Speaker 1: Pushkin. In the middle of our preparations for season seven
Speaker 1: of This Your Favorite podcast, the Revisionist History team got
Speaker 1: on a train to Philadelphia, four of us carrying props,
Speaker 1: recording equipment, and extra microphones. Our destination the Gothic, ivy
Speaker 1: covered Cathedral of Higher Learning that is the University Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: And why did we go? Because we had cooked up
Speaker 1: a little experiment and we were curious to see how
Speaker 1: it would fly. Thank you. We commandeered one of the
Speaker 1: main lecture halls at the Wharton School in I did
Speaker 1: seventy five or so students, all seniors, smart, focused, discipline,
Speaker 1: future masters of the universe, and asked them to answer
Speaker 1: ten simple questions, such as, how many years of your
Speaker 1: K twelve education were a public school and how many
Speaker 1: were a private school at the time of your graduation
Speaker 1: from high school? How many continents had you visited at
Speaker 1: any point during your middle school and high school years?
Speaker 1: Did your parents provide you with a private tutor? I
Speaker 1: looked out at rows and rows of eager students, hunched
Speaker 1: over their deaths in anticipation, took a deep breath and began, So,
Speaker 1: my name is Malcolm Gladwell. I am the host of
Speaker 1: the podcast Revisionist History. The theme of this season of
Speaker 1: Revision's History is experiments, and one of the experiments of
Speaker 1: this season involves all of you. So, you guys are
Speaker 1: guinea pigs. Yes, guinea pigs, because in the manner of
Speaker 1: all guinea pigs, they were entirely in the dark about
Speaker 1: what we had in store for them. And as you
Speaker 1: probably guessed from some of the questions that you were given,
Speaker 1: what I'm trying to do is I'm conducting at an
Speaker 1: experimental investigation into the nature of the privilege of the
Speaker 1: people in this room. The students quickly finished the questionnaires
Speaker 1: and put their names and birthdates at the top. My producers,
Speaker 1: Eloise and Harrison, are sitting at a big table at
Speaker 1: the front of the room, in full view of all
Speaker 1: the guinea pigs. They go through the completed questionnaires one
Speaker 1: by one and use the answers to generate a number,
Speaker 1: a score, which they write on a giant white sticker
Speaker 1: with a big bat sharp beeat And now the real
Speaker 1: experiment begins. I'm going to sign every one of you
Speaker 1: a number. If they can figure out what their number means,
Speaker 1: they will understand something essential about how broken the system was.
Speaker 1: That propelled them to the IVY League, and how to
Speaker 1: fix it. Just peel off the back and I would
Speaker 1: like you to fix a sticker to your chest so
Speaker 1: we can all see each other's numbers. You're going to
Speaker 1: look around the room, see everyone else's numbers, see your number,
Speaker 1: and hopefully that will aid you in your investigation of
Speaker 1: what exactly the nature of this experiment is. I'll just
Speaker 1: read the students sat there with their numbers stuck to
Speaker 1: their chests, looking around in befuttlement, trying to make sense
Speaker 1: of everyone's score. I tried to help them figure it out,
Speaker 1: gave them hints nudges. First, think about this. I gave
Speaker 1: you a series of questions. Some of those questions involved
Speaker 1: a yes or no answer. So you saw two people,
Speaker 1: Alloway's and Harrison, who quite quickly, in the space of
Speaker 1: about five minutes ten minutes, went through seventy five or
Speaker 1: so responses, and we're able to very quickly and easily
Speaker 1: assign you a number. So think about this. Logically, it
Speaker 1: wasn't a complex algorithm, right, there was no computer used.
Speaker 1: It was how long would you say you were spending?
Speaker 1: And Harrison, how long would you spending on each questionnaire?
Speaker 1: Six seconds, five six seconds. Okay, that's a clue. Guys,
Speaker 1: let's go come on. Hi. My name is Abe. They
Speaker 1: might have just looked at the zip code, because that's
Speaker 1: a pretty good predictor of privilege just in and of itself.
Speaker 1: Abe has derived his hypothesis from question six, what is
Speaker 1: the zip code your family lived in during your high
Speaker 1: school years? Perhaps he speculates the number on his chest
Speaker 1: with some kind of complex, mysterious derivative of his zip code.
Speaker 1: I didn't see if you had a computer, but if
Speaker 1: you did, there was no else was there a computer? Now?
Speaker 1: I did ask you as a calculator quantity. Abraham, with
Speaker 1: all due respect, are you suggesting that Eloise and Harrison
Speaker 1: had memorized every zip code? It's plausible they're very smart.
Speaker 1: Not that smart. I'm Zach. I think it really has
Speaker 1: to do strictly with the private verse public education system
Speaker 1: in the US. Nope, that's not what we were looking for. Hi,
Speaker 1: my name is Joseph. A question that I thought was
Speaker 1: already interesting on there was about if you have any
Speaker 1: siblings and if so, how many. Nope, not that either. Hi.
Speaker 1: I'm Kaylee. One that I don't think I've ever been
Speaker 1: asked in relation to this, was if I drank when
Speaker 1: I was in high school? What age that I get
Speaker 1: drunk at? Kayley's referring to question number nine in high school?
Speaker 1: Did you drink alcohol? And if yes, when did you
Speaker 1: first get drunk? Could you come up with any reason
Speaker 1: why I would have asked that question? Or do you
Speaker 1: think that's just one of the ones that I'm is
Speaker 1: blowing smoke on? I have my own hypothesis, but I can't. Oh,
Speaker 1: come on, what if I'm wrong? This is all about
Speaker 1: being wrong? Oh, this is all about being wrong. Once
Speaker 1: upon a time, in two thousand and eight, I wrote
Speaker 1: a book called Outliers, the first chapter of which was
Speaker 1: devoted to a phenomenon discovered in the nineteen eighties by
Speaker 1: the Canadian psychologist Roger Barnesley. Here's some of what I wrote.
Speaker 1: The explanation for who gets to the top of the
Speaker 1: hockey world is a lot more interesting and complicated than
Speaker 1: it looks. Good, Lord, I do not sound like I'm
Speaker 1: enjoying reading my own book listening to this part of
Speaker 1: the Outliers audiobook. Now, I'll admit I have some regrets
Speaker 1: about that chapter. We'll get to that, I promise Anyway,
Speaker 1: it occurred to me, as I planned our trip to
Speaker 1: Philly that I should talk to Barnsley again and go
Speaker 1: over his discovery one more time, make sure I understood everything.
Speaker 1: So I called him up and asked him to retell
Speaker 1: the story of how in the early nineteen eighties he
Speaker 1: and his wife Paula stumbled upon what has come to
Speaker 1: be known as the relative age effect. We were living
Speaker 1: in Lethbridge, Alberta, and we went to a Junior A
Speaker 1: hockey team. It was the Lethbridge Broncos. At that time.
Speaker 1: Barnesley's wife Paula started reading the game program, which had
Speaker 1: the rosters of both teams listed in it. Paula said,
Speaker 1: over to me, Roger, when do you think all these
Speaker 1: hockey players were born? And I remember thinking to myself, well,
Speaker 1: you know, that's kind of a silly question. So I
Speaker 1: did a quick calculation. I said, you know, Paula, they're
Speaker 1: average age eighteen. It's about nineteen eighty two, so they're
Speaker 1: probably all born in around nineteen sixty four. And she said, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about the year. I'm talking about the month.
Speaker 1: And I said, what are you talking about? And she
Speaker 1: opened up the page of the program where they had
Speaker 1: listed the roster of the team, and it just jumped
Speaker 1: out at us, just jumped out that the majority of
Speaker 1: these players were January, February, in March, and then you
Speaker 1: seem to get the odd April in May, and very
Speaker 1: few in the fall. And I said, my goodness, that's
Speaker 1: just remarkable. He went home and expanded his search further.
Speaker 1: Everywhere he looked in competitive hockey, same thing. For some reason,
Speaker 1: most players were born in the first part of the year,
Speaker 1: and that's when that famous forty thirty twenty ten by
Speaker 1: the Coursers of the Year showed up. The famous twenty
Speaker 1: ten phenomenon that he's talking about is what in Outliers
Speaker 1: I referred to as the iron law of Canadian hockey. Quote,
Speaker 1: in any elite group of hockey players, the very best
Speaker 1: to the best, forty percent of the players will have
Speaker 1: been born between January and March, thirty percent between April
Speaker 1: and June, twenty percent between July and September, and ten
Speaker 1: percent between October and December. Due Now, why is this.
Speaker 1: It's because Canada is obsessed with hockey and coaches start
Speaker 1: picking players for all star traveling squads at the age
Speaker 1: of nine or ten. Since the eligibility cut off for
Speaker 1: Canadian hockey is January first, that means the coaches are
Speaker 1: choosing among nine year olds who are as much as
Speaker 1: twelve months apart, and twelve months age difference at the
Speaker 1: age of nine is a lot. The January kids are
Speaker 1: bigger and stronger and more co ordinated than the December kids,
Speaker 1: which means that the January kid is more likely to
Speaker 1: be chosen by the coaches for the traveling squad, which
Speaker 1: means in turn that they will practic two or three
Speaker 1: times as often, play more games, have better coaches, better
Speaker 1: competition than the kids left behind, and what began as
Speaker 1: a completely arbitrary advantage based on a quirk of birthdays
Speaker 1: turns over time into a real advantage. The same phenomenon
Speaker 1: holds true in other sports, soccer, swimming, you name it.
Speaker 1: You can find a relative age effect everywhere, and of
Speaker 1: course it also applies to the classroom. Teachers aren't any
Speaker 1: better than coaches at disentangling ability from maturity, so relatively
Speaker 1: older kids in elementary and middle school end up getting
Speaker 1: more encouragement, they tend to get better grades, and they're
Speaker 1: more likely to be chosen for things like gifted and
Speaker 1: Talented programs. Meanwhile, relatively younger kids are more likely to
Speaker 1: be diagnosed with learning disorders or flagged for problem behavior.
Speaker 1: I cannot tell you how many parents have come up
Speaker 1: to me over the years and said, because I read
Speaker 1: your book Outliers, I held my kid back from starting school,
Speaker 1: and it was the best decision I ever made. Of
Speaker 1: course it was. But parents holding their kids back doesn't
Speaker 1: solve the problem. It just creates a relative age effect
Speaker 1: arms race. There's a fancy private school near me where
Speaker 1: so many parents of younger children have held their kids
Speaker 1: back that now the parents of the formerly eldest children
Speaker 1: have responded by holding their kids back, whereupon the first
Speaker 1: out of parents are increasingly holding their kids back a
Speaker 1: second time, meaning that there is at least the theoretical
Speaker 1: possibility that in the most competitive corners of American private education,
Speaker 1: some kids may never graduate from high school. Maybe I
Speaker 1: should have seen on that coming when I wrote Outliers.
Speaker 1: I should have made it clear that I was not
Speaker 1: trying to teach neurotic, upper middle class helicopter parents how
Speaker 1: to game the system. I just wanted schools and sports
Speaker 1: leagues to stop behaving like idiots. So Barnsley's paper on
Speaker 1: relative age effect came out in nineteen eighty five. Outliers,
Speaker 1: which was I think the first time Barnsley's work got
Speaker 1: wide publicity, was published in two thousand and eight. The
Speaker 1: world has been alerted for decades to the fact that
Speaker 1: all kinds of supposedly meritocratic systems have been hijacked. Has
Speaker 1: anything changed? You're in front of your computer, are you?
Speaker 1: I put the question to Roger Barnsley, the og of
Speaker 1: relative age effector research. What have we learned? Can you
Speaker 1: google the roster of the Canadian junior hockey team national
Speaker 1: hockey team for twenty twenty one twenty two the current roster?
Speaker 1: Thank you right now, And I want you to go
Speaker 1: down the list of the forwards. Just use the forwards
Speaker 1: for the sake of simplicity. And I want you to
Speaker 1: just read the twenty one months of birth of the
Speaker 1: forwards on the current Canadian junior national hockey team. Their
Speaker 1: birthdays are just their names. I just want their birth months, okay,
Speaker 1: you see? And then Barnsley repeated what his wife Paula
Speaker 1: did decades ago at the Left Bridge Broncos hockey game.
Speaker 1: He listed the birth months by number of the members
Speaker 1: of the national junior hockey team. Listen for birth months
Speaker 1: of seven or higher two ten, one one one two
Speaker 1: eleven eight four, two ten, five, four five, two six
Speaker 1: one three one one five three two four seven one.
Speaker 1: It's the same thing, the same thing. They've learned nothing.
Speaker 1: It's the same phenomenon. You saw it, You saw it
Speaker 1: this forty years ago. The iron law of an Adian
Speaker 1: hockey is still an iron law. Is that funny? It's depressing,
Speaker 1: very depressing, very depressing. Here we are both Canadians, we
Speaker 1: are we are citizens of a country that cares more
Speaker 1: about hockey excellence than anything else. Must be clear, anything else,
Speaker 1: and we are leaving an astonishing amount of talent on
Speaker 1: the table exactly and refusing to learn. One of Canada's
Speaker 1: own problem with academics forty years ago said to the
Speaker 1: hockey establishment, what are you doing? That's right? And they didn't.
Speaker 1: They haven't done anything. Canadian hockey hasn't done anything, but
Speaker 1: maybe revisionist history can. The inspiration for the revisionist history
Speaker 1: Warton School relative age effect experiment came to me when
Speaker 1: I was talking to Adam Kelly, former footballer turned university professor.
Speaker 1: Kelly is a disciple of Roger Barnsley. He works with
Speaker 1: sports leagues to help them solve their age related problems,
Speaker 1: like England's basketball Federation, which spent a small fortune setting
Speaker 1: up regional centers to identify promising players. We looked at
Speaker 1: the proportioned players who were selected into those talents centers
Speaker 1: across at the nation, and that was at age. Groups
Speaker 1: selected from thirteen to fifteen, both at male and female,
Speaker 1: and those who are born in birth quarter one were
Speaker 1: ten times more likely to be selected ten times. Birth
Speaker 1: quarter one is the three months closest to the English
Speaker 1: basketball eligibility cutoff date. Yeah, which absolutely crazy, isn't it?
Speaker 1: Same old story. The talent spotters thought they were picking
Speaker 1: the most promising players, but in fact they were just
Speaker 1: picking the oldest kids, because the oldest kids were, of
Speaker 1: course the tallest and most coordinated anyway. Kelly's also thought
Speaker 1: a lot about education. Why is everyone taking now examine
Speaker 1: exactly the same time. Surely we should all be taking
Speaker 1: it at that same time within our lifespan. So if
Speaker 1: you're born in August, you're taking your exam almost twelve
Speaker 1: months earlier than someone who's born in September. So that
Speaker 1: person's at twelve months more learning than you, which is
Speaker 1: super obvious when you think about it. In New York State,
Speaker 1: all the big elementary school math and English standardized tests
Speaker 1: are in late March early April. We're talking third graders,
Speaker 1: eight and nine year olds. At that age, kids get
Speaker 1: smarter every week. Yet we're trying to assess kids by
Speaker 1: their test scores. And some of the kids were judging
Speaker 1: had been around as much as a year longer than
Speaker 1: other kids. Why don't we have the January kids. I'll
Speaker 1: take the test in January, and the February kids in February,
Speaker 1: and on and on down the line. I have no idea,
Speaker 1: honestly no idea. So I gathered the research arm of
Speaker 1: Revisionist History with our props, recording equipment, and extra microphones,
Speaker 1: and headed for the Gothic, ivy covered Cathedral of Higher
Speaker 1: Learning that is the University of Pennsylvania to see if
Speaker 1: a group of really, really smart young people can figure
Speaker 1: out the importance of the month when they happen to
Speaker 1: be born. Turn all your pieces of favor, put your
Speaker 1: name of the ta, and once we are you're finished,
Speaker 1: we will collect them, and then we will commence the
Speaker 1: exercise so we give out our elaborate questionnaire, but secretly,
Speaker 1: all we're interested in is people's birthdays. And then Eloise
Speaker 1: and Harrison go through each questionnaire and use the birthdays
Speaker 1: to do a simple calculation. Technically, the youngest you could
Speaker 1: be as a college senior at the time of our
Speaker 1: experiment was to be born in September two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: So if you were born then you got a zero
Speaker 1: zero birth privilege. If you were one month older, born
Speaker 1: in August two thousand and one, you got a one.
Speaker 1: July two thousand and one you got a two, and
Speaker 1: so on. The higher the number on the sticker, the
Speaker 1: older the student wearing it. We even had a contingency
Speaker 1: for students who might have skipped a grade somewhere along
Speaker 1: the way. You get a negative number if you were
Speaker 1: younger than the expected age of a college senior. First
Speaker 1: thing we found out there were no negative numbers in
Speaker 1: the room. Back when I was in college, I knew
Speaker 1: dozens of people who had skipped grades. Apparently that doesn't
Speaker 1: happen much anymore. But it was worse than that. There's
Speaker 1: no zeros. They win a one, two, twos, threes, fours, fives,
Speaker 1: anyone less than ten. Stand up. One student finally stood
Speaker 1: up in a back row, a college senior who was
Speaker 1: a few months shy of her twenty second birthday. Oh
Speaker 1: you're ten. Oh a ten in a back row or
Speaker 1: another ten emergence. We've got the twelve, We've got these twelves.
Speaker 1: We got some tens. Take a look. This is bananas.
Speaker 1: This is as bad as the Canadian national junior hockey team.
Speaker 1: In our sample of students from one of the world's
Speaker 1: most selective universities, there were no young seniors. None, not
Speaker 1: even close. There was no one at all who had
Speaker 1: been born in two thousand and one, which is the
Speaker 1: year you would expect most seniors to be born in.
Speaker 1: At one point, a student started talking about her experience
Speaker 1: in a gifted in talent to program. So I asked
Speaker 1: for a show of hands. Do you mind me asking
Speaker 1: how many of you guys were in gifted in talented programs? Wow?
Speaker 1: Basically all of you, which makes sense right. These were
Speaker 1: a group of relatively old students, and being re to
Speaker 1: be older makes it more likely to get into a
Speaker 1: gifted and talented program, And getting into a gifted and
Speaker 1: talented program makes it more likely to get into a
Speaker 1: school like Penn, which is why a group of seniors
Speaker 1: that day at Wharton were all really old. What begins
Speaker 1: as arbitrary advantage hardens into privilege, a simple fact about
Speaker 1: their own success that our students still hadn't figured out.
Speaker 1: I'm going to get another clue, guys, the particular dimension
Speaker 1: or privilege we're interested in measuring, I'm going to say,
Speaker 1: with a great deal of certainty, is in this room
Speaker 1: the most significant form of privilege or lack of it
Speaker 1: that you would have experienced as students. At this point,
Speaker 1: I've pulled out all the stops trying to help them.
Speaker 1: I've had people with the highest numbers stand up up.
Speaker 1: At one point, I made everyone with a number over
Speaker 1: twenty get up from their seats and line up against
Speaker 1: the wall. They were still guessing, but it was like
Speaker 1: they were throwing darts with a blindfold on. They were
Speaker 1: pretty clear. Demographic similarities at the top end in spectrum
Speaker 1: racially was the most obvious in my eyes. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: also just in general that there were very few at
Speaker 1: the low end of the spectrum yeah, was also noteworthy.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about being in the higher number
Speaker 1: of group as opposed to the lower number group? I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just a fact like it is. It's an I
Speaker 1: would say, I'm coming into I was. I'm aware of
Speaker 1: my privilege as a as a white woman, but I
Speaker 1: think it's about what you do with that privilege that's important.
Speaker 1: And then, after forty minutes of floundering in the shallow
Speaker 1: end of the revisionist history research pool, a group of
Speaker 1: students in the front row put their heads together and
Speaker 1: then raise their hands. We have a hypothesis. That's Adam.
