David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants / Давид и Голиаф: Как аутсайдеры побеждают фаворитов (by Malcolm Gladwell, 2013) - аудиокнига на английском

But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:7 “Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?” 1. At the heart of ancient Palestine is the region known as the Shephelah, a series of ridges and valleys connecting the Judaean Mountains to the east with the wide, flat expanse of the Mediterranean plain. It is an area of breathtaking beauty, home to vineyards and wheat fields and forests of sycamore and terebinth. It is also of great strategic importance. Over the centuries, numerous battles have been fought for control of the region because the valleys rising from the Mediterranean plain offer those on the coast a clear path to the cities of Hebron, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem in the Judaean highlands. The most important valley is Aijalon, in the north. But the most storied is the Elah. The Elah was where Saladin faced off against the Knights of the Crusades in the twelfth century. It played a central role in the Maccabean wars with Syria more than a thousand years before that, and, most famously, during the days of the Old Testament, it was where the fledgling Kingdom of Israel squared off against the armies of the Philistines. The Philistines were from Crete. They were a seafaring people who had moved to Palestine and settled along the coast. The Israelites were clustered in the mountains, under the leadership of King Saul. In the second half of the eleventh century BCE, the Philistines began moving east, winding their way upstream along the floor of the Elah Valley. Their goal was to capture the mountain ridge near Bethlehem and split Saul’s kingdom in two. The Philistines were battle-tested and dangerous, and the sworn enemies of the Israelites. Alarmed, Saul gathered his men and hastened down from the mountains to confront them. The Philistines set up camp along the southern ridge of the Elah. The Israelites pitched their tents on the other side, along the northern ridge, which left the two armies looking across the ravine at each other. Neither dared to move. To attack meant descending down the hill and then making a suicidal climb up the enemy’s ridge on the other side. Finally, the Philistines had enough. They sent their greatest warrior down into the valley to resolve the deadlock one on one. He was a giant, six foot nine at least, wearing a bronze helmet and full body armor. He carried a javelin, a spear, and a sword. An attendant preceded him, carrying a large shield. The giant faced the Israelites and shouted out: “Choose you a man and let him come down to me! If he prevail in battle against me and strike me down, we shall be slaves to you. But if I prevail and strike him down, you will be slaves to us and serve us.” In the Israelite camp, no one moved. Who could win against such a terrifying opponent? Then, a shepherd boy who had come down from Bethlehem to bring food to his brothers stepped forward and volunteered. Saul objected: “You cannot go against this Philistine to do battle with him, for you are a lad and he is a man of war from his youth.” But the shepherd was adamant. He had faced more ferocious opponents than this, he argued. “When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd,” he told Saul, “I would go after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches.” Saul had no other options. He relented, and the shepherd boy ran down the hill toward the giant standing in the valley. “Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field,” the giant cried out when he saw his opponent approach. Thus began one of history’s most famous battles. The giant’s name was Goliath. The shepherd boy’s name was David. 2. David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants. By “giants,” I mean powerful opponents of all kinds—from armies and mighty warriors to disability, misfortune, and oppression. Each chapter tells the story of a different person—famous or unknown, ordinary or brilliant—who has faced an outsize challenge and been forced to respond. Should I play by the rules or follow my own instincts? Shall I persevere or give up? Should I strike back or forgive? Through these stories, I want to explore two ideas. The first is that much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty. And second, that we consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong. We misread them. We misinterpret them. Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness. And the fact of being an underdog can change people in ways that we often fail to appreciate: it can open doors and create opportunities and educate and enlighten and make possible what might otherwise have seemed unthinkable. We need a better guide to facing giants—and there is no better place to start that journey than with the epic confrontation between David and Goliath three thousand years ago in the Valley of Elah. When Goliath shouted out to the Israelites, he was asking for what was known as “single combat.” This was a common practice in the ancient world. Two sides in a conflict would seek to avoid the heavy bloodshed of open battle by choosing one warrior to represent each in a duel. For example, the first-century BCE Roman historian Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius tells of an epic battle in which a Gaul warrior began mocking his Roman opponents. “This immediately aroused the great indignation of one Titus Manlius, a youth of the highest birth,” Quadrigarius writes. Titus challenged the Gaul to a duel: He stepped forward, and would not suffer Roman valour to be shamefully tarnished by a Gaul. Armed with a legionary’s shield and a Spanish sword, he confronted the Gaul. Their fight took place on the very bridge [over the Anio River] in the presence of both armies, amid great apprehension. Thus they confronted each other: the Gaul, according to his method of fighting, with shield advanced and awaiting an attack; Manlius, relying on courage rather than skill, struck shield against shield and threw the Gaul off balance. While the Gaul was trying to regain the same position, Manlius again struck shield against shield and again forced the man to change his ground. In this fashion he slipped under the Gaul’s sword and stabbed him in the chest with his Spanish blade.…After he had slain him, Manlius cut off the Gaul’s head, tore off his tongue and put it, covered as it was with blood, around his own neck. This is what Goliath was expecting—a warrior like himself to come forward for hand-to-hand combat. It never occurred to him that the battle would be fought on anything other than those terms, and he prepared accordingly. To protect himself against blows to the body, he wore an elaborate tunic made up of hundreds of overlapping bronze fishlike scales. It covered his arms and reached to his knees and probably weighed more than a hundred pounds. He had bronze shin guards protecting his legs, with attached bronze plates covering his feet. He wore a heavy metal helmet. He had three separate weapons, all optimized for close combat. He held a thrusting javelin made entirely of bronze, which was capable of penetrating a shield or even armor. He had a sword on his hip. And as his primary option, he carried a special kind of short-range spear with a metal shaft as “thick as a weaver’s beam.” It had a cord attached to it and an elaborate set of weights that allowed it to be released with extraordinary force and accuracy. As the historian Moshe Garsiel writes, “To the Israelites, this extraordinary spear, with its heavy shaft plus long and heavy iron blade, when hurled by Goliath’s strong arm, seemed capable of piercing any bronze shield and bronze armor together.” Can you see why no Israelite would come forward to fight Goliath? Then David appears. Saul tries to give him his own sword and armor so at least he’ll have a fighting chance. David refuses. “I cannot walk in these,” he says, “for I am unused to it.” Instead he reaches down and picks up five smooth stones, and puts them in his shoulder bag. Then he descends into the valley, carrying his shepherd’s staff. Goliath looks at the boy coming toward him and is insulted. He was expecting to do battle with a seasoned warrior. Instead he sees a shepherd—a boy from one of the lowliest of all professions—who seems to want to use his shepherd’s staff as a cudgel against Goliath’s sword. “Am I a dog,” Goliath says, gesturing at the staff, “that you should come to me with sticks?” What happens next is a matter of legend. David puts one of his stones into the leather pouch of a sling, and he fires at Goliath’s exposed forehead. Goliath falls, stunned. David runs toward him, seizes the giant’s sword, and cuts off his head. “The Philistines saw that their warrior was dead,” the biblical account reads, “and they fled.” The battle is won miraculously by an underdog who, by all expectations, should not have won at all. This is the way we have told one another the story over the many centuries since. It is how the phrase “David and Goliath” has come to be embedded in our language—as a metaphor for improbable victory. And the problem with that version of the events is that almost everything about it is wrong. 3. Ancient armies had three kinds of warriors. The first was cavalry—armed men on horseback or in chariots. The second was infantry—foot soldiers wearing armor and carrying swords and shields. The third were projectile warriors, or what today would be called artillery: archers and, most important, slingers. Slingers had a leather pouch attached on two sides by a long strand of rope. They would put a rock or a lead ball into the pouch, swing it around in increasingly wider and faster circles, and then release one end of the rope, hurling the rock forward. Slinging took an extraordinary amount of skill and practice. But in experienced hands, the sling was a devastating weapon. Paintings from medieval times show slingers hitting birds in midflight. Irish slingers were said to be able to hit a coin from as far away as they could see it, and in the Old Testament Book of Judges, slingers are described as being accurate within a “hair’s breadth.” An experienced slinger could kill or seriously injure a target at a distance of up to two hundred yards.1 The Romans even had a special set of tongs made just to remove stones that had been embedded in some poor soldier’s body by a sling. Imagine standing in front of a Major League Baseball pitcher as he aims a baseball at your head. That’s what facing a slinger was like—only what was being thrown was not a ball of cork and leather but a solid rock. The historian Baruch Halpern argues that the sling was of such importance in ancient warfare that the three kinds of warriors balanced one another, like each gesture in the game of rock, paper, scissors. With their long pikes and armor, infantry could stand up to cavalry. Cavalry could, in turn, defeat projectile warriors, because the horses moved too quickly for artillery to take proper aim. And projectile warriors were deadly against infantry, because a big lumbering soldier, weighed down with armor, was a sitting duck for a slinger who was launching projectiles from a hundred yards away. “This is why the Athenian expedition to Sicily failed in the Peloponnesian War,” Halpern writes. “Thucydides describes at length how Athens’s heavy infantry was decimated in the mountains by local light infantry, principally using the sling.” Goliath is heavy infantry. He thinks that he is going to be engaged in a duel with another heavy-infantryman, in the same manner as Titus Manlius’s fight with the Gaul. When he