Category: Education

Walt Disney: “I Don’t Care About Critics”

(p. 286) “He is shy with reporters.” Edith Efron wrote for TV Guide in 1965. “His eyes are dull and preoccupied, his affability mechanical and heavy-handed. He gabs away slowly and randomly in inarticulate, Midwestern speech that would be appropriate to a rural general store. His shirt is open, his tie crooked. One almost expects to see over-all straps on his shoulders and wisps of hay in his hair. . . . If one has the patience to persist, however, tossing questions like yellow flares into the folksy fog, the fog lifts, a remote twinkle appears in the preoccupied eves, and the man emerges.”

Here again, as in other interviews from the 1960s, Disney permitted himself to sound bitter and resentful when he said anything of substance: “These avant-garde artists are adolescents. It’s only a little noisy element that’s going that way, that’s creating this sick art. . . . There is no cynicism in me and there is none allowed in our work. . . . I don’t like snobs. You find some of intelligentsia, they become snobs. They think they’re above everybody else. They’re not. More education doesn’t mean more common sense. These ideas they have about art are crazy. . . . I don’t care about critics. Critics take themselves too seriously. They think the only way to be noticed and to be the smart guy is to pick and find fault with things. It’s the public I’m making pictures for.”

Source:
Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. 1 ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.
(Note: ellipses and italics in original.)

Disney Learned Quickly (Despite Lack of Formal Education), and Impatiently Expected Others to Learn Quickly Too

The story below is very reminiscent of a story that Michael Lewis tells in The New, New Thing about how entrepreneur Jim Clark learned to fly.
Possible lesson: impatience and quick learning may not be traits of all high level entrepreneurs, but they appear to have been traits of at least two.

(p. 213) Seventeen years later, Broggie told Richard Hubler that teaching Disney how to run a lathe and drill press and other machinery was difficult “because he was impatient. So I’d make what we call a set-up in a lathe and turn out a piece and say, ‘Well, that’s how you do it.’ He would see part of it and he was impatient, so he would want to turn the wheels–and then something would happen. A piece might fly out of the chuck and he’d say, ‘God-damn it. why didn’t you tell me it was going to do this?’ Well, you don’t tell him, you know? It was a thing of–well–you learn it. He said one day, . . . ‘You know, it does me some good sometimes to come down here to find out I don’t know all about everything.’ . . . How would you sharpen the drill if it was going to drill brass or steel? There’s a difference. And he learned it. You only had to show him once and he got the picture.”

This was a characteristic that other people in the studio noticed. “He had a terrific memory,” Marc Davis said. “He learned very quickly. . . . You only had to explain a thing once to him and he knew how to do it. Other people are not the same. I think this is a problem he had in respect to everybody . . . his tremendous memory and his tremendous capacity for learning. He wasn’t book learned but he was the most fantastically well educated man in his own way. . . . He understood the mechanics of everything. . . . Everything was a new toy. And this also made him a very impatient man. He was as impatient as could be with whoever he worked with.”
Disney’s lack of formal education manifested itself sometimes in jibes at his college-educated employees, but more often in the odd lapses–the mispronounced words, the grammatical slips–that can mark an autodidact. “For a guy who only went to the eighth grade,” Ollie Johnston said, “Walt educated himself beautifully. His vocabulary was good. I only heard him get sore (p. 214) about a big word once in a story meeting. Everyone was sitting around talking and Ted Sears said, ‘Well, I think that’s a little too strident.’ Walt said, ‘What the hell are you trying to say, Ted?’ He hadn’t heard that word before.

Source:
Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. 1 ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.
(Note: ellipses in original.)

For a similar story about Jim Clark, see:
Lewis, Michael. The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

Support Grows for School Vouchers in D.C.

VoucherRallyDC2009-10-29.jpg “Students from Bridges Academy in Washington, D.C., at a Capitol Hill rally last month in support of the city’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which gives students from low-income families scholarships for private schools.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A2) The District of Columbia’s embattled school-voucher program, which lawmakers appeared to have killed earlier this year, looks like it could still survive.

Congress voted in March not to fund the program, which provides certificates to pay for recipients’ private-school tuition, after the current school year. But after months of pro-voucher rallies, a television-advertising campaign and statements of support by local political leaders, backers say they are more confident about its prospects. Even some Democrats, many of whom have opposed voucher efforts, have been supportive.
. . .
Many parents whose children receive vouchers say they are satisfied with the private schools they attend. During the 2008-2009 school year, about 61,700 students nationwide received vouchers, up 9% from the previous school year, according to the Alliance for School Choice, a pro-voucher advocacy group.
. . .
Created as a five-year pilot project by a Republican-controlled Congress in early 2004, the Opportunity Scholarship Program is the nation’s only federally funded voucher program. It is open to students who live in the long-struggling Washington school district and whose families have incomes at or below 185% of the federal poverty level — about $40,000 for a family of four. Recipients are chosen by lottery, although preference is given to those attending traditional schools deemed to be in need of improvement under federal law.
Joe Kelley entered his oldest son, Rashawn, in the first Opportunity Scholarship Program lottery in 2004, fearful about violence at the public middle school. Rashawn, now 17, received a voucher, and so have his three sisters. All attend a small, private Christian academy where they have been earning A’s and B’s. “It’s a lot of worry off of me,” said Mr. Kelley, a retired cook and youth counselor.
In an evaluation released in March, researchers found that in reading skills, voucher recipients overall were approximately 3.1 months ahead of eligible students who didn’t receive scholarships. But there was no difference in math skills, and voucher recipients from the worst-performing public schools got no boost in either subject.

For the full story, see:
ROBERT TOMSHO. “D.C. School Vouchers Have a Brighter Outlook in Congress.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., October 19, 2009): A2.
(Note: ellipses added.)

55% of Nebraskans Favor School Vouchers

The Friedman Foundation mentioned in the passage below, was founded by Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman who is often credited with creating the idea of education vouchers in his classic book Capitalism and Freedom.
Capitalism and Freedom was based on a series of lectures that Friedman delivered at Wabash College at the invitation of my much-missed mentor Ben Rogge. (Before teaching me economics in Indiana, Rogge was a native Nebraskan who earned his bachelor’s degree from Hastings College.)

(p. 4B) A majority of Nebraskans are open to school-choice reforms such as school vouchers and tax­-credit scholarships, according to a survey made public Thurs­day by a national school-choice group.

“It really appears Nebraska is ready to start talking about school-choice reform options,” said Paul DiPerna, director of partner services for the Fried­man Foundation for Educational Choice, which commissioned the survey.
The group partnered with the Nebraska Catholic Conference and other state and national groups to conduct the telephone survey of 1,200 likely voters.
Fifty-five percent of those sur­veyed said they favored school vouchers and supported a tax­-credit scholarship system, which would give tax credits to indi­viduals and businesses that con­tribute money to nonprofit orga­nizations that distribute private school scholarships.

For the full story, see:
Dejka, Joe. “Support for school choice tax plan seen; An Indianapolis organization says its survey shows Nebraskans would back a pending bill.” Omaha World-Herald (Fri., Sept. 18, 2009): 4B.

Trinity College Tries to Renege on Deal with Donor

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Gerald Gunderson. Source of photo: http://www.yorktownuniversity.com/faculty/gunderson.html

Gerald Gunderson, highlighted in the story quoted below, gave me some useful comments on my book project Openness to Creative Destruction at the April 2009 meetings of the Association of Private Enterprise Education.
Battles such as the one described below are easier to forgo than to fight. Gunderson has guts.

(p. A1) In one previously undisclosed fight, Trinity College in Connecticut is facing government scrutiny for its plan to spend part of a $9 million endowment from Wall Street investing legend Shelby Cullom Davis.