Speaker 1: Everyone in this front row group had the highest privilege
Speaker 1: score we handed out twenty four plus. Of course they
Speaker 1: figured it out first. They were the oldest students in
Speaker 1: the class. Next to Adam was Joseph. He was wearing
Speaker 1: a suit in a tie. Yeah. Yeah, we have a
Speaker 1: hypothesis twenty four plus. Is that a significant factor? Here?
Speaker 1: Is age? Our absolute age? Like how old are you girls?
Speaker 1: We're all a bunch of old seniors over here, older
Speaker 1: than usual. Eureka. Phase one of the experiment was over
Speaker 1: now phase two because I intended to ask them if
Speaker 1: they wanted to do something about their arbitrary privilege. In Australia,
Speaker 1: they've invented something called maturity based corrective adjustment. Procedures matcaps
Speaker 1: as it's known for provisional use in the sport of swimming.
Speaker 1: I will confess that I am madly in love with
Speaker 1: this idea. It turns out that if you take a
Speaker 1: bunch of measurements of kids and plug them into an equation,
Speaker 1: you can estimate their physical maturity quite accurately. So you
Speaker 1: don't have to rely on chronological age to assess someone's
Speaker 1: level of development. You can do one better and measure
Speaker 1: maturity directly. So what these equations do is they fighture
Speaker 1: in indices like height, wight, chronological age, and sitting height,
Speaker 1: and they use those fighters to then estimate how far
Speaker 1: away a particular individual is from that point of peak growth.
Speaker 1: That's Stephen Cobley, a professor at the University of Sydney
Speaker 1: who created maccapps along with his colleague Michael Roman. Here's
Speaker 1: how it works. Imagine we have two fourteen year old
Speaker 1: swimmers competing in a hundred meter freestyle, both with the
Speaker 1: exact same birthday, Joey and Tim. So these academics would
Speaker 1: first calculate the biological maturity status of each swimmer, that is,
Speaker 1: how far each one is from their estimated point of
Speaker 1: peak performance. So let's say, for example, Joey is actually
Speaker 1: twelve months less biologically mature than Tim at this exact moment.
Speaker 1: Then comes the cool part. Cobley then looks at thousands
Speaker 1: of data points for fourteen year old swimming in one
Speaker 1: hundred meter freestyle and calculates what is twelve months of
Speaker 1: maturity worth on average in terms of swimming time for
Speaker 1: kids competing in that age group. He enters the data
Speaker 1: into the maturation based Corrective Adjustment Procedures algorithm, and presto,
Speaker 1: the seger adjusts Joey's time to account for the fact
Speaker 1: that at the moment he raised Tim, he was twelve
Speaker 1: months behind developmentally. An adolescent swim meet in Cobley's ideal
Speaker 1: universe has two sets of results, the raw results and
Speaker 1: then the maturity adjusted results. What you're doing is your
Speaker 1: effectively lowering the time of the folks who are slightly
Speaker 1: behind in terms of their maturity status. Cobley did a
Speaker 1: test run of the maccap's algorithm on a sample of
Speaker 1: seven hundred Australian swimmers, all boys, competing in a hundred
Speaker 1: meter freestyle. The first thing he discovers is similar to
Speaker 1: what we found a pen among the top twenty five
Speaker 1: percent of all adolescent swimmers. There were no late maturing boys, none, zero,
Speaker 1: which is an astonishing fact. Australia is a country that
Speaker 1: takes swimming as seriously of Canada takes hockey, and they
Speaker 1: have basically decided to banish a big group of swimmers
Speaker 1: from consideration just because their talent happens not to appear
Speaker 1: soon enough. When you looked at these seven hundred swimmers,
Speaker 1: in some sense, the damage has already been done. We've
Speaker 1: already chased away the slow developers. They've quit, they've got discouraged.
Speaker 1: They thought they were bad swimmers. They didn't realize they
Speaker 1: were simply behind. Yeah, so what happens when you run
Speaker 1: everyone's race times through the matcap's algorithm, adjusting for maturity,
Speaker 1: the order of finish in every race changes. They're really
Speaker 1: talented swimmers who just happened to be slower to mature
Speaker 1: now have a chance. They used to be lost to
Speaker 1: the system. Now you can tell who they are. Now
Speaker 1: you can go up to young Joey and say, I
Speaker 1: know you didn't make the final, but take a look
Speaker 1: at your matcaps time. You might be the best swimmer
Speaker 1: out there. What's the most somebody moved up, but we've
Speaker 1: seen large percentage, We've siently seen big changes in ranks.
Speaker 1: So if we've got cases for events where someone who
Speaker 1: was outside let's say the top twenty, suddenly was in
Speaker 1: the top three. I read your paper and the first
Speaker 1: start I had was, Oh, wow, this belongs in the classroom.
Speaker 1: Right when you identify who gets into special gifted and
Speaker 1: talented programs, or when you decide who just isn't smart
Speaker 1: n L. When you look at who you discourage and
Speaker 1: who you encourage, you've got to be making the same mistake, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so. I think the cautionary bit that we
Speaker 1: have to remember is it's that old question of yeah,
Speaker 1: but how far do we go? So if we're going
Speaker 1: to factor, if we are going to factor relative age
Speaker 1: in in education or biological development in education adjustments, shouldn't
Speaker 1: we be factoring in other things that we know are influential? Absolutely?