says, “Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field,” the key phrase is “come to me.” He means come right up to me so that we can fight at close quarters. When Saul tries to dress David in armor and give him a sword, he is operating under the same assumption. He assumes David is going to fight Goliath hand to hand. David, however, has no intention of honoring the rituals of single combat. When he tells Saul that he has killed bears and lions as a shepherd, he does so not just as testimony to his courage but to make another point as well: that he intends to fight Goliath the same way he has learned to fight wild animals—as a projectile warrior. He runs toward Goliath, because without armor he has speed and maneuverability. He puts a rock into his sling, and whips it around and around, faster and faster at six or seven revolutions per second, aiming his projectile at Goliath’s forehead—the giant’s only point of vulnerability. Eitan Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli Defense Forces, recently did a series of calculations showing that a typical-size stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of thirty-five meters would have hit Goliath’s head with a velocity of thirty-four meters per second—more than enough to penetrate his skull and render him unconscious or dead. In terms of stopping power, that is equivalent to a fair-size modern handgun. “We find,” Hirsch writes, “that David could have slung and hit Goliath in little more than one second—a time so brief that Goliath would not have been able to protect himself and during which he would be stationary for all practical purposes.” What could Goliath do? He was carrying over a hundred pounds of armor. He was prepared for a battle at close range, where he could stand, immobile, warding off blows with his armor and delivering a mighty thrust of his spear. He watched David approach, first with scorn, then with surprise, and then with what can only have been horror—as it dawned on him that the battle he was expecting had suddenly changed shape. “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin,” David said to Goliath, “but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, and I’ll strike you down and cut off your head.…All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord, and he will give all of you into our hands.” Twice David mentions Goliath’s sword and spear, as if to emphasize how profoundly different his intentions are. Then he reaches into his shepherd’s bag for a stone, and at that point no one watching from the ridges on either side of the valley would have considered David’s victory improbable. David was a slinger, and slingers beat infantry, hands down. “Goliath had as much chance against David,” the historian Robert Dohrenwend writes, “as any Bronze Age warrior with a sword would have had against an [opponent] armed with a .45 automatic pistol.”2 4. Why has there been so much misunderstanding around that day in the Valley of Elah? On one level, the duel reveals the folly of our assumptions about power. The reason King Saul is skeptical of David’s chances is that David is small and Goliath is large. Saul thinks of power in terms of physical might. He doesn’t appreciate that power can come in other forms as well—in breaking rules, in substituting speed and surprise for strength. Saul is not alone in making this mistake. In the pages that follow, I’m going to argue that we continue to make that error today, in ways that have consequences for everything from how we educate our children to how we fight crime and disorder. But there’s a second, deeper issue here. Saul and the Israelites think they know who Goliath is. They size him up and jump to conclusions about what they think he is capable of. But they do not really see him. The truth is that Goliath’s behavior is puzzling. He is supposed to be a mighty warrior. But he’s not acting like one. He comes down to the valley floor accompanied by an attendant—a servant walking before him, carrying a shield. Shield bearers in ancient times often accompanied archers into battle because a soldier using a bow and arrow had no free hand to carry any kind of protection on his own. But why does Goliath, a man calling for sword-on-sword single combat, need to be assisted by a third party carrying an archer’s shield? What’s more, why does he say to David, “Come to me”? Why can’t Goliath go to David? The biblical account emphasizes how slowly Goliath moves, which is an odd thing to say about someone who is alleged to be a battle hero of infinite strength. In any case, why doesn’t Goliath respond much sooner to the sight of David coming down the hillside without any sword or shield or armor? When he first sees David, his first reaction is to be insulted, when he should be terrified. He seems oblivious of what’s happening around him. There is even that strange comment after he finally spots David with his shepherd’s staff: “Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?” Sticks plural? David is holding only one stick. What many medical experts now believe, in fact, is that Goliath had a serious medical condition. He looks and sounds like someone suffering from what is called acromegaly—a disease caused by a benign tumor of the pituitary gland. The tumor causes an overproduction of human growth hormone, which would explain Goliath’s extraordinary size. (The tallest person in history, Robert Wadlow, suffered from acromegaly. At his death, he was eight foot eleven inches, and apparently still growing.) And furthermore, one of the common side effects of acromegaly is vision problems. Pituitary tumors can grow to the point where they compress the nerves leading to the eyes, with the result that people with acromegaly often suffer from severely restricted sight and diplopia, or double vision. Why was Goliath led onto the valley floor by an attendant? Because the attendant was his visual guide. Why does he move so slowly? Because the world around him is a blur. Why does it take him so long to understand that David has changed the rules? Because he doesn’t see David until David is up close. “Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field,” he shouts out, and in that request there is a hint of his vulnerability. I need you to come to me because I cannot locate you otherwise. And then there is the otherwise inexplicable “Am I a dog that you come to me with sticks?” David had only one stick. Goliath saw two. What the Israelites saw, from high on the ridge, was an intimidating giant. In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness. There is an important lesson in that for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem. David came running toward Goliath, powered by courage and faith. Goliath was blind to his approach—and then he was down, too big and slow and blurry-eyed to comprehend the way the tables had been turned. All these years, we’ve been telling these kinds of stories wrong. David and Goliath is about getting them right. 1 The modern world record for slinging a stone was set in 1981 by Larry Bray: 437 meters. Obviously, at that distance, accuracy suffers. 2 The Israeli minister of defense Moshe Dayan—the architect of Israel’s astonishing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War—also wrote an essay on the story of David and Goliath. According to Dayan, “David fought Goliath not with inferior but (on the contrary) with superior weaponry; and his greatness consisted not in his being willing to go out into battle against someone far stronger than he was. But in his knowing how to exploit a weapon by which a feeble person could seize the advantage and become stronger.” Part One The Advantages of Disadvantages (and the Disadvantages of Advantages) Some pretend to be rich, yet have nothing; others pretend to be poor, yet have great wealth. Proverbs 13:7 Chapter One Vivek Ranadiv? “It was really random. I mean, my father had never played basketball before.” 1. When Vivek Ranadiv? decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and he would persuade the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense. The second principle was more important. Ranadiv? was puzzled by the way Americans play basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would pass the ball in from the sidelines and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A regulation basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Most of the time, a team would defend only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally teams played a full-court press—that is, they contested their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they did it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, Ranadiv? thought, and that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that they were so good at? Ranadiv? looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadiv? lives in Menlo Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadiv? put it, “little blond girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadiv? knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadiv? had come to America as a seventeen-year-old with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press—every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadiv? said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.” 2. Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might than the other. How often do you think the bigger side wins? Most of us, I think, would put that number at close to 100 percent. A tenfold difference is a lot. But the actual answer may surprise you. When the political scientist Ivan Arregu?n-Toft did the calculation a few years ago, what he came up with was 71.5 percent. Just under a third of the time, the weaker country wins. Arregu?n-Toft then asked the question slightly differently. What happens in wars between the strong and the weak when the weak side does as David did and refuses to fight the way the bigger side wants to fight, using unconventional or guerrilla tactics? The answer: in those cases, the weaker party’s winning percentage climbs from 28.5 percent to 63.6 percent. To put that in perspective, the United States’ population is ten times the size of Canada’s. If the two countries went to war and Canada chose to fight unconventionally, history would suggest that you ought to put your money on Canada. We think of underdog victories as improbable events: that’s why the story of David and Goliath has resonated so strongly all these years. But Arregu?n-Toft’s point is that they aren’t at all. Underdogs win all the time. Why, then, are we so shocked every time a David beats a Goliath? Why do we automatically assume that someone who is smaller or poorer or less skilled is necessarily at a disadvantage? One of the winning underdogs on Arregu?n-Toft’s list, for example, was T. E. Lawrence (or, as he is better known, Lawrence of Arabia), who led the Arab revolt against the Turkish army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War. The British were helping the Arabs in their uprising, and their goal was to destroy the long railroad the Turks had built running from Damascus deep into the Hejaz Desert. It was a daunting task. The Turks had a formidable modern army. Lawrence, by contrast, commanded an unruly band of Bedouin. They were not skilled troops. They were nomads. Sir Reginald Wingate, one of the British commanders in the region, called them “an untrained rabble, most of whom have never fired a rifle.” But they were tough and they were mobile. The typical Bedouin soldier carried no more than a rifle, a hundred rounds of ammunition, and forty-five pounds of flour, which meant that he could travel as much as 110 miles a day across the desert, even in summer. They carried no more than a pint of drinking