Word: systemics
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...talked before about the deficiencies of the U.S. public-education system. If you were U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan - who has about $5 billion in discretionary funding and a mandate to fix our schools - what would you do? There's precious little experimentation in education. Instead there seems to be a desire for greater regimentation, which I think is nonsense. I think we need to try 100 different things. If I were Arne Duncan, I'd think of myself as a venture capitalist, fund as many wacky and inventive ideas as I could, and closely monitor them...
...arises not merely from chemical reactions and combustion engines, but also from the tangle of institutions, values, incentives, and social arrangements that give rise to these physical phenomena. For example, Americans drive so much not because driving is an inevitable aspect of human life, but because our particular market system prices oil a certain way, because our government favors highways over mass transit, because we inhabit a culture that views casual car use as morally acceptable, and so forth...
...current system is by no means perfect, or even acceptable. But an admissions process with a reasonable level of racial affirmative action is desirable compared to a process that does not even attempt to correct for the fact that this is not a racially egalitarian society. A more race-blind affirmative action cannot be said to represent a truly just meritocracy; it does not fulfill the prerequisite that everyone, regardless of race, have access to the same resources and networks necessary to be an attractive applicant...
...that very university system may be part of the problem. Despite the city’s deep well of potential contributors, over half the pieces in the Nov. 2009 issue of the New York Review of Books are penned by professors, and several of the other writers are “scholars in residence” at colleges scattered across the U.S. The “New York” part of the publication’s title refers, I assume, merely to where it is edited, not to where it probes for material. New York-based careers sustained...
...group unanimously supported the College’s House system and praised Harvard’s network of proctors, resident tutors, and peer advising fellows...