On Ambition: Necessary but Corrosive?

Lucy Kellaway in The FT

Not long ago I had lunch with a friend who told me that his father, who had been a moderately well-known politician, had just died. 

How sad, I said. 

What was sad, he replied, was less his death than his life. From a young man he had set his heart on being in the cabinet but never made it beyond junior minister — and never got over it. For the past three decades of his life, he had been bitter, envious, bad company to others and a liability to himself. What had killed him in the end, his son told me, was not the organ failure reported on his death certificate, but thwarted ambition. 

A few days later I was doing a podcast with Dame Jenni Murray, the veteran broadcaster. We were discussing our careers post separation from our life-long employers, the BBC for her and the Financial Times for me. 

She said she was loving her new freelance existence and felt more carefree than she ever had. The reason: she had not one shred of ambition left. Freed from the monkey on her shoulder driving her on to succeed, she could enjoy the work she did for its own sake. 

I said that on the contrary I was entering my seventh decade more ambitious than I had ever been. I was starting a new school in September, would be teaching A-level economics for the first time, and was hell bent on doing well. 

These two conversations have got me thinking about both the corrosiveness and the necessity of ambition and wondering how much of it we need, how to turn it off when it’s no longer useful — and how to stop it from doing us in. 

Striving for power, position or money 

I was brought up to despise ambition. My parents had that snobby suspicion of overt success common in Britain in the middle of last century and disapproved of striving for power, position or money. I would hear them say “He’s very ambitious” — implying that the person in question was only a hop, skip and a jump away from turning into Macbeth. 

 When it came to my own early career as a journalist I would have sworn black and blue that I had no ambition whatsoever — any advancement was simply due to luck. 

I changed my mind about 15 years ago when I went around asking all the most successful journalists at the FT if they considered themselves ambitious. The older, posher Brits mostly said no, but everyone else, all the Americans and all younger journalists said yes. 

Suddenly I saw how pathetic the old-fashioned British aversion to visible striving was. All successful people are ambitious. If you want to achieve anything, especially in anything competitive, you won’t get anywhere at all without ambition. 

Now as a teacher, I find myself not only pro-ambition, but being forced to teach it to children. “High expectations” are one of the government’s eight teacher standards each trainee teacher must provide evidence of to qualify — the idea is that teachers expect great things from every student so that they can expect great things of themselves. 

Just before the end of term I asked my year 11 students to write down what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives. Some said they wanted to make a lot of money in the City and then start their own businesses. Others wanted to be neurosurgeons, professional footballers, astronauts, forensic scientists. One said he wanted to return to the country his parents were from and become a politician and help to resolve the civil war there. 

As they started to discuss their ambitions I wanted to cheer. What a great job the school and their parents had done to make them all aim so high. What a great job I was doing as their economics teacher! 

Aim high, but within reason 

But as this roll call of ambition continued, I started to feel a bit uncomfortable. I wanted to say: come off it Tommy, you have struggled for three years to see the difference between fixed and variable costs so I’m not sure that the ambition of being Elon Musk is realistic for you. 

What comes out of this are three thoughts. 

Ambition is a good thing but it must be proportionate. This is true not only of Tommy but of all of us — we should aim as high as we can, but within reason. If my friend’s father had had the more reasonable (but still high) ambition of becoming an MP, he might have died a very happy man. 

The second is that if you do not get the success you want, you need to let go quickly, before the wanting destroys you. My brother had the ambition of being a professional oboist. From the age of about 15, this was all he wanted in life and for a decade he did everything to make it happen. But when, in his mid 20s, he realised he was probably not going to get snapped up by the London Symphony Orchestra — or any orchestra at all — he sadly put his oboe away, cancelled his ambition and joined a stockbroker instead. 

Lastly, I now see I’m wrong about myself again. Contrary to what I told Murray, I’m not ambitious any more. I’ve looked it up and it means a “strong desire for success, achievement, power or wealth”. I don’t even have a weak desire for three of those and while I do want to achieve as an A-level teacher, that is because I’ll be no use to my students if I don’t know what I’m doing, and I won’t have any fun myself. 

Now mine is gone, I see more clearly the trouble with ambition. It is not that it turns you into a ruthless, driven version of Macbeth, but that the striving, by definition, makes you dissatisfied with your life at present. Worse still, all the really ambitious people I have known have never been satisfied by achieving the thing of their dreams, they merely concocted an even bigger dream. I daresay that if my friend’s father had made it to the cabinet, he would still have died embittered by dint of not having made it as prime minister. 

In the end he was unusual and unlucky to die still holding on to ambition. One of the greatest joys of getting older is the corrosive side of the striving, the wanting, the envy tends to recede. Whether it is because the charms of success, power and money fade as you get older or whether it is because of the diminishing probability of achieving those things — it doesn’t matter. Murray was right: life without the monkey is a good deal nicer.

Four years of Achhe Din - Modi feels we have let him down miserably

G Sampath in The Hindu

My dear friends and loyal readers, please join me in congratulating ourselves on four fantastic years of Achhe Din. I hope that is the correct spelling of ‘achhe’ and it’s not ‘achhoo’ as my autocorrect is suggesting. My father says the right spelling is ‘chee’ but I think he is editorialising.

So wherever you are, whoever you are, extend both your arms — don’t feel shy, this is a time to celebrate — and pat yourselves on the back. If you can’t reach your own back because you are too fat, do it using your social media handle, or the handle of your trishul. But do it for sure — because you deserve it.


A ridiculous notion

You silly goose! Deserve it my foot! I was just joking, to see how seriously you take me. And you all are really patting yourselves on the back?! This has to be the height of self-delusion. Do you people really believe the credit for all that India has achieved in the last four years goes to each one of you? I am asking a genuine question here and I want a genuine answer: are all of you megalomaniacs? Did you really think each of you is collectively responsible for the progress of this great nation? I am shocked to hear that you would entertain even for one second such a ridiculous, blasphemous notion. Never forget that all the good things happening in our country right now is because of one man — and we all know who that is.

What makes me really sad is that all of you got four years — four entire years — to fulfil every one of our beloved Prime Minister’s dreams. And yet, you have let him down so badly. Each one of you. True, the Indian economy is still growing at 12.7% per annum, we are still creating 4.2 crore jobs every year, and farmers are so happy that they are giving away milk and tomatoes for free. It is also true that we have eliminated corruption through demonetisation, achieved 200% tax compliance through GST, and deposited ₹15 lakh in the bank account of every Indian who worked in the IT Cell for a minimum of 56 days.

Nor can anyone deny that today, white people in different parts of the world look at brown Indians with more respect than ever before. Foreigners are so much in awe of our Prime Minister that when they translate his speeches they add five extra paragraphs free of charge. After 60 years of Dark Ages under the Congress, today every Indian village has woken up to light and Paytm.


Four great feats

In fact, Modiji routinely achieves in any given week 100 times more than what Nehru accomplished from 1947 to 2014. But the pseudo-sickular Indian media that has sold out to the hate-Modi industry simply won’t show them to the Indian public. If you think I am being too harsh, I’ll give you just four examples of Modiji’s historic achievements, all from the last one week, which have been completely blacked out by the paid-cum-stung media.

I’m betting you didn’t know, for instance, that for the first time in India’s 30,000-year-history, an orchid was named after an Indian Prime Minister when the Singapore government decided to name a beautiful Indic orchid that produces upright inflorescences up to 56 inches long, ‘Dendrobrium Narendra Modi’. Or that Modiji became the first Indian Prime Minister to visit a Mariamman temple in Singapore. Were you aware that the IAEA has hailed the achievement of electrifying all Indian villages as the greatest event in the history of every energy, including physical, kinetic, potential, sexual, and weed energy? Or that for the first time in India’s history, an Indian Prime Minister purchased a Madhubani painting in Singapore using a RuPay card? Do you know how many Madhubani paintings Nehru bought using a RuPay card, either in India or in Singapore? Zero. That’s right. If Modiji and Nehru were to settle things between them through a tennis match, Modiji would win by an innings and 545 runs.


The one thing we couldn’t do

That’s the kind of Prime Minister we’ve been blessed with the last four years — someone who not only works 23 hours a day but never boasts about it in his own words. In return, he had only one small request for all of us: a Congress-mukt Bharat. And I’m sorry to say, as a nation, we have failed miserably in this.

As the Karnataka elections and the recent bypoll results showed, not only is India far from being Congress-mukt, the entire Opposition is ganging up against one man. And you all are sitting quietly and watching like Gandhiji’s monkeys? After all that he has done for you, if you can’t even ensure another five years of Achhe Din in 2019, I must say you are not fit to remain in this country. I suggest you pack off to Pakistan and while you are there, don’t forget to watch ‘Veeradi Veera Wedding’ with your jihadi grandmother.

Degree classifications are extremely crude - and pretty useless

When they graduate, students should simply be given a transcript of their marks as a record their study, says Jonathan Wolff

• 
• • Jonathan Wolff
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 July 2012 18.45 BST

Universities themselves do not find the classifications useful. Any student applying for further study will be asked for a transcript of all their marks, in addition to their degree result. Photograph: tomas del amo /Alamy

In Geneva a few weeks ago, as the American and European participants were discussing which insect repellent to use on their post-conference hikes, I had to leave in order to attend yet another meeting of an exam board. This year, I've been chair of several of our boards, "faculty observer" on others, and external examiner elsewhere, and so my desk has been littered with exam scripts and spreadsheets. My head is full of rules for dealing with classification and borderline cases. Degree schemes are like snowflakes: no two are alike.

North Americans rarely understand the expression "exam board" unless they have worked or studied in the UK. Of course, they grade their papers, often with substantial help from their teaching assistants. But once the marks are settled, that is it as far as the department is concerned. Marks go off to the university administration, and in due course find their way on to student transcripts.

Here, by contrast, at least two academics assess or moderate each paper. The mark then exists in a form of limbo until ratified by the exam board, the external examiner and the university examinations section. In some cases, a single essay will be read by three different people, and the mark adjusted twice, although this is rare. Marking in the UK is a process of handicraft, not mass production.

And what do we do with these finally tuned judgments? We put them into a computer that weights them for year of study, ignores some of the bad ones, and produces a number through some form of averaging process. That number will assign the candidate either to a clear degree class, or to a twilight borderline zone. If borderline, we then use another set of rules, apparently too complex for any computer, taking account of such things as "exit velocity", "spread of marks" and any extenuating conditions, in turn graded A, B, C, and X. In such discussions a score of academics can spend a couple of happy hours for each degree programme trying to detect whiffs of high-class performance. Inevitably, and tragically, some students will be consigned to a lower classification by a hair's breadth.

And after all of this, what do we end up with? Given that many students now regard a 2:2 as hugely disappointing, the great majority find a way to do what they need to achieve at least an upper second. Some, with talent and hard work, will do even better and will be awarded a first. Those who in the old days would have performed weakly are likely to have failed at an earlier stage, and so just won't be there in the graduating class. I haven't seen a third in years. Averaging between a 2:2 and a fail is a real challenge. Hence after all this work, we assign perhaps 20% of students to the first-class category and most of the rest to the upper second-class group, with a sprinkling of lower seconds.

In other words, the job of an exam board is to spend a huge amount of effort taking a rich profile of information – how students have done over a wide range of assessments – and turn it into extremely crude classification. And it is classification that we find useless for our own purposes. Any student who applies for further study will be asked for a transcript of all their marks, in addition to their degree result. Universities apparently don't think the degree classification conveys very much useful information, and so why should anyone else?

I'm coming to the conclusion that we should simply issue students with transcripts to record their study, and leave it at that. There are proposals to replace degree classifications with grade point averages, as in the US. That's a move in the right direction, but why have a summary measure at all? School achievement isn't summarised into a single number, and why should it be any different at university? If a student on a German and geography degree did brilliantly in German and miserably in geography what purpose is served by reducing it all to a single score? And so my plea: No more classifications. No more algorithms. No more borderlines. And, most heartfelt of all, no more exam boards.

• Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy at University College London

Not just unprepared for university, but for life

You don't need to be a 'tiger mother' to think most children are not being stretched enough

Christina Patterson in The Independent

Wednesday, 4 April 2012

They're usually blonde. They're usually these girls who whoop and leap for the cameras, blonde, and pretty, and thin. There must be some short, fat, spotty, and even male 18-year-olds who do so much better than they expected. Who do, in fact, so well that they behave as if they've won The X Factor, or the lottery. But usually it's girls, and blonde, pretty girls, who give us the message that A-level results are better than they've ever been before.

And they are. They always are. There were, last year, like the year before, and the year before, record numbers of A grades. Average scores have gone up by almost 25 per cent over 15 years. They're brilliant. They're amazing. They're just not, unfortunately, much of an indication of how much the people who took them have learnt.

You can, according to the Cambridge Assessment exam board, get the kind of results that make you whoop and leap, and still not know how to spell, or structure a sentence. You can, apparently, get the kind of results that make your parents proud, and still not know how to think. And because so many students can't spell, or think, universities are having to teach them. Sixty per cent of them are putting on extra courses to teach undergraduates what they should have learnt at school.

Perhaps it's not surprising that the man who's in charge of education in this country is a little bit worried. "I am increasingly concerned that current A-levels," said Michael Gove, in a letter to the exam regulator, "fall short of commanding the level of confidence we would want to see." It is, he said, "more important" that students start their degrees with "the right knowledge and skills" than that "ministers are able to influence the curriculum". He was, he said, going to hand control of the syllabus to exam boards and academic panels made up of senior dons. He hoped, he said, that the new A-levels would start in two years. He hoped, and so do I.

It's lovely, of course, to have so many pretty girls so happy to have done so well. But it isn't lovely that so many of them are struggling at university, and it isn't lovely that so many people with good GCSEs are having to be taught basic numeracy by employers shocked to find they can't add up. And it isn't lovely that this country is slipping down the world education league tables. In the last one, Britain had dropped to 25th place for reading, 28th for maths, and 16th for science. For the sixth biggest economy in the world, that doesn't sound all that good.