water, since they were so good at finding water in the desert. “Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power,” Lawrence wrote. “Our largest available resources were the tribesmen, men quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, courage.” The eighteenth-century general Maurice de Saxe famously said that the art of war was about legs, not arms, and Lawrence’s troops were all legs. In one typical stretch in the spring of 1917, his men dynamited sixty rails and cut a telegraph line at Buair on March 24, sabotaged a train and twenty-five rails at Abu al-Naam on March 25, dynamited fifteen rails and cut a telegraph line at Istabl Antar on March 27, raided a Turkish garrison and derailed a train on March 29, returned to Buair and sabotaged the railway line again on March 31, dynamited eleven rails at Hedia on April 3, raided the train line in the area of Wadi Daiji on April 4 and 5, and attacked twice on April 6. Lawrence’s masterstroke was an assault on the port town of Aqaba. The Turks expected an attack from British ships patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba to the west. Lawrence decided to attack from the east instead, coming at the city from the unprotected desert, and to do that, he led his men on an audacious, six-hundred-mile loop—up from the Hejaz, north into the Syrian desert, and then back down toward Aqaba. This was in summer, through some of the most inhospitable land in the Middle East, and Lawrence tacked on a side trip to the outskirts of Damascus in order to mislead the Turks about his intentions. “This year the valley seemed creeping with horned vipers and puff-adders, cobras and black snakes,” Lawrence writes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom about one stage in the journey: We could not lightly draw water after dark, for there were snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in knots around their brinks. Twice puff-adders came twisting into the alert ring of our debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died of bites; four recovered after great fear and pain, and a swelling of the poisoned limb. Howeitat treatment was to bind up the part with snake-skin plaster, and read chapters of the Koran to the sufferer until he died. When they finally arrived at Aqaba, Lawrence’s band of several hundred warriors killed or captured twelve hundred Turks and lost only two men. The Turks simply had not thought that their opponent would be crazy enough to come at them from the desert. Sir Reginald Wingate called Lawrence’s men an “untrained rabble.” He saw the Turks as the overwhelming favorites. But can you see how strange that was? Having lots of soldiers and weapons and resources—as the Turks did—is an advantage. But it makes you immobile and puts you on the defensive. Meanwhile, movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, and courage—which Lawrence’s men had in abundance—allowed them to do the impossible, namely, attack Aqaba from the east, a strategy so audacious that the Turks never saw it coming. There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources—and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is sometimes every bit the equal of the former. For some reason, this is a very difficult lesson for us to learn. We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser. Part One of David and Goliath is an attempt to explore the consequences of that error. When we see the giant, why do we automatically assume the battle is his for the winning? And what does it take to be that person who doesn’t accept the conventional order of things as a given—like David, or Lawrence of Arabia, or, for that matter, Vivek Ranadiv? and his band of nerdy Silicon Valley girls? 3. Vivek Ranadiv?’s basketball team played in the National Junior Basketball seventh-and-eighth-grade division representing Redwood City. The girls practiced at Paye’s Place, a gym in nearby San Carlos. Because Ranadiv? had never played basketball, he recruited a couple of experts to help him. The first was Roger Craig, a former professional athlete who worked for Ranadiv?’s software company.1 After Craig signed on, he recruited his daughter Rometra, who had played basketball in college. Rometra was the kind of person you assigned to guard your opponent’s best player in order to render her useless. The girls on the team loved Rometra. “She has always been like my big sister,” Anjali Ranadiv? said. “It was so awesome to have her along.” Redwood City’s strategy was built around the two deadlines that all basketball teams must meet in order to advance the ball. The first is the time allotted for the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a player from the other team takes the ball out-of-bounds and has five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the court. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually that’s not an issue, because teams don’t hang around to defend against the inbounds pass. They run back to their own end. Redwood City did not do that. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her counterpart. When some teams play the press, the defender plays behind the offensive player she’s guarding in order to impede her once she catches the ball. The Redwood City girls, by contrast, played a more aggressive, high-risk strategy. They positioned themselves in front of their opponents to prevent them from catching the inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn’t have anyone guard the player throwing the ball in. Why bother? Ranadiv? used that extra player as a floater who could serve as a second defender against the other team’s best player. “Think about football,” Ranadiv? said. “The quarterback can run with the ball. He has the whole field to throw to, and it’s still damned difficult to complete a pass.” Basketball was harder. A smaller court. A five-second deadline. A heavier, bigger ball. As often as not, the teams Redwood City was playing against simply couldn’t make the inbounds pass within the five-second limit. Or else the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her five seconds were about to be up, would throw the ball away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood City players. Ranadiv?’s girls were maniacal. The second deadline in basketball requires a team to advance the ball across midcourt into its opponent’s end within ten seconds, and if Redwood City’s opponents met the first deadline and were able to make the inbounds pass in time, the girls would turn their attention to the second deadline. They would descend on the girl who caught the inbounds pass and “trap” her. Anjali was the designated trapper. She’d sprint over and double-team the dribbler, stretching her long arms high and wide. Maybe she’d steal the ball. Maybe the other player would throw it away in a panic—or get bottled up and stalled, so that the ref would end up blowing the whistle. “When we first started out, no one knew how to play defense or anything,” Anjali said. “So my dad said the whole game long, ‘Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbounds plays.’ It’s the best feeling in the world to steal the ball from someone. We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams that were a lot better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them.” The Redwood City players would jump ahead 4–0, 6–0, 8–0, 12–0. One time they led 25–0. Because they typically got the ball underneath their opponent’s basket, they rarely had to attempt the low-percentage, long-range shots that require skill and practice. They shot layups. In one of the few games that Redwood City lost that year, only four of the team’s players showed up. They pressed anyway. Why not? They lost by only 3 points. “What that defense did for us is that we could hide our weaknesses,” Rometra Craig said. “We could hide the fact that we didn’t have good outside shooters. We could hide the fact that we didn’t have the tallest lineup. Because as long as we played hard on defense, we were getting steals and getting easy layups. I was honest with the girls. I told them, ‘We’re not the best basketball team out there.’ But they understood their roles.” A twelve-year-old girl would go to war for Rometra. “They were awesome,” she said. Lawrence attacked the Turks where they were weak—along the farthest, most deserted outposts of the railroad—and not where they were strong. Redwood City attacked the inbounds pass, the point in a game where a great team is as vulnerable as a weak one. David refused to engage Goliath in close quarters, where he would surely lose. He stood well back, using the full valley as his battlefield. The girls of Redwood City used the same tactic. They defended all ninety-four feet of the basketball court. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort. It is basketball for those who, like Lawrence’s Bedouin, are “quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets [are] movement, endurance, individual intelligence…courage.” “It’s an exhausting strategy,” Roger Craig said. He and Ranadiv? were in a conference room at Ranadiv?’s software company, reminiscing about their dream season. Ranadiv? was at the whiteboard, diagramming the intricacies of the Redwood City press. Craig was sitting at the table. “My girls had to be more fit than the others,” Ranadiv? said. “He used to make them run!” Craig said, nodding. “We followed soccer strategy in practice,” Ranadiv? said. “I would make them run and run and run. I couldn’t teach them skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the game. That’s why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you’re going to get tired.” Ranadiv? said “tired” with a note of approval in his voice. His father was a pilot who was jailed by the Indian government because he wouldn’t stop challenging the safety of the country’s planes. Ranadiv? went to MIT after he saw a documentary on the school and decided that it was perfect for him. This was in the 1970s, when going abroad for undergraduate study required the Indian government to authorize the release of foreign currency, and Ranadiv? camped outside the office of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India until he got his money. Ranadiv? is slender and fine-boned, with a languorous walk and an air of imperturbability. But none of that should be mistaken for nonchalance. The Ranadiv?s are relentless. He turned to Craig. “What was our cheer again?” The two men thought for a moment, then shouted out happily, in unison: “One, two, three, attitude!” The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else. “One time, some new girls joined the team,” Ranadiv? said, “and so in the first practice I had, I was telling them, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do,’ and I showed them. I said, ‘It’s all about attitude.’ And there was this one new girl on the team, and I was worried that she wouldn’t get the whole attitude thing. Then we did the cheer and she said, ‘No, no, it’s not one, two, three, attitude. It’s one, two, three, attitude, hah!’”—at which point Ranadiv? and Craig burst out laughing. 4. In January of 1971, the Fordham University Rams played a basketball game against the University of Massachusetts Redmen. The game was in Amherst, at the legendary arena known as the Cage, where the Redmen hadn’t lost since December of 1969. Their record was 11–1. The Redmen’s star was none other than Julius Erving—Dr. J—one of the greatest athletes ever to play the game of basketball. The UMass team was very, very good. Fordham, on the other hand, was a team of scrappy kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn. Their center had torn up his knee the first week of practice and was out, which meant that their tallest player was six foot five. Their starting forward—and forwards are typically almost as tall as centers—was Charlie Yelverton, who was only six foot two. But from the opening buzzer, the Rams launched a full-court press, and they never let up. “We jumped out to a thirteen-to-six lead, and it was a war the rest of the way,” Digger Phelps, the Fordham coach at the time, recalls. “These were tough city kids. We played you ninety-four feet. We knew that sooner or later we were going to make you crack.” Phelps sent in one indefatigable Irish or Italian kid from the Bronx after another to guard Erving, and, one by one, the indefatigable Irish and Italian kids fouled out. None of them were as good as Erving. It didn’t matter. Fordham won 87–79. In the world of basketball, there are countless stories like this about legendary games where David used the full-court press to beat Goliath. Yet the puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular. What did Digger Phelps do the season after his stunning upset of UMass? He never used the full-court press the same way again. And the UMass coach, Jack Leaman, who was humbled in his own gym by a bunch of street kids—did he learn from his defeat and use the press himself the next time he had a team of underdogs? He did not. Many people in the world of basketball don’t really believe in the press because it’s not perfect: it can be beaten by a well-coached team with adept ball handlers and astute passers. Even Ranadiv? readily admitted as much. All an opposing team had to do to beat Redwood City was press back. The girls were not good enough to handle a taste of their own medicine. But all those objections miss the point. If Ranadiv?’s girls or Fordham’s scrappy overachievers had played the conventional way, they would have lost by thirty points. The press was the best chance the underdog had of beating Goliath. Logically, every team that comes in as an underdog should play that way, shouldn’t they? So why don’t they? Arregu?n-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time, underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the 202 lopsided conflicts in Arregu?n-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe-to-toe with Goliath the conventional way 152 times—and lost 119 times. In 1809, the Peruvians fought the Spanish straight up and lost; in 1816, the Georgians fought the Russians straight up and lost; in 1817, the Pindaris fought the British straight up and lost; in the Kandyan rebellion of 1817, the Sri Lankans fought the British straight up and lost; in 1823, the Burmese chose to fight the British straight up and lost. The list of failures is endless. In the 1940s, the Communist insurgency in Vietnam bedeviled the French until, in 1951, the Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap switched to conventional warfare—and promptly suffered a series of defeats. George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict’s early stages. “As quickly as he could,” William Polk writes in Violent Politics, a history of unconventional warfare, Washington “devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.” It makes no sense, unless you think back to Lawrence’s long march across the desert to Aqaba. It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six hundred miles through snake-infested desert on the back of camels. It is easier and far more satisfying to retreat and compose yourself after every score—and execute perfectly choreographed plays—than to swarm about, arms flailing, and contest every inch of the basketball court. Underdog strategies are hard. The only person who seemed to have absorbed the lessons of that famous game between Fordham and the University of Massachusetts was a skinny little guard on the UMass freshman team named Rick Pitino. He didn’t play that day. He watched, and his eyes grew wide. Even now, more than four decades later, he can name, from memory, nearly every player on the Fordham team: Yelverton, Sullivan, Mainor, Charles, Zambetti. “They came in with the most unbelievable pressing team I’d ever seen,” Pitino said. “Five guys between six feet five and six feet. It was unbelievable how they covered ground. I studied it. There is no way they should have beaten us. Nobody beat us at the Cage.” Pitino became the head coach at Boston University in 1978, when he was twenty-five years old, and he used the press to take the school to its first NCAA tournament appearance in twenty-four years. At his next head-coaching stop, Providence College, Pitino took over a team that had gone 11–20 the year before. The players were short and almost entirely devoid of talent—a carbon copy of the Fordham Rams. They pressed, and ended up one game away from playing for the national championship. Again and again, in his career, Pitino has achieved extraordinary things with a fraction of the talent of his competitors. “I have so many coaches come in every year to learn the press,” Pitino said. He is now the head basketball coach at the University of Louisville, and Louisville has become the Mecca for all those Davids trying to learn how to beat Goliaths. “Then they e-mail me. They tell me they can’t do it. They don’t know if their players can last.” Pitino shook his head. “We practice every day for two hours,” he went on. “The players are moving almost ninety-eight percent of the practice. We spend very little time talking. When we make our corrections”—that is, when Pitino and his coaches stop play to give instructions—“they are seven-second corrections, so that our heart rate never rests. We are always working.” Seven seconds! The coaches who come to Louisville sit in the stands and watch that ceaseless activity and despair. To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice. Their teams are just good enough that they know it could never work. Their players could never be convinced to play that hard. They were not desperate enough. But Ranadiv?? Oh, he was desperate. You would think, looking at his girls, that their complete inability to pass and dribble and shoot was their greatest disadvantage. But it wasn’t, was it? It was what made their winning strategy possible. 5. One of the things that happened to Redwood City the minute the team started winning basketball games was that opposing coaches began to get angry. There was a sense that Redwood City wasn’t playing fair—that it wasn’t right to use the full-court press against twelve-year-old girls who were just beginning to grasp the rudiments of the game. The point of youth basketball, the dissenting chorus said, was to learn basketball skills. Ranadiv?’s girls, they felt, were not really playing basketball. Of course, you could as easily argue that in playing the press, a twelve-year-old girl learned much more valuable lessons—that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged. But the coaches on the other side of Redwood City’s lopsided scores were disinclined to be so philosophical. “There was one guy who wanted to have a fight with me in the parking lot,” Ranadiv? said. “He was this big guy. He obviously played football and basketball himself, and he saw that skinny, foreign guy beating him at his own game. He wanted to beat me up.” Roger Craig said that he was sometimes startled by what he saw. “The other coaches would be screaming at their girls, humiliating them, shouting at them. They would say to the refs, ‘That’s a foul! That’s a foul!’ But we weren’t fouling. We were just playing aggressive defense.” “One time, we were playing this team from East San Jose,” Ranadiv? said. “They had been playing for years. These were born-with-a-basketball girls. We were just crushing them. We were up something like twenty to zero. We wouldn’t even let them inbound the ball, and the coach got so mad that he took a chair and threw it. He started screaming at his girls, and of course the more you scream at girls that age, the more nervous they get.” Ranadiv? shook his head. You should never, ever raise your voice. “Finally, the ref physically threw the guy out of the building. I was afraid. I think he couldn’t stand it because here were all these blond-haired girls who were clearly inferior players, and we were killing them.” All the qualities that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and finely calibrated execution. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable: a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out-of-bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way. T. E. Lawrence could triumph because he was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer. He did not graduate with honors from the top English military academy. He was an archaeologist by trade who wrote dreamy prose. He wore sandals and full Bedouin dress when he went to see his military superiors. He spoke Arabic like a native, and handled a camel as if he had been riding one all his life. He didn’t care what people in the military establishment thought about his “untrained rabble” because he had little invested in the military establishment. And then there’s David. He must have known that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. But he was a shepherd, which in ancient times was one of the lowliest of all professions. He had no stake in the finer points of military ritual. We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options. Vivek Ranadiv? stood on the sidelines as the opposing teams’ parents and coaches heaped abuse on him. Most people would have shrunk in the face of that kind of criticism. Not Ranadiv?. It was really random. I mean, my father had never played basketball before. Why should he care what the world of basketball thought of him? Ranadiv? coached a team of girls who had no talent in a sport he knew nothing about. He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of. 6. At the nationals, the Redwood City girls won their first two games. In the third round, their opponents were from somewhere deep in Orange County. Redwood City had to play them on their own court, and the opponents supplied their own referee as well. The game was at eight o’clock in the morning. The Redwood City players left their hotel at six to beat the traffic. It went downhill from there. The referee did not believe in “one, two, three, attitude, hah!” He didn’t think that playing to deny the inbounds pass was basketball. He began calling one foul after another. “They were touch fouls,” Craig said. Ticky-tacky stuff. The memory was painful. “My girls didn’t understand,” Ranadiv? said. “The ref called something like four times as many fouls on us as on the other team.” “People were booing,” Craig said. “It was bad.” “A two-to-one ratio is understandable, but a ratio of four to one?” Ranadiv? shook his head. “One girl fouled out.” “We didn’t get blown out. There was still a chance to win. But…” Ranadiv? called the press off. He had to. The Redwood City players retreated to their own end and passively watched as their opponents advanced down the court. The Redwood City girls did not run. They paused and deliberated between each possession. They played basketball the way basketball is supposed to be played, and in the end they lost—but not before proving that Goliath is not quite the giant he thinks he is. 1 Roger Craig, it should be said, is more than simply a former professional athlete. Retired now, he was one of the greatest running backs in the history of the National Football League. Chapter Two Teresa DeBrito “My largest class was twenty-nine kids. Oh, it was fun.” 1. When Shepaug Valley Middle School was built, to serve the children of the baby boom, three hundred students spilled out of school buses every morning. The building had a line of double doors at the entrance to handle the crush, and the corridors inside seemed as busy as a highway. But that was long ago. The baby boom came and went. The bucolic corner of Connecticut where Shepaug is located—with its charming Colonial-era villages and winding country lanes—was discovered by wealthy couples from New York City. Real-estate prices rose. Younger families could no longer afford to live in the area. Enrollment dropped to 245 students, then to just over 200. There are now eighty children in the school’s sixth grade. Based on the number of students coming up through the region’s elementary schools, that number may soon be cut in half, which means that the average class size in the school will soon fall well below the national average. A once-crowded school has become an intimate one. Would you send your child to Shepaug Valley Middle School? 