcomes. (It might have something to do with empowerment, or maybe self-esteem.)

Off the top of my head, I couldn't imagine what the difference between North Dakota and the District of Columbia would be, but if some foundation would put me up for a week in the Hay-Adams Hotel, I could study the D.C. educational system in depth. And, while I wouldn't actually go to North Dakota (it is November), I would make some phone calls.

I couldn't begin to guess what difference I would find, but somebody has to do this. Think of the children. I believe the children are our future.

(By the way, Malcolm, that master of good judgment, having apparently forgotten his many humiliations of the past, is back to blogging.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer