This year marks the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death. Widely considered one of the greatest polymaths in human history, Leonardo was an inventor, artist, musician, architect, engineer, anatomist, botanist, geologist, historian, and cartographer.
Though his artistic output was small, Leonardo’s impact was great, reflecting his deep knowledge of the body, his extensive studies of light and the human face, and his sfumato (Italian for “smoky”) technique, which allowed for incredibly lifelike images. Leonardo regarded artists as divine apprentices, writing “We, by our arts, may be called the grandsons of God.”
Twenty-first-century scholars at MIT ranked him the sixth most influential person who ever lived. Like Rembrandt and Michelangelo, he is so renowned that he is known by only his first name. Yet despite his fame, there are things about Leonardo that many people today find surprising.
1. Shady Parentage
Leonardo was born out of wedlock on April 15, 1452. His father, Piero, was a wealthy notary, and his mother, Caterina, was a local peasant girl. Although the circumstances of his birth would place Leonardo at a disadvantage in terms of education and inheritance, biographer Walter Isaacson regards it as a terrific stroke of luck. Rather than being expected to become a notary like his father, Leonardo was instead free to develop the full range of his genius. People surmise that it also imbued him with a special sense of urgency to establish his own identity and prove himself.
2. Physical Beauty
Leonardo created some of the world’s most beautiful works of art, including the “Last Supper” and the “Mona Lisa.” In his own day, he was known as an exceptionally attractive person. One of Leonardo’s biographers describes him as a person of “outstanding physical beauty who displayed infinite grace in everything he did.” A contemporary described him as a “well proportioned, graceful, and good-looking man” who “wore a rose-pink tunic” and had “beautiful curling hair, carefully styled, which came down to the middle of his chest.” Leonardo is thought to have entered into long-term and possibly sexual relationships with two of his pupils, both artists in their own right.
The paintings generally attributed to Leonardo number fewer than 20, while his notebooks contain over 7,000 pages. They’re the best source of knowledge about Leonardo, housed today in locations such as Windsor Castle, the Louvre and the Spanish National Library in Madrid. Their diverse content ranges across drawings—most famously, Vitruvian Man—notes of things he wanted to investigate, scientific and technical diagrams and shopping lists. They comprise perhaps the most remarkable monument to human curiosity and creativity ever produced by a single person. Yet when Leonardo penned them, they were just loose pieces of paper of different types and sizes. His friends bound them into “notebooks” only after his death.
4. Outsider’s Education
As a result of his illegitimacy, Leonardo received a rather rudimentary formal education consisting primarily of business arithmetic. He never attended university and sometimes referred to himself as an “unlettered man.” Yet his lack of formal schooling also freed him from the constraints of tradition, helping to instill in him a determination to question authority and place greater reliance on his own experience than opinions expressed in books. As a result, he became a firsthand observer and experimenter, uninterested in serving as a mouthpiece for the classics.
Meaningful innovation education exposes kids to this vital element.
I love watching the rise of makerspaces in schools. More and more students have access to 3D printers, kid-friendly coding programs, and other great technical tools. This investment in STEM project-based learning means that students with all kinds of learning styles are directly engaged in issues critical to their future.
But there’s a key ingredient missing. When you give students access to awesome tools and the freedom to design, what happens when they hit on something great? Most often, that’s where the project stalls. In the business world, that’s when a patent comes in.
Teaching patenting concepts at a young age is not only feasible, but I believe it’s a way to help women and other underrepresented groups play a bigger role in tech.
Tinker While You Learn
At the Future of Education Technology Conference in Orlando, Fla., I saw some amazing curricula and technology demos [Ed. note: Clare spoke there]. Schools have a huge selection of tools to teach engineering to young students.
Engineering, however, is only one component of the innovation process. Creativity, business and the law also play a critical role. Patents motivate people to invest in the arduous process of inventing by giving them economic ownership for continued development. For a startup, a patent buys you time to do the hard work of bringing your idea to life. Patent education is an important ingredient in helping kids become real-world problem solvers.
