Todd Rose

Ryan Long, thanks for coming on Dad Saves America.

Do you guys have an issue with the fact that it's DSA?

I'm trying to crowd out.

I'm doing my part to try to reframe DSA.

Okay,

yeah.

Yeah, so how did that happen? Because it's like, it's a weird, it's just like a, these guys are funny, it's a bunch of bros.

No, they knew what was going on.

So what is Yes Every Kid working on now, and how do you see these poll results playing out across the country?

Yeah, I think you could conceptualize this in what Professor Todd Rose out of Harvard would call a collective illusion, where, again, there was no breakdown by partisan affiliation or income distribution or any of the crosstabs on these answers.

Americans of every stripe... basically have the same answers and the same values.

But it feels like, especially in education, we're in a like tribal death match of partisan warfare.

And so I'm just going like full circle your work on voice and choice, access and opportunity, mission specific goals and letting the schools help tell their story.

Because the book I love to bring up is Dr. Todd Rose and the end of average.

And the byline is in a world that values sameness.

And so you've got to have some common measures right across the portfolio, across the state.

That's okay, and that's normal, and we should be encouraging that.

Two of my favorite books on that topic, one, Range by David Epstein, and two, Dark Horse by Todd Rose.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with either of those, but-

No. I'll have to put them both on my list

Yeah

...

Todd Rose is a graduate school of education at Harvard, academic who's started his own think tank-

Amazing

In this video, we explain why publicly conforming to what we privately disagree with makes us complicit in tyranny, and why each of us has far more power to influence society than we have been led to believe.

In the 1950s, the social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted an experiment which demonstrated the degree to which individuals will reject what they think is true in order to conform to the majority.

In the experiment, Ash showed a test subject two cards.

On the first card was a single line, and on the second card were three lines, A, B, and C, with only line C being the same length as the line on the first card.

Ash's experiment confirms what philosophers have been reiterating for thousands of years.

For most human beings, conforming to what others say and do, no matter how objectively false or absurd, takes precedence over adapting to reality and discovering the truth.

In reflecting on Ash's experiment, the psychologist Todd Rose explains, We care about being in the numerical majority even when we don't necessarily care about the group, and even when the group opinion is merely an illusion.

Acting on instinct, in social situations our brains don't actually bother to make the distinction between appearance and reality.

Uh, I, I, I mentioned, uh, I think Range.

There's another good book I like called Dark Horse by Todd Rose, and dark horses were people in his mind who, who were unexpected victors, who had been overlooked because they didn't fit like the standard notion of a champion in some way, shape, or form.

And what he found at those... about those dark horses was that all of them valued fulfillment the most.

Passion, a sense of purpose, being deeply engaged in what they did.

Yeah.

So have you read about the end of average? The author was a guy who wrote about it for the Toronto Star, Todd Rose.

And the end of average basically says that in engineering at some point, we just basically said average is not something that we should pay attention to anymore.

Right.