Sometimes we don’t even notice the choices we make, but that doesn’t change the size of their effect.

The following is a teaching fable that has been around in various forms for years.

An old man told his grandson about the battle that goes on inside people.

He said, “The battle is between the two animals that live inside us all.

One is Evil—it is made of anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good—it is joy, peace, love, authenticity, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, and compassion.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked, “Which wins the battle?”

The old man replied, “The one you feed.”

It is with your choices, not just the conscious ones, but all of them, that you feed the beasts.

You can never rid yourself of all the traits that comprise either the evil or the good beast, but you can control their size, frequency and intensity.

It’s your choice.

Leadership Turn is ending; its last day is December 29. I’ve enjoyed writing it and our interaction since August 16, 2007 and I hope we can continue at my other blog.

If you enjoy my views and writing, please join me at MAPping Company Success or subscribe via RSS or EMAIL.

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This story is one of the saddest I’ve read lately.

That is an age when a child should spend time being a child, exploring their world, running around, creating imaginary worlds, friends, situations and enjoying unconditional love.

Instead, they are learning that to please mommy and daddy they have to get a certain teat result and get into a certain school.

…3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and talented public kindergarten classes.

Granted, I didn’t read all 166 comments, but 98% of the ones I did read were negative on tutoring. Many of them reacted as I did—let kids be kids.

But many parents see their kids as a reflection or symbol of their own success; that means pressure to excel—even at that age.

Of course, those who do get in will be labeled “high potential” and “leadership material,” which is ridiculous at that age. And so we destroy potential in the rest.

Life is so short and childhood is even shorter. There is plenty of time to compete, set goals, worry whether you are achieving enough vs. what others are doing. Time to find out that love can be conditional on accomplishing your parent’s expectations.

But is it really necessary to start at age three?

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This is especially true when it comes to learning.

Think about it, is there any question what is meant by “A closed mind is like a closed book; just a block of wood” or any doubt about the truth of it?

Anyone who has ever expended effort in imparting their knowledge to another knows the truth of this saying, “Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.”

Not just teachers, but every trainer worth their salt will agree with this sentiment, “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” It is why they use role-playing, why apprentice programs work and why there is no substitute for OJT (on-the-job training).

In today’s image conscious culture too often people avoid asking questions for fear of being laughed at or worse. I know there have been times I didn’t ask, usually on subjects that fell in the “any idiot knows that” only to find out later that the answer was neither well-known nor obvious. The Chinese call it ‘losing face’, but their ancestors knew the truth. “He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.”

Last, but definitely not least, is the proverb that has been the basis of my life. It is what I’ve held onto every time my world has turned upside down—more times than I like to remember. “Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.”

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The approach is known as “reading workshop” and “…students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading…”

I sent the article to my niece, who alternates between teaching and being a school librarian. She started as a teacher, was driven out of it by internal politics and unreasonable parents, got a Master of Library Science and spent a few years as school librarian and is now back to teaching.

She wrote back, “This is how I teach!  Cool!  Thanks for sending it.  It is controversial and some English teachers think I’m nuts but I love it!”

My niece, along with many others, is the type of teachers we need more of—they love reading and learning and work to pass that love on.

But there is a lot of opposition to moving away from the way reading has been taught.

“In the method familiar to generations of students, an entire class reads a novel — often a classic — together to draw out the themes and study literary craft. That tradition, proponents say, builds a shared literary culture among students, exposes all readers to works of quality and complexity and is the best way to prepare students for standardized tests.”

I bolded the last five words because they are the crux of the problem.

Is the purpose of school to prepare for standardized tests or to teach kids to think?

Are communities stronger and the workforce more cohesive because the people all read To Kill A Mockingbird in eighth grade? And what of those educated elsewhere?

What serves the future better, a love of learning and reading or the skill to ace a standardized test?

At which do you want your kids to excel?

Which skill set do you want to hire?

What do you think?

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As with any large group, negative attitudes and actions often get more attention and press than positive ones and I’m no exception.

Leadership’s Future is often about Millennials—their sense of entitlement, expectations, impatience, and the parental intervention that fuels it.

My Millennial friends kid me that I’m ignoring a large number of their demographic, although even they don’t claim that it’s anywhere near a majority.

But they do have a point, so I’m offering up a new term to designate those who are chronologically, but not psychologically, Millennials.

aMillennial, because placing an ‘a’ in front of a word nullifies its meaning (see a-6).

I ran into a great example of the positive at AARP’s u@50 contest.

It wasn’t the first place winner that blew me away, but the second.

Her words are an inspiration for us all and a good lesson to remember that people change as life changes.

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See how what one says and others hear may have nothing to do with each other.

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First the practical…

Innovation comes from the producer – not from the customer. –W. Edwards Deming (You can’t want what you’ve never had.)

Innovation is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public. –Ludwig von Mises (Got to love those early adopters!)

Now the inspirational…

There are no dreams too large, no innovation unimaginable and no frontiers beyond our reach. –John S. Herrington (But you have to believe…)

If you open up the mind, the opportunity to address both profits and social conditions are limitless. It’s a process of innovation. –Jerry Greenfield (But addressing the former with no consideration of the latter is a recipe for disaster.)

Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow. –William Pollard (Something that GM and Chrysler still haven’t learned.)

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I finally decided it was luck—definitely outside my control.

I wrote recently abut how the luck of right time/right place luck played a role in the early success of a startup and also touched on Malcolm Gladwell’s research as described in Outliers: The Story of Success.

A few days ago I read a brief article about University of Chicago researchers Susan Goldin-Meadow and Meredith Rowe, who have been studying the effects of gesturing on toddler language development.