2. The story of Vivek Ranadiv? and the Redwood City girls’ basketball team suggests that what we think of as an advantage and as a disadvantage is not always correct, that we mix the categories up. In this chapter and the next, I want to apply that idea to two seemingly simple questions about education. I say “seemingly” because they seem simple—although, as we will discover, they are really anything but. The Shepaug Valley Middle School question is the first of the two simple questions. My guess is that you’d be delighted to have your child in one of those intimate classrooms. Virtually everywhere in the world, parents and policymakers take it for granted that smaller classes are better classes. In the past few years, the governments of the United States, Britain, Holland, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, and China—to name just a few—have all taken major steps to reduce the size of their classes. When the governor of California announced sweeping plans to reduce the size of his state’s classes, his popularity doubled within three weeks. Inside of a month, twenty other governors had announced plans to follow suit, and within a month and a half, the White House announced class-size reduction plans of its own. To this day, 77 percent of Americans think that it makes more sense to use taxpayer money to lower class sizes than to raise teachers’ salaries. Do you know how few things 77 percent of Americans agree on? There used to be as many as twenty-five students in a classroom at Shepaug Valley. Now that number is sometimes as low as fifteen. That means students at Shepaug get far more individual attention from their teacher than before, and common sense says that the more attention children get from their teacher, the better their learning experience will be. Students at the new, intimate Shepaug Valley ought to be doing better at school than students at the old crowded Shepaug—right? It turns out that there is a very elegant way to test whether this is true. Connecticut has a lot of schools like Shepaug. It’s a state with many small towns with small elementary schools, and small schools in small towns are subject to the natural ebbs and flows of birthrates and real-estate prices—which means that a grade can be all but empty one year and crowded the next. Here are the enrollment records, for example, for the fifth grade in another Connecticut middle school: 1993 18 1994 11 1995 17 1996 14 1997 13 1998 16 1999 15 2000 21 2001 23 2002 10 2003 18 2004 21 2005 18 In 2001, there were twenty-three fifth graders. The next year there were ten! Between 2001 and 2002, everything else in that school remained the same. It had the same teachers, the same principal, the same textbooks. It was in the same building in the same town. The local economy and the local population were virtually identical. The only thing that changed was the number of students in fifth grade. If the students in the year with a larger enrollment did better than the students in the year with a smaller one, then we can be pretty sure that it was because of the size of the class, right? This is what is called a “natural experiment.” Sometimes scientists set up formal experiments to try and test hypotheses. But on rare occasions the real world provides a natural way of testing the same theory—and natural experiments have many advantages over formal experiments. So what happens if you use the natural experiment of Connecticut—and compare the year-to-year results of every child who happens to have been in a small class with the results of those who happened to have come along in years with lots of kids? The economist Caroline Hoxby has done just that, looking at every elementary school in the state of Connecticut, and here’s what she found: Nothing! “There are many studies that say they can’t find a statistically significant effect of some policy change,” Hoxby says. “That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t an effect. It just means that they couldn’t find it in the data. In this study, I found estimates that are very precisely estimated around the point zero. I got a precise zero. In other words, there is no effect.” This is just one study, of course. But the picture doesn’t get any clearer if you look at all the studies of class size—and there have been hundreds done over the years. Fifteen percent find statistically significant evidence that students do better in smaller classes. Roughly the same number find that students do worse in smaller classes. Twenty percent are like Hoxby’s and find no effect at all—and the balance find a little bit of evidence in either direction that isn’t strong enough to draw any real conclusions. The typical class-size study concluded with a paragraph like this: In four countries—Australia, Hong Kong, Scotland, and the United States—our identification strategy leads to extremely imprecise estimates that do not allow for any confident assertion about class-size effects. In two countries—Greece and Iceland—there seem to be nontrivial beneficial effects of reduced class sizes. France is the only country where there seem to be noteworthy differences between mathematics and science teaching: While there is a statistically significant and sizable class-size effect in mathematics, a class-size effect of comparable magnitude can be ruled out in science. The nine school systems for which we can rule out large-scale class-size effects in both mathematics and science are the two Belgian schools, Canada, the Czech Republic, Korea, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, and Spain. Finally, we can rule out any noteworthy causal effect of class size on student performance in two countries, Japan and Singapore. Did you follow that? After sorting through thousands of pages of data on student performance from eighteen separate countries, the economists concluded that there were only two places in the world—Greece and Iceland—where there were “nontrivial beneficial effects of reduced class sizes.” Greece and Iceland? The push to lower class sizes in the United States resulted in something like a quarter million new teachers being hired between 1996 and 2004. Over that same period, per-pupil spending in the United States soared 21 percent—with nearly all of those many tens of billions of new dollars spent on hiring those extra teachers. It’s safe to say that there isn’t a single profession in the world that has increased its numbers over the past two decades by as much or as quickly or at such expense as teaching has. One country after another has spent that kind of money because we look at a school like Shepaug Valley—where every teacher has a chance to get to know every student—and we think, “There’s the place to send my child.” But the evidence suggests that the thing we are convinced is such a big advantage might not be such an advantage at all.1 3. Not long ago, I sat down with one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. He began by talking about his childhood in Minneapolis. He would go up and down the streets of his neighborhood at the beginning of every winter, he said, getting commitments from people who wanted their driveways and sidewalks cleared of snow. Then he would contract out each job to other children in the neighborhood. He paid his workers the moment the job was done, with cash on hand, and collected from the families later because he learned that was the surest way to get his crew to work hard. He had eight, sometimes nine, kids on the payroll. In the fall, he would switch to raking leaves. “I would go and check their work so I could tell the customer that their driveway would be done the way they wanted it done,” he remembered. “There would always be one or two kids who didn’t do it well, and I would have to fire them.” He was ten years old. By the age of eleven, he had six hundred dollars in the bank, all earned by himself. This was in the 1950s. That would be the equivalent today of five thousand dollars. “I didn’t have money for where I wanted to go,” he said with a shrug, as if it was obvious that an eleven-year-old would have a sense of where he wanted to go. “Any fool can spend money. But to earn it and save it and defer gratification—then you learn to value it differently.” His family lived in what people euphemistically called a “mixed neighborhood.” He went to public schools and wore hand-me-downs. His father was a product of the Depression, and talked plainly about money. The man from Hollywood said that if he wanted something—a new pair of running shoes, say, or a bicycle—his father would tell him he had to pay half. If he left the lights on, his father would show him the electric bill. “He’d say, ‘Look, this is what we pay for electricity. You’re just being lazy, not turning the lights off. We’re paying for you being lazy. But if you need lights for working—twenty-four hours a day—no problem.’” The summer of his sixteenth year, he went to work at his father’s scrap-metal business. It was hard, physical labor. He was treated like any other employee. “It made me not want to live in Minneapolis,” he said. “It made me never want to depend on working for my father. It was awful. It was dirty. It was hard. It was boring. It was putting scrap metal in barrels. I worked there from May fifteenth through Labor Day. I couldn’t get the dirt off me. I think, looking back, my father wanted me to work there because he knew that if I worked there, I would want to escape. I would be motivated to do something more.” In college he ran a laundry service, picking up and delivering dry cleaning for his wealthy classmates. He organized student charter flights to Europe. He went to see basketball games with his friend and sat in terrible seats—obstructed by a pillar—and wondered what it would be like to sit in the premium seats courtside. He went to business school and law school in New York, and lived in a bad neighborhood in Brooklyn to save money. After graduation, he got a job in Hollywood, which led to a bigger job, and then to an even bigger job, and side deals and prizes and a string of extraordinary successes—to the point where he now has a house in Beverly Hills the size of an airplane hangar, his own jet, a Ferrari in the garage, and a gate in front of his seemingly never-ending driveway that looks like it was shipped over from some medieval castle in Europe. He understood money. And he understood money because he felt he had been given a thorough education in its value and function back home on the streets of Minneapolis. “I wanted to have more freedom. I wanted to aspire to have different things. Money was a tool that I could use for my aspiration and my desires and my drive,” he said. “Nobody taught me that. I learned it. It was kind of like trial and error. I liked the juice of it. I got some self-esteem from it. I felt more control over my life.” He was sitting in his home office as he said that—a room easily the size of most people’s