There are all kinds of reasons why standards have dropped. It would, for example, be quite strange for academic rigour in our schools to have increased at a time when academic rigour in our culture has shrunk. It would also be quite strange if schools that are judged on their performance in exam league tables didn't encourage their students into media studies or drama, rather than Mandarin or maths.

There were good reasons for widening the scope of subjects taught in schools, and giving more options to students who didn't look as though they were going to shine academically. It's surely better to leave school with a piece of paper saying you can do something than to leave with nothing at all. And there were good reasons for introducing league tables. If you want people to raise standards, you need them to show they have. But it does mean they're likely to focus less on learning, and more on results.

Whatever the intentions, the result has been that too many of our children aren't prepared for university, or life. The ones who are going to university aren't doing the subjects, like science or engineering, we need them to do if we don't want all our industries to go to China. The ones who aren't going to university aren't getting enough skills to do much at all. And if the ones who do go to university don't develop our industries, the ones who don't will be fighting for even fewer jobs.

"Children," said a man at a conference I went to last week, "aren't the problem. They are," he said, "very interested in anything that adults do. Teenagers," he said, "are desperate for direction. When they ask 'why should I do this?' you have two choices. Either walk out of the room, or tell them."
The conference was on "the manufacturing economy", and the man was a head of physics at a big South London comprehensive, called David Perks. They had, he said, managed to get 100 pupils to do A-level physics. There were, he said, equal numbers of girls and boys. Many of them, he said, were planning to go on and study engineering.

Educating children in a culture that doesn't seem to value academic achievement isn't easy. Nor is motivating them when, if they don't work, they won't starve. But you don't need to be a "tiger mother" to think that most of our children aren't being stretched enough. And, in an increasingly cut-throat global marketplace, it's our children who will suffer, not us.

Do we really believe the toffs who are running this country are brighter than the rest of us? Or that more money means a higher IQ? Do we really want state-educated pupils, who are 93 per cent of the population, to be let into the best educational institutions only through social engineering?
If we don't, we need to start believing that all our children can do better. And you don't help children do better by feeding them lies.

Indian students rank 2nd last in global test

15 Jan, 2012, 02.37AM IST, Hemali Chhapia,TNN

MUMBAI: Across the world, India is seen as an education powerhouse - based largely on the reputation of a few islands of academic excellence such as the IITs. But scratch the glossy surface of our education system and the picture turns seriously bleak.

Fifteen-year-old Indians who were put, for the first time, on a global stage stood second to last, only beating Kyrgyzstan when tested on their reading, math and science abilities.

India ranked second last among the 73 countries that participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), conducted annually to evaluate education systems worldwide by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Secretariat. The survey is based on two-hour tests that half a million students are put through.

China's Shanghai province, which participated in PISA for the first time, scored the highest in reading. It also topped the charts in mathematics and science.

"More than one-quarter of Shanghai's 15 year olds demonstrated advanced mathematical thinking skills to solve complex problems, compared to an OECD average of just 3%," noted the analysis.

The states of Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, showpieces for education and development, were selected by the central government to participate in PISA, but their test results were damning.

15-yr-old Indians 200 points behind global topper

Tamil Nadu and Himachal, showpieces of India's education and development, fared miserably at the Programme for International Student Asssment, conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Secretariat.

An analysis of the performance of the two states showed:

In math, considered India's strong point, they finished second and third to last, beating only Kyrgyzstan

When the Indian students were asked to read English text, again Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh were better than only Kyrgyzstan. Girls were better than boys

The science results were the worst. Himachal Pradesh stood last, this time behind Kyrgyzstan. Tamil Nadu was slightly better and finished third from the bottom

The average 15-year-old Indian is over 200 points behind the global topper. Comparing scores, experts estimate that an Indian eighth grader is at the level of a South Korean third grader in math abilities or a second-year student from Shanghai when it comes to reading skills.

The report said: "In Himachal, 11% of students are estimated to have a proficiency in reading literacy that is at or above the baseline level needed to participate effectively and productively in life. It follows that 89% of students in Himachal are estimated to be below that baseline level."

Clearly, India will have to ramp up its efforts and get serious about what goes on in its schools. "Better educational outcomes are a strong predictor for future economic growth," OECD secretary-general Angel Gurria told The Times of India.

"While national income and educational achievement are still related, PISA shows that two countries with similar levels of prosperity can produce very different results. This shows that an image of a world divided neatly into rich and well-educated countries and poor and badly-educated countries is now out of date."

In case of scientific literacy levels in TN, students were estimated to have a mean score that was below the means of all OECD countries, but better than Himachal. Experts are unsure if selecting these two states was a good idea.

Shaheen Mistry, CEO of Teach For India programme, said, "I am glad that now there is data that lets people know how far we still have to go."