“Higher-income parents did gesture more and, more importantly, their children on average produced 25 meanings in gesture during that 90-minute session, compared with an average of 13 among poorer children, they reported in the journal Science. … Gesturing also seems to be an important precursor to forming sentences, as children start combining one word plus a gesture for a second word. … In fact, kindergarten vocabulary is a predicter of how well youngsters ultimately fare in school.”

Such a little thing, but with such potentially enormous impact.

I don’t remember my mother gesturing, but I do know that she talked to my sister and I using the exact same vocabulary that she used with her peers and that became our vocabulary. Fortunately for us, she had a large vocabulary between having gone to college and being an avid reader, but I wonder where I would be if that had been different.

Plus, researchers are finding that children start learning long before it was originally thought.

The problem is that from zero to six kids dependent on what they get from home; from 6 or so to18 or so they look to their peers, which is the blind leading the blind, and then it’s on to adulthood where changes are far more difficult and, if the research is at all accurate, limited.

No one can control when they’re are born, who their parents are or the economic strata into which they’re born, but you can reach out and help change the people’s luck.

And for all those who look at me and say that they’re busy or that they have donated all they can or it’s just not their problem and there are schools/social services/etc., to deal with it I have a news flash for you.

Unless you plan to die tomorrow, it’s your problem.

It’s your problem because of a little thing called demographics.

This recession will eventually turn around, even if it takes longer than our instant gratification culture likes, and when it does the US is going to need every warm body if it plans to retain/regain its success and influence.

No one is expecting you to solve the problems, but you can reach out and touch just one life. If everyone over 21 did that we would be well on the way to change.

Your choice is whether to be part of the good luck or the bad.

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College is expensive. Students have to pay for tuition, fees, books, school supplies, and all sorts of other expenses.  Many years ago, college was still expensive, but at least the average college student could afford to go to college.  But tuition, fees and textbooks have increased in price at far more than the inflation rate.  Students and parents are understandably upset over this.  At many institutions, the tuition goes up every year, sometimes at several times the inflation rate.  Many people think that the universities are just raising tuition to be greedy.  It isn’t that simple, though.

The average student’s tuition does not adequately cover the cost of education. College is not like high school.  College professors need to maintain expertise and remain current in their fields of study.  That means more than just reading about the subject on the internet.  Also, college professors need to be paid.  Libraries need to be current, and professional journals are not cheap.  Books are not cheap for libraries, either.

State colleges and universities are supposed to be supported by tax dollars.  However, state legislatures have cut funding to higher education, reasoning that colleges and universities can make up the difference through tuition.  That means that tuition goes up to cover inflation, and then goes up even more to cover the reduction in state funding.

Private institutions rely not only on tuition, but on investments from their endowments to generate operating funds.  In today’s economic climate, those endowments are not bringing in much money, so tuition has to rise to compensate.

Then, textbook companies keep coming up with new editions of textbooks.  They are pretty proactive killing the used book market, too.  I have on occasion tried to adopt an old edition of textbooks when the new editions come out, only to find that the bookstore could not get copies of the old edition.  We wound up using the new editions.  So much for trying to save my students some money.

As you can imagine, costs quickly spiral upwards too high for most students to be able to afford college.  There are some grants and scholarships, but most are for those who have very low incomes.

The wealthy can afford college.

The poor have it paid for them.

The middle class, the bulk of our students, don’t qualify for grants and can’t afford college themselves.

This is where student loans come in. All across the nation, college financial aid offices are advising students to secure student loads.  But most of these students are young and have not had any experience with loans.  They quickly get in over their heads.  Nearly 2/3 of students wind up graduating college in debt.  Most owe over $20,000 in loans.  Many owe over $50,000 and some students owe nearly $100,000 (if they go from undergraduate to graduate, law or medical school).

This is a serious problem.  Students are graduating deep in debt.

Worse, shortly after graduation they have to start paying back their loans, but this is when they are least able to do so. After all, your first job after college normally is not a high paying job (even for highly paid fields).  So students graduate with debt, just as they are trying to buy cars, buy houses, start families and do many other things that incur additional debt and expenses.

To add insult to injury, students often have to take more classes than they used to.  High schools are turning out students who are not at all prepared for college level work.  Close to half of our students require some remedial work in mathematics, reading, and writing.  Those remedial classes have tuition, but they do not count towards degrees.  This adds a year or more to an undergraduate program and it incurs more tuition, fees and textbook expenses.  That is a problem, however, that needs to be fixed at the high school level.

So, what are we to do at the college level?  The solution is not to simply force colleges to lower tuition.  After all, tuition was raised not out of greed, but as a way to fund the college after state funds and endowments dried up.  If states were to fund higher education at the rate that they used to, then tuition would drop. As for textbooks, I’ll leave that to a later post.

What is clear to me is that something needs to be done.  We are doing our students a disservice if they are graduating deep in debt.  Perhaps our financial aid offices should be working to help students find part-time jobs to fund their education.  Perhaps there needs to be more direct government assistance to students in the form of grants.

It is hard to say just what needs to be done.  But I see the cost of college getting higher and higher.   In fact, it is high enough now that I think that I’d have had trouble affording it and I seriously doubt that I’d have been able to afford graduate school.

There is not an easy fix to this problem.  Any fix would require a cohesive and comprehensive plan.

And I simply don’t see that happening.

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When he decided to stop that was it.

Obviously, he wasn’t driven by money; he didn’t want celebrity. He said what he wanted to say—no more and no less. But what he said will resonate for many years to come.

About education: “Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?” (Today’s students have this one down pat.)

About writing: “The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!” (But with a little more effort it can be just the opposite.)

About business: “To make a business decision, you don’t need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.” (An awful lot of CEOs seem to have taken this attitude to heart.)

About living: “There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do.” (True, but I’m trying—are you?)

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