I haven’t read (m)any of Mal­colm Glad­well’s arti­cles in the past 6 months as they’re all, well, a bit homo­ge­neous. Plus, if there are any fas­ci­nat­ing rev­e­la­tions that I really should hear about I’ll undoubt­edly dis­cover them (in a much-condensed form) in many other places rehash­ing his content.

This inter­view with Mal­colm Gladwell—where he dis­cusses edu­ca­tion, hir­ing and jour­nal­ism—is typ­i­cally Glad­wellian and worth your time, however.

On edu­ca­tion:

If I were [the United States Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion], I’d think of myself as a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist, fund as many wacky and inven­tive ideas as I could, and closely mon­i­tor them to see how they worked.

I’ve always been fas­ci­nated by the idea that in inner-city schools, the thing they do best is sports. […] It’s not cor­rect to say these schools are dys­func­tional; they’re highly func­tional in cer­tain areas. So I’ve always won­dered about using the prin­ci­ples of sports in the class­room. Go same sex; do every­thing in teams; have teams com­pete with each other.

On teach­ing and hir­ing practises:

Cer­tain kinds of pre­dic­tions are impos­si­ble. If you want to find out if some­one can do the job, you have to let them do the job. We should be exper­i­ment­ing with peo­ple too. I feel very strongly about the notion that if you want to find the best teach­ers, you let every­body into the pro­fes­sion, mon­i­tor them for two years, and then pick the 10% that are the best. That’s how you do it, and that’s com­pletely the oppo­site of the way we do it now. Right now we’re act­ing out a fic­tion, which is that we can tell whether someone’s good at this enor­mously com­plex thing called teach­ing before they’ve ever taught.

And the sin­gle piece of advice he would offer to young journalists?

The issue is not writ­ing. It’s what you write about. […] Aspir­ing jour­nal­ists should stop going to jour­nal­ism pro­grams and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was study­ing today, I would go get a master’s in sta­tis­tics, and maybe do a bunch of account­ing courses and then write from that per­spec­tive. I think that’s the way to sur­vive. The role of the gen­er­al­ist is dimin­ish­ing. Jour­nal­ism has to get smarter.

I par­tic­u­larly like that penul­ti­mate sen­tence: The role of the gen­er­al­ist is dimin­ish­ing. It puts me in mind of this pre­vi­ous post on the end of the poly­math and the down­side of sci­en­tific progress (that I’ve just updated to include a link to the quoted post).

via @sgourley