houses—and then he finally came to the point. He had children that he loved very dearly. Like any parent, he wanted to provide for them, to give them more than he had. But he had created a giant contradiction, and he knew it. He was successful because he had learned the long and hard way about the value of money and the meaning of work and the joy and fulfillment that come from making your own way in the world. But because of his success, it would be difficult for his children to learn those same lessons. Children of multimillionaires in Hollywood do not rake the leaves of their neighbors in Beverly Hills. Their fathers do not wave the electricity bill angrily at them if they leave the lights on. They do not sit in a basketball arena behind a pillar and wonder what it would be like to sit courtside. They live courtside. “My own instinct is that it’s much harder than anybody believes to bring up kids in a wealthy environment,” he said. “People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they’re ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth. It’s difficult at both ends of the spectrum. There’s some place in the middle which probably works best of all.” There are few things that inspire less sympathy than a multimillionaire crying the blues for his children, of course. The man from Hollywood’s children will never live in anything but the finest of houses and sit anywhere but in first class. But he wasn’t talking about material comforts. He was a man who had made a great name for himself. One of his brothers had taken over the family scrap-metal business and prospered. Another of his brothers had become a doctor and built a thriving medical practice. His father had produced three sons who were fulfilled and motivated and who had accomplished something for themselves in the world. And his point was that it was going to be harder for him, as a man with hundreds of millions of dollars, to be as successful in raising his children as his father had been back in a mixed neighborhood of Minneapolis. 4. The man from Hollywood is not the first person to have had this revelation. It is something, I think, that most of us understand intuitively. There is an important principle that guides our thinking about the relationship between parenting and money—and that principle is that more is not always better. It is hard to be a good parent if you have too little money. That much is obvious. Poverty is exhausting and stressful. If you have to work two jobs to make ends meet, it’s hard to have the energy in the evening to read to your children before they go to bed. If you are a working single parent, trying to pay your rent and feed and clothe your family and manage a long and difficult commute to a physically demanding job, it is hard to provide your children with the kind of consistent love and attention and discipline that makes for a healthy home. But no one would ever say that it is always true that the more money you have, the better parent you can be. If you were asked to draw a graph about the relationship between parenting and money, you wouldn’t draw this: Money makes parenting easier until a certain point—when it stops making much of a difference. What is that point? The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, what economists call “diminishing marginal returns” sets in. If your family makes seventy-five thousand and your neighbor makes a hundred thousand, that extra twenty-five thousand a year means that your neighbor can drive a nicer car and go out to eat slightly more often. But it doesn’t make your neighbor happier than you, or better equipped to do the thousands of small and large things that make for being a good parent. A better version of the parenting-income graph looks like this: But that curve tells only part of the story, doesn’t it? Because when the income of parents gets high enough, then parenting starts to be harder again. For most of us, the values of the world we grew up in are not that different from the world we create for our children. But that’s not true for someone who becomes very wealthy. The psychologist James Grubman uses the wonderful expression “immigrants to wealth” to describe first-generation millionaires—by which he means that they face the same kinds of challenges in relating to their children that immigrants to any new country face. Someone like the Hollywood mogul grew up in the Old Country of the middle class, where scarcity was a great motivator and teacher. His father taught him the meaning of money and the virtues of independence and hard work. But his children live in the New World of riches, where the rules are different and baffling. How do you teach “work hard, be independent, learn the meaning of money” to children who look around themselves and realize that they never have to work hard, be independent, or learn the meaning of money? That’s why so many cultures around the world have a proverb to describe the difficulty of raising children in an atmosphere of wealth. In English, the saying is “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” The Italians say, “Dalle stelle alle stalle” (“from stars to stables”). In Spain it’s “Quien no lo tiene, lo hance; y quien lo tiene, lo deshance” (“he who doesn’t have it, does it, and he who has it, misuses it”). Wealth contains the seeds of its own destruction. “A parent has to set limits. But that’s one of the most difficult things for immigrants to wealth, because they don’t know what to say when having the excuse of ‘We can’t afford it’ is gone,” Grubman said. “They don’t want to lie and say, ‘We don’t have the money,’ because if you have a teenager, the teenager says, ‘Excuse me. You have a Porsche, and Mom has a Maserati.’ The parents have to learn to switch from ‘No we can’t’ to ‘No we won’t.’” But “no we won’t,” Grubman said, is much harder. “No we can’t” is simple. Sometimes, as a parent, you have to say it only once or twice. It doesn’t take long for the child of a middle-class family to realize that it is pointless to ask for a pony, because a pony simply can’t happen. “No we won’t” get a pony requires a conversation, and the honesty and skill to explain that what is possible is not always what is right. “I’ll walk wealthy parents through the scenario, and they have no idea what to say,” Grubman said. “I have to teach them: ‘Yes, I can buy that for you. But I choose not to. It’s not consistent with our values.’” But then that, of course, requires that you have a set of values, and know how to articulate them, and know how to make them plausible to your child—all of which are really difficult things for anyone to do, under any circumstances, and especially if you have a Ferrari in the driveway, a private jet, and a house in Beverly Hills the size of an airplane hangar. The man from Hollywood had too much money. That was his problem as a parent. He was well past the point where money made things better, and well past the point where money stopped mattering all that much. He was at the point where money starts to make the job of raising normal and well-adjusted children more difficult. What the parenting graph really looks like is this: That’s what is called an inverted-U curve. Inverted-U curves are hard to understand. They almost never fail to take us by surprise, and one of the reasons we are so often confused about advantages and disadvantages is that we forget when we are operating in a U-shaped world.2 Which brings us back to the puzzle of class size: What if the relationship between the number of children in a classroom and academic performance is not this: or even this: What if it’s this? The principal of Shepaug Valley Middle School is a woman named Teresa DeBrito. In her five-year tenure at the school, she has watched the incoming class dwindle year by year. To a parent, that might seem like good news. But when she thought about it, she had that last curve in mind. “In a few years we’re going to have fewer than fifty kids for the whole grade coming up from elementary school,” she said. She was dreading it: “We’re going to struggle.” 5. Inverted-U curves have three parts, and each part follows a different logic.3 There’s the left side, where doing more or having more makes things better. There’s the flat middle, where doing more doesn’t make much of a difference. And there’s the right side, where doing more or having more makes things worse.4 If you think about the class-size puzzle this way, then what seems baffling starts to make a little more sense. The number of students in a class is like the amount of money a parent has. It all depends on where you are on the curve. Israel, for example, has historically had quite large elementary school classes. The country’s educational system uses the “Maimonides Rule,” named after the twelfth-century rabbi who decreed that classes should not exceed forty children. That means elementary school classes can often have as many as thirty-eight or thirty-nine students. Where there are forty students in a grade, though, the same school could suddenly have two classes of twenty. If you do a Hoxby-style analysis and compare the academic performance of one of those big classes with a class of twenty, the small class will do better. That shouldn’t be surprising. Thirty-six or thirty-seven students is a lot for any teacher to handle. Israel is on the left side of the inverted-U curve. Now think back to Connecticut. In the schools Hoxby looked at, most of the variation was between class sizes in the mid- to low twenties and those in the high teens. When Hoxby says that her study found nothing, what she means is that she could find no real benefit to making classes smaller in that medium range. Somewhere between Israel and Connecticut, in other words, the effects of class size move along the curve to the flat middle—where adding resources to the classroom stops translating into a better experience for children. Why isn’t there much of a difference between a class of twenty-five students and a class of eighteen students? There’s no question that the latter is easier for the teacher: fewer papers to grade, fewer children to know and follow. But a smaller classroom translates to a better outcome only if teachers change their teaching style when given a lower workload. And what the evidence suggests is that in this midrange, teachers don’t necessarily do that. They just work less. This is only human nature. Imagine that you are a doctor and you suddenly learn that you’ll see twenty patients on a Friday afternoon instead of twenty-five, while getting paid the same. Would you respond by spending more time with each patient? Or would you simply leave at six-thirty instead of seven-thirty and have dinner with your kids? Now for the crucial question. Can a class be too small, the same way a parent can make too much money? I polled a large number of teachers in the United States and Canada and asked them that question, and teacher after teacher agreed that it can. Here’s a typical response: My perfect number is eighteen: that’s enough bodies in the room that no one person needs to feel vulnerable, but everyone can feel important. Eighteen divides handily into groups of two or three or six—all varying degrees of intimacy in and of themselves. With eighteen students, I can always get to each one of them when I need to. Twenty-four is my second favorite number—the extra six bodies make it even more likely that there will be a dissident among them, a rebel or two to challenge the status quo. But the trade-off with twenty-four is that it verges on having the energetic mass of an audience instead of a team. Add six more of them to hit thirty bodies and we’ve weakened the energetic connections so far that even the most charismatic of teachers can’t