1. Why is rice a staple food? Gladwell describes at length how a rice paddy requires daily diligent work, unlike, say, a wheat field where there are stages in the cultivation process where all you have to do is leave it alone and let it grow. So how did something that requires such painstaking cultivation end up being a staple food for so many people? Isn't there something else in that part of the world that grows more easily?
2. How much cultural bias is there in IQ tests? Gladwell mentions in passing a very advanced IQ test analogy question: “Teeth is to Hen as Nest is to ?” The general consensus of the internet is that the answer is mare. Hen's teeth and a mare's nest are both idioms whose literal meanings refer to non-existent things.
However, I would never have gotten that question right because I have never in my life, not once, heard the expression "mare's nest."
This ignorance is not entirely a function of my intelligence or lack thereof. It also means that the expression is absent from the active vocabulary of the people around me and the word choices of the writers whose work I consume. Now it's true I haven't read everything (although there have only been two books that I started and was unable to finish and a third that I neglected to start because they were too hard, and all of those I could have read if I'd had to for a school assignment or something), but no one can be expected to have read everything. And having read everything isn't entirely a sign of intelligence - it's also a sign of free time and hobby preferences. In any case, I don't know if I would have gotten the question right even if I had heard of a mare's nest, but my not having heard of it was at least partly a failure of my cultural environment. And I spent my entire life in an English-speaking community where the vast majority of the grownups were university educated. This makes me wonder how well these tests can assess people from other source cultures.
3. Why do the KIPP programs seem to rule out the possibility of going to college from public high school? Gladwell describes a USian middle-school program called KIPP, which gives motivated but economically disadvantaged public school students significantly more instructional hours so they can get scholarships to good private high schools and from there go on to college. But why are the school boards working on the assumption that the way into college is a private high school? Why aren't they also doing anything to help motivated by economically disadvantaged high school students go to college? Have these school boards written off all their high school students?
4. What are the Entitlement expectations of working-class authority figures? The book discusses Entitlement from the point of view of parents' expectations of their children and parents' and children's expectations of their authority figures. But what about the authority figures' expectations of people. In my own life, my friendly neighbourhood authority figures seem to expect that I'll have Entitlement, and I think it makes their jobs easier if people express their needs rather than being quietly complacent. Do working-class authority figures feel the same way, or do they expect their charges to be quietly complacent? If they do expect complacency, are they under them impression that they know their charges' needs as well as or better than their charges, or do they just not care?
2 comments:
Re Rice, you might like to read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, or at least the section on the origin and spread of the four original domesticated grains: wheat, rice, barley and rye. I would give you the answer myself, but it's long and complicated and I'll end up botching it.
Re mare's nest, I have never heard that expression either. Intelligence tests are ridiculously biased, one of many reasons they are useless, IMO.
Re US public and private schools, I'd be interested in knowing more about that program. The public schools in the US, especially the ones that serve low-income neighbourhoods, are generally so awful that the chances of a student learning enough in one of them to go to college (which means university in the US) is incredibly slim. I'm guessing they are thinking it's a whole lot easier to find bright kids, remove them from the awful schools, and place them in better schools, than it is to fix the schools.
I think "Cuckoo" is an appropriate answer for “Teeth is to Hen as Nest is to ?” Cuckoo's nests and hen's teeth are both rara avis (to continue the avian theme).
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