Patent education also lays a foundation for financial rewards in the workplace. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office finds that wages in patent-based industries are 74% higher than other verticals, and this premium is growing. This is according to the USPTO’s latest update to “Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy.”
Despite the countless books and articles written about innovation, we don’t have a good understanding about what drives innovation within organizations. Instead, we have multiple, often conflicting, theories about what makes innovation happen. We follow the one that resonates best with us or is in vogue. As a result, innovation efforts at many companies suffocate as they stumble along, thinking they are on the right path but not really knowing where they are headed.
The way to build an environment where innovation happens consistently is to make certain that the foundational building blocks that drive innovation are present. Few companies have built such an environment, what I call an innovation biome . The companies that have built this environment are the ones we admire as they are the ones that bring the most innovative offerings to the world.
In the rest of the companies, though, the most common reason that innovations fail is this: others reject an idea because they don’t have the right tools to evaluate the idea.
Overcoming disbelievers and naysayers
In most companies, when someone has an idea it has to climb up several layers of management, requiring a yes at every level for it to keep climbing.
A single no going up the management staircase can kill an idea. Since no one is ever penalized for saying no (you only get hurt for saying yes to the wrong thing), companies often develop cultures that are conservative and not conducive to innovation.
Just about every major innovation in history was rejected by the experts of the time.
Whether it was the earliest people who believed the earth is round, or Darwin’s theory of evolution, or Pasteur’s theory of germs, disbelievers and naysayers have always shown up in full force. This has never stopped. Experts thought the Personal Computer would not be successful, nor the automobile, nor the telephone (presumably the telephone was never supposed to catch on because there was no shortage of messenger boys).
This still happens every day in companies around the world.
The more of the five (or more) senses brought into the learning process, the more likely you are to retain what you’ve learned. This infographic from Mia MacMeekin shows 27 ways to enhance learning retention.
As an organization, critical thinking is at the core of what we do, from essays and lists to models and teacher training. (You can check out What It Means To Think Critically for a wordier survey of the intent of critical thinking.)
For this post, we’ve gathered various critical thinking resources. As you’ll notice, conversation is a fundamental part of critical thinking, if for no other reason than the ability to identify a line of reasoning, analyze, evaluate, and respond to it accurately and thoughtfully is among the most common opportunities for critical thinking for students in everyday life. Who is saying what? What’s valid and what’s not? How should I respond?
This varied and purposely broad collection includes resources for teaching critical thinking, from books and videos to graphics and models, rubrics and taxonomies to presentations and debate communities. Take a look, and let us know in the comments which you found the most–or least–useful.
3. It’s difficult to create a collection of critical thinking resources without talking about failures in thinking, so here’s A Logical Fallacies Primer in PowerPoint format.
7. An Intro To Critical Thinking, a 10-minute video from wireless philosophy that takes given premises, and walks the viewer through valid and erroneous conclusions
There are so many components to a killer website design. But all too often I see people overlook minor details, like typography.
I know what some of you might be thinking. How important can a website’s font really be?
Believe it or not, something as simple as choosing the right font can have a major impact on conversion. Plus, website fonts affect the overall appearance of your site.
Now it’s unlikely that you’ve been on a website and thought, “Wow! I absolutely love this font!”
This just isn’t something that our minds are trained to look for and I’m not expecting you to find a font that’s going to “wow” your website visitors. But, I can guarantee that you’ve been on websites that have fonts that were generic, unappealing, difficult to read, or felt out of place. You obviously don’t want people to have that impression of your website.
Why your website font matters
Here’s something to consider: different website fonts can change the reader’s perception of a particular topic.
Errol Morris conducted a survey in an article published in The New York Times in 2012. He included a passage from a book that claimed we live in an ear of unprecedented safety, and followed the passage up with two questions:
Is the claim true? (yes or no)
How confident are you with the answer? (slightly, moderately, very)
As it turns out, Morris didn’t care about anyone’s opinion. He just wanted to know if the font could influence their answers. Forty thousand people unknowingly participated in this experiment. While everyone read the same passage; they did not all see it in the same typography.