maintain the magic all the time. And what about the other direction? Drop down six from the perfect eighteen bodies and we have the Last Supper. And that’s the problem. Twelve is small enough to fit around the holiday dinner table—too intimate for many high schoolers to protect their autonomy on the days they need to, and too easily dominated by the bombast or bully, either of whom could be the teacher herself. By the time we shrink to six bodies, there is no place to hide at all, and not enough diversity in thought and experience to add the richness that can come from numbers. The small class is, in other words, potentially as difficult for a teacher to manage as the very large class. In one case, the problem is the number of potential interactions to manage. In the other case, it is the intensity of the potential interactions. As another teacher memorably put it, when a class gets too small, the students start acting “like siblings in the backseat of a car. There is simply no way for the cantankerous kids to get away from one another.” Here’s another comment from a high school teacher. He had recently had a class of thirty-two and hated it. “When I face a class that large, the first thought that I have is ‘Damn it, every time I collect something to mark, I am going to spend hours of time here at the school when I could be with my own kids.’” But he didn’t want to teach a class of fewer than twenty either: The life source of any class is discussion, and that tends to need a certain critical mass to get going. I teach classes right now with students who simply don’t discuss anything, and it is brutal at times. If the numbers get too low, discussion suffers. That seems counterintuitive because I would think that the quiet kids who would hesitate to speak in a class of thirty-two would do so more readily in a class of sixteen. But that hasn’t really been my experience. The quiet ones tend to be quiet regardless. And if the class is too small, among the speakers, you don’t have enough breadth of opinion perhaps to get things really going. There is also something hard to pin down about energy level. A very small group tends to lack the sort of energy that comes from the friction between people. And a really, really small class? Beware. I had a class of nine students in grade-twelve Academic French. Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? It was a nightmare! You can’t get any kind of conversation or discussion going in the target language. It’s difficult to play games to reinforce vocabulary, grammar skills, et cetera. The momentum just isn’t there. The economist Jesse Levin has done some fascinating work along these same lines, looking at Dutch schoolchildren. He counted how many peers children had in their class—that is, students at a similar level of academic ability—and found that the number of peers had a surprising correlation with academic performance, particularly for struggling students.5 In other words, if you are a student—particularly a poor student—what you need is to have people around you asking the same questions, wrestling with the same issues, and worrying about the same things as you are, so that you feel a little less isolated and a little more normal. This is the problem with really small classes, Levin argues. When there are too few students in a room, the chances that children are surrounded by a critical mass of other people like them start to get really low. Taken too far, Levin says, class-size reduction “steals away the peers that struggling students learn from.” Can you see why Teresa DeBrito was so worried about Shepaug Valley? She is the principal of a middle school, teaching children at precisely the age when they begin to make the difficult transition to adolescence. They are awkward and self-conscious and anxious about seeming too smart. Getting them to engage, to move beyond simple question-and-answer sessions with their teacher, she said, can be “like pulling teeth.” She wanted lots of interesting and diverse voices in her classrooms, and the kind of excitement that comes from a critical mass of students grappling with the same problem. How do you do that in a half-empty room? “The more students you have,” she continued, “the more variety you can have in those discussions. If it’s too small with kids this age, it’s like they have a muzzle on.” She didn’t say it, but you could imagine her thinking that if someone went and built a massive subdivision on the gently rolling meadow next to the school, she wouldn’t be that unhappy. “I started in Meriden as a middle-school math teacher,” DeBrito went on. Meriden is a middle- and lower-income city in another part of the state. “My largest class was twenty-nine kids.” She talked about how hard that was, how much work it took to follow and know and respond to that many students. “You’ve got to be able to have eyes in the back of your head. You’ve got to be able to hear what’s happening when you’re working with a particular group. You have to really be on top of your game when you have that many kids in a classroom so that over there in a corner, they’re not just talking about something that has nothing to do with what they’re supposed to be working on.” But then she made a confession. She liked teaching that class. It was one of the best years of her career. The great struggle for someone teaching math to twelve- and thirteen-year-olds is to make it seem exciting—and twenty-nine kids was exciting. “There were so many more peers to interact with,” she said. “They weren’t always relating with just this one group. There was more opportunity to vary your experiences. And that’s the real issue—what can be done to enliven, enrich, and engage the child, so they aren’t just being passive.” Did she want twenty-nine children in every classroom at Shepaug? Of course not. DeBrito knew that she was a bit unusual and that the ideal number for most teachers was lower than that. Her point was simply that on the question of class size, we have become obsessed with what is good about small classrooms and oblivious of what can also be good about large classes. It is a strange thing, isn’t it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks of the other students in the classroom with your child as competitors for the attention of the teacher and not allies in the adventure of learning? When she thought back to that year in Meriden, DeBrito got a faraway look in her eyes. “I like the noise. I like to hear them interact. Oh, it was fun.” 6. A half-hour drive up the road from Shepaug Valley, in the town of Lakeville, Connecticut, is a school called Hotchkiss. It is considered one of the premier private boarding schools in the United States. Tuition is almost $50,000 a year. The school has two lakes, two hockey rinks, four telescopes, a golf course, and twelve pianos. And not just any pianos, but, as the school takes pains to point out, Steinway pianos, the most prestigious piano money can buy.6 Hotchkiss is the kind of place that spares no expense in the education of its students. The school’s average class size? Twelve students. The same condition that Teresa DeBrito dreads, Hotchkiss—just up the road—advertises as its greatest asset. “[Our] learning environment,” the school proudly declares, “is intimate, interactive, and inclusive.” Why does a school like Hotchkiss do something that so plainly makes its students worse off? One answer is that the school isn’t thinking of its students. It is thinking of the parents of its students, who see things like golf courses and Steinway pianos and small classes as evidence that their $50,000 is well spent. But the better answer is that Hotchkiss has simply fallen into the trap that wealthy people and wealthy institutions and wealthy countries—all Goliaths—too often fall into: the school assumes that the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages. They don’t, of course. That’s the lesson of the inverted-U curve. It is good to be bigger and stronger than your opponent. It is not so good to be so big and strong that you are a sitting duck for a rock fired at 150 miles per hour. Goliath didn’t get what he wanted, because he was too big. The man from Hollywood was not the parent he wanted to be, because he was too rich. Hotchkiss is not the school it wants to be, because its classes are too small. We all assume that being bigger and stronger and richer is always in our best interest. Vivek Ranadiv?, a shepherd boy named David, and the principal of Shepaug Valley Middle School will tell you that it isn’t. 1 The definitive analysis of the many hundreds of class-size studies was done by the educational economist Eric Hanushek, The Evidence on Class Size. Hanushek says, “Probably no aspect of schools has been studied as much as class size. This work has been going on for years, and there is no reason to believe that there is any consistent relationship with achievement.” 2 The psychologists Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant argue, in a brilliant paper, that, in fact, nearly everything of consequence follows the inverted U: “Across many domains of psychology, one finds that X increases Y to a point, and then it decreases Y.…There is no such thing as an unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.” 3 My father, a mathematician and stickler on these matters, begs to differ. I am oversimplifying things, he points out. Inverted-U curves actually have four parts. Stage one, where the curve is linear. Stage two, where “the initial linear relation has flagged.” This is the area of diminishing marginal returns. Stage three, where extra resources have no effect on the outcome. And stage four, in which more resources are counterproductive. He writes: “We take a term in house construction—footing—to label the first stage, and then use the mnemonic ‘footing, flagging, flat, and falling.’” 4 A classic inverted-U curve can be seen in the relationship between alcohol consumption and health. If you go from not drinking at all to drinking one glass of wine a week, you’ll live longer. And if you drink two glasses a week, you’ll live a little bit longer, and three glasses a little bit longer still—all the way up to about seven glasses a week. (These numbers are for men, not women.) That’s the upslope: the more, the merrier. Then there’s the stretch from, say, seven to fourteen glasses of wine a week. You’re not helping yourself by drinking more in that range. But you’re not particularly hurting yourself either. That’s the middle part of the curve. Finally, there’s the right side of the curve: the downslope. That’s when you get past fourteen glasses of wine a week and drinking more starts to leave you with a shorter life. Alcohol is not inherently good or bad or neutral. It starts out good, becomes neutral, and ends up bad. 5 The clear exception: children with serious behavioral or learning disabilities. For special-needs students, the inverted-U curve is shifted far to the right. 6 Although the Hotchkiss website claims to have twelve Steinway pianos, the school’s music director has said elsewhere that they actually have twenty—plus a Fazioli, which is the Rolls-Royce of performance grand pianos. That’s more than a million dollars’ worth of pianos. If you are playing “Chopsticks” in a Hotchkiss practice room, it’s going to sound really good. Chapter Three Caroline Sacks “If I’d gone to the University of Maryland, I’d still be in science.” 