Success

A kinder, gentler philosophy of success - video from TED

The economics of suicide

The economics of suicide:

"after people attempt suicide and fail, their incomes increase by an average of 20.6 percent compared to peers who seriously contemplate suicide but never make an attempt. ...Once you attempt suicide you suddenly have access to lots of resources—medical care, psychiatric attention, familial love and concern—that were previously expensive or unavailable. ...psychological and familial resources become 'cheaper' after a suicide attempt: It is difficult to find free medical care when you are sad, but once you try to kill yourself, it's forced on you."

No Solution

Let's talk about Ben:

"He just found it incredibly difficult to grasp reading at school, his reading age was well below average. When he got homework I had to help him read it and when he sat his Sats tests at 11 (in English, maths and science) he had to have someone read the questions to him."
"I initially thought he was dyslexic and took him to be tested but, because he could not read very well, the test did not work and they could not determine whether he was or was not."

This is an example of a failure in education. The root cause of this failure is a system that developed over time based on the limited knowledge of leaders decades or centuries ago. When we hear about Ben's problem this way it seems intractable, the kind of problems that might take years to resolve or work around. Indeed, one might conclude that there is no solution and that he is simply not able to keep up.

How coloured lenses helped Ben read

It turns out that he had a condition called scotopic sensitivity which is thought to affect half of all children with learning difficulties. This is clearly a huge problem with a cheap and simple solution, but the educational system could not have been designed to deal with an illness that wasn't known centuries or decades before. This might be forgiveable, except that it can't adapt because it wasn't designed to react appropriately to a student having trouble.

There is a well defined formal process for failure and segmentation based on past performance, but no similarly entrenched process for prioritizing and seeking out the cause of the difficulties. If you've failed to do what it takes to teach a child to read, having someone read his tests to him is in no way fair to him.