Murray

Murray is graduated from high school as the 14-year-old valedictorian, He attends Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, earning a degree in physics. He applies to graduate studies at Princeton University but is rejected. He is admitted to Harvard but the financial aid is insufficient and he cannot afford to attend. As a result of being denied at his top choice schools, Murray does not continue his education and starts living in a box under a nearby expressway. He wears a beanie hat and wanders around a junk yard having conversations with imaginary cats mumbling, “I coulda been somebody.” His friends, many of who are schizophrenic and all of whom suffer from varying degrees of substance use disorder suggest that Murray accept the offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but Murray declines. “They don’t want me, the heck with them,” he opines. “It’s all their fault.” Wiping drool from the front of his shirt, Murray gets in a lengthy argument with a fence post and was last seen trying to learn how to simultaneously pat his head and rub his stomach.

Nah.

Murray goes to MIT, works on particle physics, discovers quarks, earns a Nobel Prize in physics, and gets on with his life. Parenthetically, he speaks 13 languages. He makes significant contributions to the sum of the knowledge or our species, publishing article after article in journals, investigating the fundamental particles that make up every bit of matter in the universe.

I would argue that Murray’s motivation and ability matter significantly more than the name of the institution from which he was graduated. I believe the Nobel Committee might agree. “Okay, so he discovered quarks but MIT for grad school, I just don’t know about that” said no one on the committee ever.

Would you suggest that had Murray gone to Princeton or Harvard rather than MIT that he would know 14 languages rather than “only” 13? That he would have won two Nobel Prizes? That his life would be better or different in any way?

Now to be fair, most of our children are not Murray Gell-Mann, do not share his ability to discover the particles that make up protons and neutrons, and that therefore the name on their diploma will be more meaningful than the knowledge in their heads. Maybe. But what they know is still more important than where they matriculate.

Here is one of my favorite recent examples of what exactly some of our children are learning in high school. During an 11th grade math test, a student’s pencil falls off her desk and rolls a few feet away. The teacher has been explicit that no student may leave their seat during the exam. The student raises her hand, intending to ask permission to leave their seat and retrieve the pencil needed to complete the assessment. The teacher reminds the class that no questions will be answered during the test. The student, unable to complete the test, fails.

I get it. Sort of. From the teacher’s point of view. Classroom discipline is certainly important. We can’t have kids leaving their seats, leaping about, playing pickleball during tests, picking up errant pencils. At the same time, perhaps a solution could have been found that would have allowed the child to obtain a pencil and finish solving the requisite equations.

My take away is that there is a lot of “learning” that takes place in the classrooms in which our beloved children spend their days and that much of that agenda—stay seated, no questions, follow the (sometimes absurd) rules—have nothing to do with how to factor quadratics.

So to “what you know if more important than where you attend” I would add “the more responsibility parents can take for what their children learn and how they learn it, the better.”

A dear friend of mine retired recently from the University of Miami where she had taught in the business school for many years. She is convinced that the attitude of her students toward their education in the single most important factor in their continued success, more important even than curriculum. She ran into one of her students from the MBA program and asked him what he remembered about the classes she taught in management and business ethics. “Not much, Professor,” he admitted. “But I frequently reflect on your exuberance and love of the subject matter.”

Our children may not make a contribution to particle physics, our children may not win a Nobel Prize, our children may not be allowed to pick up a pencil to finish a math test. But our children will undoubtably remember how we helped them feel about where they were admitted to college and how they felt about learning.

As loving parents, the ball remains in our court.