Trinity’s Davis professor of business, Gerald Gunderson, says he believed the plan, which would have funded scholarships for international students, violated the wishes of the late Mr. Davis. He alerted the Connecticut attorney general’s office. Then, Mr. Gunderson said in notes submitted to the agency, Trinity’s president summoned him to the school’s cavernous Gothic conference room, where he called the professor a “scoundrel” and threatened not to reappoint him.
Trinity said some of Mr. Davis’s family approved of the plan but it is now coming up with a new one, and declined to discuss the meeting.
. . .
(p. A14) The clash over the Davis gift has simmered on Trinity’s quiet campus of 2,200 students. Founded in 1823, the liberal-arts college has Episcopalian roots and Gothic architecture patterned after British universities.
In 1976, the school accepted a $750,000 gift from Mr. Davis, founder of a New York money-management firm who made a $900 million fortune investing in insurance stocks. Mr. Davis was a major benefactor to Wellesley College, Columbia University, Tufts University and his own alma mater, Princeton. But he had a personal connection to Trinity: His son-in-law was a graduate of the school and its campus overlooks downtown Hartford, an insurance hub.
In 1981, Trinity President Theodore D. Lockwood wrote to Mr. Davis that the fund, by then $1.6 million, was big enough to be tapped to create a Shelby Cullom Davis Professorship of American Business and Economic Enterprise. The letter listed several related activities, such as campus visits from business leaders. Mr. Lockwood also sought flexibility to use the money as the school saw fit “as conditions evolved and opportunities arose.”
In a return letter, Mr. Davis approved the professorship and activities Mr. Lockwood specified. But he rejected any other leeway. “It is my wish that the funds and income from the Endowment be used for the various purposes you have described…and for no other purposes.”
Trinity tapped Mr. Gunderson, an economic historian who shared Mr. Davis’s conservative political philosophy, to be the Davis professor.
The Davis fund grew beyond the needs of meeting Mr. Gunderson’s $155,000-a-year salary. By 2007, it reached $13.5 million, or 3% of Trinity’s total endowment, and generated more than $500,000 a year in income. After recent market declines, the fund is now estimated at $9 million.
Mr. Gunderson, 68 years old, says he complained for years that the school was starving the program and had rejected his frequent requests to add another full-time professor and a business-executive-in-residence program. The letter from Mr. Lockwood provides for the creation of a single professorship, but it doesn’t explicitly rule out adding another.
Mr. Gunderson says he suspects that liberal academics at Trinity have blocked these plans and have little interest in Mr. Davis’s vision. Mr. Gunderson, who is treasurer of the free-market nonprofit Yankee Institute, says some professors opposed his position in the 1970s in an economics department whose courses often stressed the downside of capitalism.
. . .
Last April, Trinity’s current president, James F. Jones Jr., sent Mr. Gunderson an email saying he had been looking for ways to use the “enormous” Davis fund to “benefit the College in ways different from merely watching the endowment continue to balloon because of the original strictures.” Mr. Jones said he had approached some Davis family members about using the money for financial aid for foreign students through another program the family had helped fund.
Mr. Gunderson replied that the college had entered into a binding contract with Shelby Cullom Davis, not his family. “Simply wishing things were different or saying that someone thinks it is a good idea is not sufficient and will not stand a legal challenge,” he wrote.
Following that exchange, Kathryn W. Davis, the donor’s 102-year-old widow, signed a document endorsing the use of her husband’s gift for the scholarships. But in an interview, she said the school hadn’t explained the restrictions her husband had outlined in his 1981 letter to the school, and said the endowment “should be used as my husband wished.”
The couple’s son, Shelby M.C. Davis, and grandson, Christopher C. Davis, both successful money managers, signed off on the fund’s use for scholarships.
Diana Davis Spencer, the donor’s daughter, says she only recently heard about the plan from Mr. Gunderson and is angry that Trinity didn’t contact her. Ms. Spencer, whose own philanthropy focuses on entrepreneurship, says her father would have opposed any change to the endowment’s mission. The university is “morally incorrect” and its plan “undermines donors’ confidence,” she says.
Trinity’s Mr. Joyce says the school believed key members of the family had been briefed.
After the April email exchange, Mr. Gunderson’s lawyer contacted the Connecticut attorney general’s office, which began its review. In the fall, Mr. Gunderson looked through financial data that the school had filed with the attorney general and noticed that about $200,000 of endowment money had been used to fund an internship program for college students over the past five years.
Mr. Gunderson says he was concerned in part because the school, facing a budget crunch, had tapped other restricted endowment money in 2004 but returned it after a faculty revolt. Trinity confirms this episode.
Mr. Joyce said Trinity this month reimbursed the Davis endowment for $191,337 spent on the internship program, though he said the original agreement still permits the school to spend a small amount annually on the initiative.
On Oct. 20, Mr. Jones, Trinity’s president, called Mr. Gunderson to the conference-room meeting. According to the professor’s notes, submitted to the attorney general, Mr. Jones called him “a liar and a bully,” threatened not to reappoint him and told him not speak to any other administrators. The notes said the president insisted on approving future spending from the Davis fund “down to a box of paperclips.”
Mr. Joyce, who said Mr. Jones wouldn’t be available for comment, declined to discuss the meeting. Mr. Joyce says he would be “very surprised” if Mr. Gunderson’s contract weren’t renewed when it comes up in July 2010.
In a February letter, the attorney general’s office told Trinity it could find no evidence that Mr. Davis intended the college or his family to have discretion to direct income from the endowment to purposes “other than the study and promotion of the economic theories of the free enterprise system.”
Mr. Joyce says Trinity scuttled its scholarship plan. The school intends to submit a new proposal to the attorney general and the Davis family on how it would spend excess Davis funds.
The attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, says he will consider the proposal. But he cautioned that colleges, despite financial pressures, can’t stray from donors’ intent: “There’s a vastly increasing temptation for schools to fill gaps or even launch new initiatives using money that was meant for another purpose.”