Speaker 1: Why wouldn't we, Well, exactly why wouldn't we If we've
Speaker 1: developed a better way of identifying talent, why wouldn't we
Speaker 1: want to use it everywhere? Back at Wharton, I climbed
Speaker 1: up on my soapbox. I talked about how maccapps had
Speaker 1: freed swimmers, and the tyranny of birthdays communicated my enthusiasm
Speaker 1: for bringing the Australian Revolution to the shores of the
Speaker 1: United States. So in Australia they started to do this.
Speaker 1: Eleven year olds are all swimming the one hundred meter freestyle.
Speaker 1: We've got twelve kids. We have, you know, an order
Speaker 1: of finish. Then they run the times through an algorithm
Speaker 1: and have a new order. Now, would you feel comfortable
Speaker 1: with all of your if you go back to your
Speaker 1: k through twelve experiences? Would you feel comfortable if they
Speaker 1: ran all of your test scores through an age correction algorithm.
Speaker 1: Around the room, I saw young people of promise, focused,
Speaker 1: eager they would be my disciples. I was so full
Speaker 1: of excitement. I put the question to a vote, yes
Speaker 1: or no. I see to a short hand who likes
Speaker 1: the idea. There was a great stirring and wrestling. My
Speaker 1: heart leapt into my throat. I thought I had brought
Speaker 1: the birthday rights revolution into the heart of the lion's den.
Speaker 1: I looked up, looked around, and nothing, no roar of support,
Speaker 1: only a long, cold silence. I've never seen less enthusiasm
Speaker 1: for a great idea in my life? What is the
Speaker 1: matter with you guys? A young man spoke up first, Well,
Speaker 1: it's like, be completely honest. It's to be selfish about it.
Speaker 1: It would probably have heard our chances of being right
Speaker 1: here in this room because I'm old from my grade,
Speaker 1: I did well my standardized test scores. Maybe if they
Speaker 1: readjusted it, I would be more of in the median.
Speaker 1: He was a twenty two year old senior in college.
Speaker 1: So selfishly, I would say, no, it's not an idea
Speaker 1: from a society standpoint, perhaps, so you're being honest. I'm
Speaker 1: being honest. Yeah, it's like saying, you know, legacy admissions
Speaker 1: or something like that. My father went to pen and
Speaker 1: my mother went to pen. Oh you're drowning. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: we get rid of this, you know. But I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna be honest. It's fantastic. Who else wants to then?
Speaker 1: Matteo raises his hand. He is an eighteen on his sticker,
Speaker 1: an age privilege advantage of a year and a half.
Speaker 1: And I think that's a poor idea because it assumes
Speaker 1: that everyone who is older is like always going to
Speaker 1: be smarter. Any one whose younger is always going to
Speaker 1: be less smart. I've seen some pretty old people do
Speaker 1: some terrible things. No, no, no, Matello, that's not what
Speaker 1: it does. Well, it's neutral. It just adjusts for the
Speaker 1: age grading. But I want my score to be my score.
Speaker 1: But wait, wait, I want to I want to? Can
Speaker 1: I just harpen? You said you want your score to
Speaker 1: be your score? Yeah? But why is? Why is an
Speaker 1: adjusted score a score that accounts for your degree of
Speaker 1: maturity somehow less characteristic of who you are than an
Speaker 1: unadjusted score. I would have thought the opposite. A score
Speaker 1: that doesn't include information on your level of maturity would
Speaker 1: seem to be more artificial than one that does. I
Speaker 1: don't know, I guess i'd have I would want to
Speaker 1: look at the algorithm before I made an actual judgment,
Speaker 1: because I'd be surprised if I was okay with everything
Speaker 1: theoretically that everything that the algorithm would say. The students
Speaker 1: stood up, one by one, using their prodigious powers of
Speaker 1: analysis and imagination to come up with one objection after another.
Speaker 1: Why do you think you guys are so hostile to
Speaker 1: attempts to remedy the situation. My fear with algorithm is
Speaker 1: that it could be gamed. So if this were implemented
Speaker 1: where we know that if you're younger, you get say
Speaker 1: one hundred point bump in the SAT or are you
Speaker 1: more favorably throughout your whole educational career. And we're probably
Speaker 1: sending our kids off to kindergarten at four, or we're
Speaker 1: planning whenever we have our kids, look at where the
Speaker 1: cutoff date is. We're kindergarten, you know, in September maybe,
Speaker 1: and saying all right, we're going to reproduce nine months
Speaker 1: before in December or January. Yeah, it's the current system
Speaker 1: that's being gamed. We're responding to the gaming, are we not? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I guess I'm the fear is that the album
Speaker 1: QUI regained yea, and yes exactly. I put my hand
Speaker 1: on the table to steady myself. My head was spinning.