1. One hundred and fifty years ago, when Paris was at the center of the art world, a group of painters used to gather every evening at Caf? Guerbois, in the neighborhood of Batignolles. The ringleader of the group was ?douard Manet. He was one of the oldest and most established members of the group, a handsome and gregarious man in his early thirties who dressed in the height of fashion and charmed all those around him with his energy and humor. Manet’s great friend was Edgar Degas. He was among the few who could match wits with Manet; the two shared a fiery spirit and a sharp tongue and would sometimes descend into bitter argument. Paul C?zanne, tall and gruff, would come and sit moodily in the corner, his trousers held up with string. “I am not offering you my hand,” C?zanne said to Manet once before slumping down by himself. “I haven’t washed for eight days.” Claude Monet, self-absorbed and strong willed, was a grocer’s son who lacked the education of some of the others. His best friend was the “easygoing urchin” Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who, over the course of their friendship, would paint eleven portraits of Monet. The moral compass of the group was Camille Pissarro: fiercely political, loyal, and principled. Even C?zanne—the most ornery and alienated of men—loved Pissarro. Years later, he would identify himself as “C?zanne, pupil of Pissarro.” Together this group of remarkable painters would go on to invent modern art with the movement known as Impressionism. They painted one another and painted next to one another and supported one another emotionally and financially, and today their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But in the 1860s, they were struggling. Monet was broke. Renoir once had to bring him bread so that he wouldn’t starve. Not that Renoir was in any better shape. He didn’t have enough money to buy stamps for his letters. There were virtually no dealers interested in their paintings. When the art critics mentioned the Impressionists—and there was a small army of art critics in Paris in the 1860s—it was usually to belittle them. Manet and his friends sat in the dark-paneled Caf? Guerbois with its marble-topped tables and flimsy metal chairs and drank and ate and argued about politics and literature and art and most specifically about their careers—because the Impressionists all wrestled with one crucial question: What should they do about the Salon? Art played an enormous role in the cultural life of France in the nineteenth century. Painting was regulated by a government department called the Ministry of the Imperial House and the Fine Arts, and it was considered a profession in the same way that medicine or the law is a profession today. A promising painter would start at the ?cole Nationale Sup?rieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he would receive a rigorous and formal education, progressing from the copying of drawings to the painting of live models. At each stage of his education, there would be competitions. Those who did poorly would be weeded out. Those who did well would win awards and prestigious fellowships, and at the pinnacle of the profession was the Salon, the most important art exhibition in all of Europe. Every year each of the painters of France submitted two or three of his finest canvases to a jury of experts. The deadline was the first of April. Artists from around the world pushed handcarts loaded with canvases through Paris’s cobblestoned streets, bringing their work to the Palais de l’Industrie, an exhibition hall built for the Paris World Fair between the Champs-?lys?es and the Seine. Throughout the next few weeks, the jury would vote on each painting in turn. Those deemed unacceptable would be stamped with the red letter “R” for rejected. Those accepted would be hung on the walls of the Palais, and over the course of six weeks beginning in early May, as many as a million people would throng the exhibition, jostling for position in front of the biggest and best-known artists’ works and jeering at the works they did not like. The best paintings were given medals. The winners were celebrated and saw the value of their paintings soar. The losers limped home and went back to work. “There are in Paris scarcely fifteen art-lovers capable of liking a painting without Salon approval,” Renoir once said. “There are 80,000 who won’t buy so much as a nose from a painter who is not hung at the Salon.” The Salon made Renoir so anxious that one year he went down to the Palais during jury deliberations and waited outside, hoping to find out early whether he got in or not. But then becoming shy, he introduced himself as a friend of Renoir’s. Another of the Guerbois regulars, Fr?d?ric Bazille, once confessed, “I have an appalling fear of getting rejected.” When the artist Jules Holtzapffel didn’t make it into the Salon of 1866, he shot himself in the head. “The members of the jury have rejected me. Therefore I have no talent,” read his suicide note. “I must die.” For a painter in nineteenth-century France, the Salon was everything, and the reason that the Salon was such an issue for the group of Impressionists was that time and again, the Salon jury turned them down. The Salon’s attitude was traditional. “Works were expected to be microscopically accurate, properly ‘finished’ and formally framed, with proper perspective and all the familiar artistic conventions,” the art historian Sue Roe writes. “Light denoted high drama, darkness suggested gravitas. In narrative painting, the scene should not only be ‘accurate,’ but should also set a morally acceptable tone. An afternoon at the Salon was like a night at the Paris Op?ra: audiences expected to be uplifted and entertained. For the most part, they knew what they liked, and expected to see what they knew.” The kinds of paintings that won medals, Roe says, were huge, meticulously painted canvases showing scenes from French history or mythology, with horses and armies or beautiful women, with titles like Soldier’s Departure, Young Woman Weeping over a Letter, and Abandoned Innocence. The Impressionists had an entirely different idea about what constituted art. They painted everyday life. Their brushstrokes were visible. Their figures were indistinct. To the Salon jury and the crowds thronging the Palais, their work looked amateurish, even shocking. In 1865, the Salon, surprisingly, accepted a painting by Manet of a prostitute, called Olympia, and the painting sent all of Paris into an uproar. Guards had to be placed around the painting to keep the crowds of spectators at bay. “An atmosphere of hysteria and even fear predominated,” the historian Ross King writes. “Some spectators collapsed in ‘epidemics of crazed laughter’ while others, mainly women, turned their heads from the picture in fright.” In 1868, Renoir, Bazille, and Monet managed to get paintings accepted by the Salon. But halfway through the Salon’s six-week run, their works were removed from the main exhibition space and exiled to the d?potoir—the rubbish dump—a small, dark room in the back of the building, where paintings considered to be failures were relocated. It was almost as bad as not being accepted at all. The Salon was the most important art show in the world. Everyone at the Caf? Guerbois agreed on that. But the acceptance by the Salon came with a cost: it required creating the kind of art that they did not find meaningful, and they risked being lost in the clutter of other artists’ work. Was it worth it? Night after night, the Impressionists argued over whether they should keep knocking on the Salon door or strike out on their own and stage a show just for themselves. Did they want to be a Little Fish in the Big Pond of the Salon or a Big Fish in a Little Pond of their own choosing? In the end, the Impressionists made the right choice, which is one of the reasons that their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But this same dilemma comes up again and again in our own lives, and often we don’t choose so wisely. The inverted-U curve reminds us that there is a point at which money and resources stop making our lives better and start making them worse. The story of the Impressionists suggests a second, parallel problem. We strive for the best and attach great importance to getting into the finest institutions we can. But rarely do we stop and consider—as the Impressionists did—whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest. There are many examples of this, but few more telling than the way we think about where to attend university. 2. Caroline Sacks1 grew up on the farthest fringes of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. She went to public schools through high school. Her mother is an accountant and her father works for a technology company. As a child she sang in the church choir and loved to write and draw. But what really excited her was science. “I did a lot of crawling around in the grass with a magnifying glass and a sketchbook, following bugs and drawing them,” Sacks says. She is a thoughtful and articulate young woman, with a refreshing honesty and directness. “I was really, really into bugs. And sharks. So for a while I thought I was going to be a veterinarian or an ichthyologist. Eugenie Clark was my hero. She was the first woman diver. She grew up in New York City in a family of immigrants and ended up rising to the top of her field, despite having a lot of ‘Oh, you’re a woman, you can’t go under the ocean’ setbacks. I just thought she was great. My dad met her and was able to give me a signed photo and I was really excited. Science was always a really big part of what I did.” Sacks sailed through high school at the top of her class. She took a political science course at a nearby college while she was still in high school, as well as a multivariant calculus course at the local community college. She got As in both, as well as an A in every class she took in high school. She got perfect scores on every one of her Advanced Placement pre-college courses. The summer after her junior year in high school, her father took her on a whirlwind tour of American universities. “I think we looked at five schools in three days,” she says. “It was Wesleyan, Brown, Providence College, Boston College, and Yale. Wesleyan was fun but very small. Yale was cool, but I definitely didn’t fit the vibe.” But Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, won her heart. It is small and exclusive, situated in the middle of a nineteenth-century neighborhood of redbrick Georgian and Colonial buildings on the top of a gently sloping hill. It might be the most beautiful college campus in the United States. She applied to Brown, with the University of Maryland as her backup. A few months later, she got a letter in the mail. She was in. “I expected that everyone at Brown would be really rich and worldly and knowledgeable,” she says. “Then I got there, and everybody seemed to be just like me—intellectually curious and kind of nervous and excited and not sure whether they’d be able to make friends. It was very reassuring.” The hardest part was choosing which courses to take, because she loved the sound of everything. She ended up in Introductory Chemistry, Spanish, a class called the Evolution of Language, and Botanical Roots of Modern Medicine, which she describes as “sort of half botany class, half looking at uses of indigenous plants as medicine and what kind of chemical theories they are based on.” She was in heaven. 3. Did Caroline Sacks make the right choice? Most of us would say that she did. When she went on that whirlwind tour with her father, she ranked the colleges she saw, from best to worst. Brown University was number one. The University of Maryland was her backup because it was not in any way as good a school as Brown. Brown is a member of the Ivy League. It has more resources, more academically able students, more prestige, and more accomplished faculty than the University of Maryland. In the rankings of American colleges published every year by the magazine U.S. News