Geek Heresy (24 page)

As highly regarded as education is,
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it is not always appreciated for the right reasons. Part of the problem is that we think of education as being about grammar and multiplication tables, about names and dates and cognitive skills. But while knowledge is essential for a productive life, much more is necessary.

Often overlooked is the deeper transformation that good education can bring about in heart, mind, and will. It’s not just that Sreenivasa is more knowledgeable or “better educated” than Kavitha, it’s that Sreenivasa has an aspirational outlook, a belief in herself and in her ability to learn, intrinsic motivation toward many interests, and a desire to contribute to causes beyond her own – all traits that are largely neglected in policy circles.

Fortunately, hard evidence for education’s less tangible value is slowly emerging. In one noteworthy study, economists Pamela Jakiela, Ted Miguel, and Vera te Velde show a striking change in attitude among Kenyan teenage girls based on just two years of formal schooling.

Among a group of over 1,800 girls, half were randomly chosen to receive a scholarship. And in the way of behavioral economists, Jakiela
and her colleagues had the two groups play games – specifically, variations of the game of Dictator.

In its standard version, Dictator involves two players, one of whom is given a fixed amount of cash. The sole action of the game occurs when that person is offered the chance to give away all, some, or none of it as she pleases to the other player. In its simplicity and ubiquity, Dictator is the tic-tac-toe of behavioral economics. Repeated experiments show that most people in the dictator role prefer to keep a majority of the cash for themselves but still give a portion to the other player. In other words, as dictators, most people aren’t self-sacrificing saints, but neither are they total misers. The question, though, is how much they keep.

In this case, the economists devised four variations of the game. In versions 1A and 1B, the cash was given to the dictator as usual. In versions 2A and 2B, the cash was given to the other player, and the dictator could choose to take as much as she wanted. In A games, the amount of the pot was determined by a dice roll by the player initially receiving the cash. In B games, the pot was decided by a physical exercise: The harder the player worked, the more total cash was disbursed. That is, in the A games, the pot was decided by luck; in the B games, the pot was decided by the effort of one of the players.

The main result was that, as dictators, the girls who attended school kept more when they put in the effort, thus rewarding themselves for their work. They also gave more when the other player put in the effort, thus respecting the others’ exertions. The effect was most pronounced in students whose grades had improved in the preceding two years. The researchers suggested that the students internalized the experience of being rewarded for effort at school and brought that ethic to other parts of their lives. Just two years of formal schooling appeared to instill a healthy valuation of effort over luck.

Valuing effort instead of luck shows both good intention and discernment – greater heart and mind. It not only affirms an individual’s capacity to reach goals, but also strengthens social norms to reward effort. On the whole, people are more likely to reach their goals if they believe that greater effort matters, and societies are more likely to prosper if they reward effort. Notably, it doesn’t matter whether real-world
outcomes are primarily based on luck or effort. If effort is even 1 percent of the cause, it’s still good for people to believe in it. Luck averages out, but the effects of that 1 percent will accumulate over time like compound interest.
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Indeed, as early as 1966, sociologist James Coleman suspected a related cause for social disparities in a study commissioned by the US government. One of the key differences between children of different socioeconomic classes in America was the degree to which they believed in luck or effort.
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The children of better-off, more educated parents valued effort.

The study by Jakiela et al. demonstrates that education is much more than a transfer of knowledge. Education builds heart, mind, and will, too. Something about schooling is more conducive to intrinsic growth than is, say, twelve hours of mindless menial work in rice fields or in a sweatshop. It’s not that rice fields and factories can’t be educational: Some farming and industrial communities appear to transmit great wisdom across generations.
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And some forms of alternative education use the farm or workshop as the classroom.
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But these environments are more often the site of child labor or child neglect – even when benign, they rarely engage kids with continual learning opportunities.

In contrast, with an effective education, there are repeated chances to learn, “I can do this!” This is true even in the much-maligned brand of education that is rote learning. Japan, for example, has a national education system based largely on cycles of listen-study-test-pass, but few would argue that Japan’s educational system is failing.
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The country has very high literacy rates, a long life expectancy, and the third-largest economy in the world despite a prolonged recession. Similarly, elite students from China and India outperform average students in the United States even though they’re raised on rote learning. The base of optimistic intentions, keen discernment, and greater self-control that a good rote education develops is far better than no education, poor education, or an ambitious educational program run badly.

None of which is to say that rote learning is the pinnacle. Hardly. The education that the world’s most privileged children enjoy is often tailored to foster their unique talents. Great teachers prod, guide, motivate, and inspire. A good school encourages collaboration and creativity.
And well-off parents provide their children with a range of enrichment activities that go well beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic.
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In fact, a good education is one of the few things that statistics-minded technocrats acknowledge exist, even as they are unable to quantify its causes. Small things can matter, and too many of them are lost in efforts to cut costs or to standardize achievement. For example, good schools often bring in outside speakers to expose students to a variety of professions. Though this in no way improves test scores, it can help students develop life goals. Shanti Bhavan hosts many visitors; its students aspire to be doctors, engineers, scientists, journalists, environmental activists, and Broadway singers. A disproportionate number want to be astronauts, because of a memorable visit by NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus. Meanwhile, surveys of Indian government school children reveal that their hopes are limited to government jobs – those are the only stable jobs that they’ve heard of.
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As Plutarch wrote, “the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.”
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True Sustainability

If good education is effective, it is neither quick nor cheap. George exhausted his fortune underwriting Shanti Bhavan for its first fifteen years, and recently the school has had to cut back on enrollment as it builds its fundraising capacity. Besides, even if Shanti Bhavan itself were to endure, what about the 250 million other children in India who aren’t in good schools? It’s unlikely there are a million Abraham Georges to fund their education. Is Shanti Bhavan just a nice one-off story without a generalizable lesson? Is its model of education sustainable?