Speaker 1: These were the children of outliers, children raised according to
Speaker 1: the rules of a game I kind of helped set
Speaker 1: in motion. And now the consensus among seventy five elderly
Speaker 1: ivy leaguers was that the system should remain rigged in
Speaker 1: favor of the elderly. The apple cart must remain upright
Speaker 1: with the shiniest and oldest apples on the top. Now
Speaker 1: do I blame them, No, I don't. This is what
Speaker 1: happens when we give up on fairness as an essential principle.
Speaker 1: All that remains is cynicism. The students of pen do
Speaker 1: not see the point of changing a system because their
Speaker 1: parents did not see the point of changing the system,
Speaker 1: and their parents didn't see the point because the schools
Speaker 1: didn't see the point, And the schools, for goodness sake,
Speaker 1: can't even rise from the slumber of their indifference to
Speaker 1: see that it makes no sense to give everyone an
Speaker 1: assessment test on the same day we gain the things
Speaker 1: that we've given up on. I tribe my best in Outliers,
Speaker 1: but I subtitled the book the Story of Success. And
Speaker 1: if I learned anything from that afternoon a pen, it's
Speaker 1: that we want to think about success as a word
Speaker 1: to describe ourselves, our own progress. But it's not really
Speaker 1: people who are successful. It's the systems around us. Great
Speaker 1: students and great hockey players come from great teams and
Speaker 1: great classrooms. And if you want to judge the success
Speaker 1: of those teams in classrooms, start by looking at their composition,
Speaker 1: like when was everyone born? And if we can't get
Speaker 1: that one right, God help us with everything else all right,
Speaker 1: thank you guys. I hope this has all been fun.
Speaker 1: I hope this makes you feel free to wear your
Speaker 1: numbers for the bouncy school year. Revisionist History is produced
Speaker 1: by Eloise Linton Leaving Gistu and Jacob Smith, with Tali
Speaker 1: Emlyn and Harrison VJ Choi. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Original scoring by Luiskara,
Speaker 1: mastering by Flawn Williams, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact
Speaker 1: checking by Keisha Williams. Special thanks to Solmon Hood Klawan
Speaker 1: for production to help on this episode. I'm Malcolm Glabe, Hey,
Speaker 1: Revisionous History listeners. I'm capping off this episode with a
Speaker 1: preview of a new Pushkin show that really has me hooked.
Speaker 1: It's called Death of an Artist. Death of an Artist
Speaker 1: has all the elements of a gripping story, a suspicious death,
Speaker 1: tumultuous relationship, a murder trial, questions of morality, feminism, power
Speaker 1: and balance, and divided our world. On September eight, nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty five, up and coming artist Anna Mendietta fell from
Speaker 1: the thirty fourth floor window of her husband and famous
Speaker 1: sculptor Carl Andrea's apartment. Host Helen Molesworth asks was Carl
Speaker 1: Andrea involved. You'll revisit Anna's untimely death, the trial that followed,
Speaker 1: and both the protests and silence that have followed this
Speaker 1: story ever since. Okay, here comes a sneak peak. You
Speaker 1: can follow the story by searching for Death of an
Speaker 1: Artist wherever you get your podcasts. It's nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: Iowa City. There's a damp chill in the air. We
Speaker 1: are on a sort of shabby block in front of
Speaker 1: a brick apartment building with a white door in need
Speaker 1: of a paint job and a storefront window with its
Speaker 1: blinds drawn shut. The sidewalk just in front of the
Speaker 1: door is covered in blood, and it looks like the
Speaker 1: blood might be seeping out from under the door jam.
Speaker 1: It's a busy week day and as pedestrians pass the
Speaker 1: puddle of blood, they notice it and casually step around it. Eventually,
Speaker 1: a man in a green and black plaid jacket pauses
Speaker 1: and looks around as if looking for an explanation. When
Speaker 1: none comes, he walks away. Then a well dressed white
Speaker 1: woman uses her umbrella to poke at the bloody puddle,
Speaker 1: but after a moment or two of inspection, she also
Speaker 1: walks away. Finally, an older gentleman emerges from a nearby
Speaker 1: storefront and silently cleans up the mess, and the evidence
Speaker 1: of whatever happened is suddenly gone, and with it disappears
Speaker 1: any account of whose blood was spilled and how. The
Speaker 1: whole scene is being captured by two young women in
Speaker 1: their twenties, sisters who sit in an old car parked nearby.
Speaker 1: One of them holds a super eight camera, the kind
Speaker 1: you'd make home movies with back them. The other snaps
Speaker 1: photos with a thirty five millimeter camera. They are Anna
Speaker 1: and Raclean Mendieta, Cuban refugees who landed in this unlikely
Speaker 1: place as children in nineteen seventy three. Anna was a
Speaker 1: first year MFA student at the University of Iowa. She
Speaker 1: was funny, loud, outrageous, and had to take no prisoners
Speaker 1: vibe and in the way of sisters. She had roped
Speaker 1: rect Clean into helping her make a new piece, and
Speaker 1: like many works on a maid, it would come to
Speaker 1: seem tragically prophetic. In the wake of her death. She
Speaker 1: basically staged what looked like the remnants of you know,
Speaker 1: physical violence with what looked like blood in the doorway
Speaker 1: of a building, And I thought it was extremely powerful
Speaker 1: for a very young artist to be doing that, and
Speaker 1: to be doing it in this small, largely white town
Speaker 1: of Iowa City was fascinating to me. That's Connie Butler,
Speaker 1: one of the many curators who would come to admire
Speaker 1: and study on a Mendietta's work in the decades that followed.