For the full story, see:
JOHN HECHINGER. “New Unrest on Campus as Donors Rebel.” Wall Street Journal (Thurs., April 23, 2009): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Among Professor Gunderson’s publications is:
Gunderson, Gerald A. Wealth Creators: An Entrepreneurial History of the United States. 1st ed. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1989.

“No Amount of Dancing Will Help You Learn More Algebra”

WhyDontStudentsLikeSchoolBK.jpg

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) . . . , Mr. Willingham shows how experiments support his claims.

The trendy notion that each person has a unique learning style comes under an especially withering assault. “How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?” asks Mr. Willingham’s hypothetical teacher. The disillusioning reply: “No one has found consistent evidence supporting a theory describing such a difference. . . . Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn.”
It turns out that while education gurus were promoting the uplifting vision of all students being equal in ability but unique in “style,” researchers were testing the theory behind it. In one experiment, they presented vocabulary words to students classified as “auditory learners” and “visual learners.” Half the words came in sound form, half in print. According to the learning-styles theory, the auditory learners should remember the words presented in sound better than the words presented in print, and vice-versa for the visual learners.
But this is not what happened: Each type of learner did just as well with each type of presentation. Why? Because what is being taught in most of the curriculum — at all levels of schooling — is information about meaning, and meaning is independent of form. “Specious,” for instance, means “seemingly logical, but actually fallacious” whether you hear it, see it or feel it out in Braille. Mr. Willingham makes a convincing case that the distinction between visual, auditory and kinesthetic learners (who supposedly learn best when body movement is involved) is a specious one. At some point, no amount of dancing will help you learn more algebra.

For the full review, see:
CHRISTOPHER F. CHABRIS. “Bookshelf; How to Wake Up Slumbering Minds
Will the discoveries of neuroscientists help us to think, learn and remember?.” Wall Street Journal (Mon., APRIL 27, 2009): A13.
(Note: the initial ellipsis was added; the ellipsis internal to the first full paragraph, was in the original.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Willingham, Daniel T. Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009.

The Epistemological Implications of Wikipedia

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

I think the crucial feature of Wikipedia is in its being quick (what “wiki” means in Hawaiian), rather than in its current open source model. Academic knowledge arises in a slow, vetted process. Publication depends on refereeing and revision. On Wikipedia (and the web more generally) knowledge is posted first, and corrected later.
In the actual fact, Wikipedia’s coverage is vast, and its accuracy is high.
I speculate that Wikipedia provides clues to developing new, faster, more efficient knowledge generating institutions.
(Chris Anderson has a nice discussion of Wikipedia in The Long Tail, starting on p. 65.)

(p. A13) Until just a couple of years ago, the largest reference work ever published was something called the Yongle Encyclopedia. A vast project consisting of thousands of volumes, it brought together the knowledge of some 2,000 scholars and was published, in China, in 1408. Roughly 600 years later, Wikipedia surpassed its size and scope with fewer than 25 employees and no official editor.

In “The Wikipedia Revolution,” Andrew Lih, a new-media academic and former Wikipedia insider, tells the story of how a free, Web-based encyclopedia — edited by its user base and overseen by a small group of dedicated volunteers — came to be so large and so popular, to the point of overshadowing the Encyclopedia Britannica and many other classic reference works. As Mr. Lih makes clear, it wasn’t Wikipedia that finished off print encyclopedias; it was the proliferation of the personal computer itself.
. . .
By 2000, both Britannica and Microsoft had subscription-based online encyclopedias. But by then Jimmy Wales, a former options trader in Chicago, was already at work on what he called “Nupedia” — an “open source, collaborative encyclopedia, using volunteers on the Internet.” Mr. Wales hoped that his project, without subscribers, would generate its revenue by selling advertising. Nupedia was not an immediate success. What turned it around was its conversion from a conventionally edited document into a wiki (Hawaiian for “fast”) — that is, a site that allowed anyone browsing it to edit its pages or contribute to its content. Wikipedia was born.
The site grew quickly. By 2003, according to Mr. Lih, “the English edition had more than 100,000 articles, putting it on par with commercial online encyclopedias. It was clear Wikipedia had joined the big leagues.” Plans to sell advertising, though, fell through: The user community — Wikipedia’s core constituency — objected to the whole idea of the site being used for commercial purposes. Thus Wikipedia came to be run as a not-for-profit foundation, funded through donations.
. . .
It is clear by the end of “The Wikipedia Revolution” that the site, for all its faults, stands as an extraordinary demonstration of the power of the open-source content model and of the supremacy of search traffic. Mr. Lih observes that when “dominant encyclopedias” were still hiding behind “paid fire walls” — and some still are — Wikipedia was freely available and thus easily crawled by search engines. Not surprisingly, more than half of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from Google.

