CHAPTER 13 How the Best Universities Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools We have met the enemy, and he is us. —VWalt Kelly It should come as no surprise to readers of this book that I never re- ally liked school. I endured it. I didn’t have the option to quit—an unthinkable idea in my household. In the end I even wound up with a Yale degree (all right, an honorary one—but it is printed in Latin). Truth be told, I did get a real Ph.D., but that was more a testament to my figuring out how to work the system while avoiding the draft, than it was a testament to my scholarship or academic prowess. I became a professor, an unlikely job for someone who hated school, and I became an unlikely colleague who worked with people who, by and large, loved school. I spent 35 years of my life as a profes- sor at the best universities in America, and still I hated school. Somewhere in the middle of my academic career, about the time that my kids went to school, I began to think about how learning worked. (I was trying to develop computers that learned.) Since my kids also hated school, I began to wonder about why school was the way it was and why it really had so little to do with learning as I un- derstood it. Eventually I realized that I was part of the problem. I readily had found employment in a world that let me think about interesting problems all day and work with really smart graduate students. To pay for this life of the mind, I was required to teach every now and then. I never really liked teaching for exactly the same reason I didn’t like being on the other side of the classroom. I didn’t get the point. I talked. Students listened or at least faked listening, and then there were grades to be given out based on how well they actually had been listening. I didn’t like this game any more as a teacher than I had 183 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023929