Speaker 1: The photos in film the Mendietta sisters took that day
Speaker 1: would ultimately become a work of art called Moffett Building Piece.
Speaker 1: The fact that it still exists only in these little
Speaker 1: thirty five millimeter slides, which you know, you have to
Speaker 1: get very close to with a loop, and it's a
Speaker 1: very intimate way of viewing these things. You know, that
Speaker 1: implicates you as a viewer too, almost as if you
Speaker 1: are yourself looking at a crime scene. Anna's interest in
Speaker 1: blood wasn't only meant to shock. She was keenly aware
Speaker 1: of violence and injustice when she made them off at
Speaker 1: Building Piece. She was investigating her own community's reaction to
Speaker 1: a brutal crime, a rape and murder that had happened
Speaker 1: on campus a few months before. Here's how she explained
Speaker 1: her inspiration. A young woman was killed, raped and killed
Speaker 1: at Iowa in one of the dorms, and it just
Speaker 1: really freaked me out. So I did sort of rape
Speaker 1: performances type things at that time, using my own body.
Speaker 1: I did something I believe in and that I felt
Speaker 1: I had to do. That's not actually Anna Mendietta's voice
Speaker 1: you're hearing. That was Tanya Brigera, another artist from Cuba
Speaker 1: who you'll hear from more later. Anna Mendieta's question was
Speaker 1: could you make art about something so awful? And she
Speaker 1: used blood, not paint. Blood is the most essential substance
Speaker 1: of life. Could it jolt people out of their daily routines?
Speaker 1: Could blood make people pay attention? She didn't know it yet,
Speaker 1: but the Moffett Building piece was about to be her
Speaker 1: first major artwork, and in a circular way, that's kind
Speaker 1: of terrifying. The question she asked about how we react
Speaker 1: when we encounter the residue of violence. This question would
Speaker 1: haunt all of us after she died. I'm your host
Speaker 1: Helen Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony
Speaker 1: Music Entertainment. This is Death of an Artist Episode one.
Speaker 1: The haunting for my entire professional life, I've been a
Speaker 1: member of something called the art world, an exclusive network
Speaker 1: of artists, gallery dealers, curators, collectors, and philanthropists. For two decades.
Speaker 1: I was lucky enough to be a museum curator, making
Speaker 1: me one of a small group of cultural insiders who
Speaker 1: determine what art we see and how we talk about it.
Speaker 1: In the museum world and in art history, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of unspoken rules about what you can say
Speaker 1: publicly and what is supposed to stay private. It turns
Speaker 1: out I wasn't that good at sticking to the script,
Speaker 1: and I guess I'm still not good at it, because
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you Anna Mendietta's whole story, all
Speaker 1: the way to its shocking and troubling end, and much
Speaker 1: to my surprise, I discovered it's a story many of
Speaker 1: my colleagues in the art world would prefer I didn't
Speaker 1: tell at first, blush. It seemed like people didn't want
Speaker 1: me to talk about it because of who else is
Speaker 1: part of that story. Anna's husband, the famous sculptor Carl Andre.
Speaker 1: He is one of the so called fathers of minimalism,
Speaker 1: a cultural hero to many a revered artists with lots
Speaker 1: of connections and he was a suspect in Anna's death.
Speaker 1: Even though Carl Andrea and Anna Mendietta were a highly
Speaker 1: visible art world couple, even though something terrible happened between
Speaker 1: them the night she died, you will not read about
Speaker 1: it on a museum wall label or in most art
Speaker 1: history textbooks. Reviews of their exhibitions tend to take care
Speaker 1: of it in a sentence or two. You would not
Speaker 1: know that Mendietta's death divided the art world in nineteen
Speaker 1: and in many ways still does. I'm not the first
Speaker 1: person to try and tell this story. In fact, many
Speaker 1: of the voices you'll hear in this show are from
Speaker 1: interviews conducted by investigative journalist Robert Katz. He published a
Speaker 1: book in nineteen ninety that remains the most comprehensive look
Speaker 1: into this art world tragedy. He spoke with dozens of
Speaker 1: Anna and Carl's friends in noisy restaurants, in parks, in
Speaker 1: busy offices, and you'll hear the voices of some art
Speaker 1: world insiders on these tapes who have since decided not
Speaker 1: to talk. Most folks don't want to discuss what happened
Speaker 1: that night. They don't want to talk about what the
Speaker 1: ramifications of that night were on the art world. They
Speaker 1: don't want to contemplate what it means when a community
Speaker 1: is torn apart by violence, and they don't want to
Speaker 1: discuss whether or not justice has been served. All these
Speaker 1: different folks not talking for all of their different reasons
Speaker 1: means that a veil of silence started to fall over
Speaker 1: this project, and I can't lie. The more silence we encountered,
Speaker 1: the more sad and frustrated I became. And the more
Speaker 1: silence we encountered, the more I wanted to talk