For the full review, see:
JEREMY PHILIPS. “Business Bookshelf; Everybody Knows Everything.” Wall Street Journal (Weds., March 18, 2009): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion, 2009.

Entrepreneurs Learn “Not in the Classroom Where Old Ways are Taught, But in the Factories and Labs, Where New Ways Are Wrought”

Gilder’s rhyme about the classroom is cute, and maybe mainly true. In an important paper, Baumol has more prosaically (in the literal sense) expressed a similar view.
But there are counterexamples. Gilder himself, in his Microcosm, notes how what was taught in some classrooms was crucial to progress in information technology.

(p. 296) Entrepreneurs can be pompous and vain where it doesn’t count; but in their own enterprise, the first law is to listen. They must be men meek enough–and shrewd enough–to endure the humbling eclipse of self that comes in the process of profound learning from others.
In all the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education–and (p. 297) discovered the secrets of their later breakthroughs–not in the classroom, where the old ways are taught, but in the factories and labs, where new ways are wrought.

Source:
Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992.

The important Baumol paper mentioned above, is:
Baumol, William J. “Education for Innovation: Entrepreneurial Breakthroughs Versus Corporate Incremental Improvements.” In Innovation Policy and the Economy, edited by Adam B. Jaffe, Josh Lerner and Scott Stern, 33-56. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.

Ukrainian Memorial to the Millions Starved by Stalin’s Communism

FamineMemorialKievUkraine.jpg “A memorial to the famine, right, opposite a revered cathedral, was dedicated last November in Kiev. A museum is planned there.” Source of photo and caption: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A6) KIEV, Ukraine — A quarter century ago, a Ukrainian historian named Stanislav Kulchytsky was told by his Soviet overlords to concoct an insidious cover-up. His orders: to depict the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s as unavoidable, like a natural disaster. Absolve the Communist Party of blame. Uphold the legacy of Stalin.
Professor Kulchytsky, though, would not go along.
The other day, as he stood before a new memorial to the victims of the famine, he recalled his decision as one turning point in a movement lasting decades to unearth the truth about that period. And the memorial itself, shaped like a towering candle with a golden eternal flame, seemed to him in some sense a culmination of this effort.
“It is a sign of our respect for the past,” Professor Kulchytsky said. “Because everyone was silent about the famine for many years. And when it became possible to talk about it, nothing was said. Three generations on.”
. . .
The pro-Western government in Kiev, which came to power after the Orange Revolution of 2004, calls the famine a genocide that Stalin ordered because he wanted to decimate the Ukrainian citizenry and snuff out aspirations for independence from Moscow.
The archives make plain that no other conclusion is possible, said Professor Kulchytsky, who is deputy director of the Institute of Ukrainian History in Kiev.
Professor Kulchytsky is 72, though he looks younger, as if he has somehow withstood the draining effect of so much research into the horrors of that time.
“It is difficult to bear,” he acknowledged. “The documents about cannibalism are especially difficult to read.”
Professor Kulchytsky said it was undeniable that people all over the Soviet Union died from hunger in 1932 and 1933 as the Communists waged war on the peasantry to create farming collectives. But he contended that in Ukraine the authorities went much further, essentially quarantining and starving many villages.
“If in other regions, people were hungry and died from famine, then here people were killed by hunger,” Professor Kulchytsky said. “That is the absolute difference.”

For the full story, see:
CLIFFORD J. LEVY. “Kiev Journal – A New View of a Famine That Killed Millions.” The New York Times (Mon., March 16, 2009): A6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)