Policymakers and large foundations often speak of catalyzing a transformation with a finite injection of cash. They talk as if social change is a cascading domino rally just waiting for someone to come along and knock over the first piece. When they seek “sustainability,” what they really want is to take immortal credit for having made a limited one-time donation. As a result, meaningful expenditures on education or capacity building are often seen as unsustainable, because they incur high costs and require someone to keep paying for them year
after year. (Here again is C. K. Prahalad, who, as you may remember, groaned that “charity might feel good, but it rarely solves the problem in a scalable and sustainable fashion.”)
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This is, however, a counterproductive view of sustainability. Shanti Bhavan, for example, is a decidedly unsustainable endeavor by the standards of Prahalad. It costs the school about $1,500 per year per student, and these funds are not recovered from the students’ families – they certainly couldn’t afford it. Nor does the school’s model seem expandable under any large-scale government program, at least in India. The $1,500 per year dwarfs what the Indian government spends on each of its public school students, which is less than $250 a year.
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The fate of Shanti Bhavan, then, is dependent on charity. But it would be a great mistake to believe that Shanti Bhavan’s impact isn’t sustainable.

Sreenivasa herself is a towering monument to sustainability. As a Shanti Bhavan graduate, Christ College alumna, and Ernst & Young employee, Sreenivasa is firmly embedded in upper-middle-class India. Even if she never makes more than $5,000 per year – a low estimate, given her skills and experience – she would have an excellent standard of living compared to the hundreds of millions of Indians living on just a few hundred dollars a year. Barring debilitating setbacks, Sreenivasa will never know the kinds of struggles Kavitha, whose household income probably will never exceed $1,500 per year, will experience. And if they are typical of their peers, Sreenivasa will be happier than Kavitha.
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So Sreenivasa’s story is a triumph even if Shanti Bhavan were to shut its doors tomorrow. As avuncular figures say all over the world, “education is the one thing that no one can take away from you.” Shanti Bhavan’s effect on its students ratchets.

But there’s more. Sreenivasa will command jobs that provide good health care for her family, while Kavitha will be lucky to have a competent rural health-care worker to call on. Sreenivasa will be able to send any children she may have to good schools. Kavitha will make do with understaffed government schools or marginally better private schools (where fees are about $1 to $2 a month). Sreenivasa will pay taxes and contribute to her parents’ welfare. Kavitha may have to beg from neighbors to survive dry seasons.

None of this is to say that Kavitha’s life is doomed, or that outcomes are determined wholly by internal traits. Kavitha might join a local self-help group and become a community leader. Or she might inherit land from a rich relative. And Sreenivasa is not immune to hardship. She may be laid off or lose money in a stock-market crash. Both women will experience ups and downs. Still, the range of likely outcomes for Sreenivasa and Kavitha is bracketed and persistent. Sreenivasa is in a better position to live well and to contribute to the well-being of her children and their offspring.

And if that’s not enough, yet another effect of Sreenivasa’s education is felt by her home community. Some critics of Shanti Bhavan question the stark sociocultural rifts caused within families when one child is taken to what might as well be another planet. I once shared these concerns.
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My reservations evaporated, however, when I visited Shanti Bhavan’s campus and met their students. The school takes pains to retain the children’s ties to their families through careful counseling and two home leaves each year. Students are open and honest about the challenges of staying close to family. Some have navigated complex situations such as sexual abuse, which can be routine at home.
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Most acknowledge the gaping social, cultural, and linguistic canyon between themselves and their families and have become accustomed to mediating any differences.

Despite the challenges, the students are well adjusted, and their families report joy and amazement at their progress. Students are often treated like celebrities when they return home, and they inspire neighbors to seek out the best schooling they can afford for their own children.
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Because Sreenivasa’s mother saw the effect of Shanti Bhavan on her daughter, she did everything she could to keep Sreenivasa’s sister Gayathri in school. Gayathri now attends a government college, and her own future is much brighter than it could have been.

Lastly, Sreenivasa also bears a kernel of the school’s financial sustainability in a way that might even have made Prahalad proud. In 2013, I took Sreenivasa and some of her friends out for lunch. All of them were from Shanti Bhavan’s pioneering classes, and the first to start working.
But even though they had only been in their jobs for a few months, they had already begun contributing a portion of every paycheck to Shanti Bhavan. As more students graduate, the balance of supporters to students will shift until, at some point, alumni could fund the whole student body, and perhaps expansion to boot.

All of that – what Sreenivasa keeps for herself and propagates to future generations – comes without another penny from Shanti Bhavan, its founder Abraham George, or any other benefactor. That’s a lot of sustainability.

. . . And Scalability

Unlike Shanti Bhavan, Ashesi University is already financially viable, as its operating costs are covered by an admittedly high tuition. (Donors contribute to scholarships, capital campaigns, and endowments.) But Ashesi also provides a hint toward large-scale impact. University president Awuah argues that if today’s African college graduates – just 5 percent of every age group – could be persuaded to work toward Africa’s future, the continent would be transformed in twenty years when that 5 percent would inevitably assume leadership.
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