Check out these results.
This graph shows all of the respondents who agreed to the first question. Morris took their levels of confidence in the second question and assigned a weighted value to each response.
In doing so, it’s clear that there was a difference between how confident people were in agreeing with the claims being made based on the font they were presented in. Now let’s look and see the results of respondents who disagreed with the passage.
Compare the two graphs. Do you notice any similarities?
As you can see, the Baskerville font was ranked highest for weighted agreement and lowest for weighted disagreement. Comic Sans font ranked lowest for weighted agreement, and ranked high for weighted disagreement.
Based on this data, Morris was able to conclude that fonts can influence the way people perceive information. Basically, the typeface can actually affect the credibility of your website.
In short — yes, website fonts matter.
The best Google Font pairings for 2019
You don’t want to have the same font everywhere on your site; that’s too boring. Mix it up! But make sure you pick fonts that go well together. I created this guide to help you do just that.
Leadership comes with hard work but successful leadership entails more than just laboriousness, it calls for special traits that only a select few possess. Whether these traits are skills that can be developed or are a matter of biological endowment is something which still needs scientific back-up. Generally speaking, successful leaders do have something in common. They share a set of common characteristics such as : confidence, focus, trust, far-sightedness, accountability, enthusiasm, persistence, communication, determination, love of their work, and patience. Also, successful leaders are a joy to be around. They listen empathically and are a source of inspiration and zeal to the people around them.
The TED list below features some really wonderful talks on how to be a leader and how to inspire others to action.
Take careful notice that none of the principles these wealthy parents seek costs a single penny to develop. I don’t think they know that. That everybody could do one or all of these things with their own kids just as well as Exeter or St. Paul’s could. — John Taylor Gatto
(Note: Rather than put everything in quotes, I’d prefer to make this article more readable by keeping John’s words in normal text. I have shortened and condensed John’s speech for quick reading but these are his ideas and words. I’m the beneficiary of John’s wisdom and experience while making them more accessible to other homeschooling parents who may be on the same path.)
16 Things Parents of Expensive Boarding Schools Want for their Children’s Education
Now let’s take a look at what the parents at the finest and most expensive private boarding schools in America want from schooling. I’m talking about the twenty ritziest private boarding schools in America. Schools like Groton, and St. Paul’s, and Deerfield, and Kent.
The schools have had an enormous effect on 20th century Society through the efforts of their graduates. Because of that importance, I’ve reduced the practices in these places to a formula so that you can see clearly that there’s nothing they do that isn’t easily within your reach. The formula looks like this in an elite boarding school.
But, I’m going to warn you in advance to take careful notice that none of the principles these wealthy parents seek costs the single penny to develop. I don’t think they know that. That everybody could do one or all of these things with their own kids just as well as Exeter or St. Paul’s could.
Elite private schools want their children to learn good manners and to display those manners to everybody, even the humblest person, without thinking about it. So the manors would be reflexive. That’s because they know that manners will make their children welcome everywhere, even in strange settings where they’re not known, someone will recognize that this is a well-bred person.
The second thing elite private school parents want is hard intellectual knowledge taught to their children, undiluted; they don’t want it watered down.
Elite private school parents want their children to be advised only by people that they personally respect and Trust.
The next thing elite private school parents want is that their children be taught love and appreciation for the land, for the natural world of plants and animals, not for the scientific knowledge but because they recognize that unless you have a relation with nature, that’s easy your life becomes lonely and barren and abstract. That’s why these rich kids ride horses and sailboats. Not for the competitive sports aspect of it, because it puts them in touch with nature.
Next, they want their children to develop a public sense of decorum so that they can adapt naturally to every setting they find themselves in without provoking anger or opposition.
They want a common core of Western culture taught, not so they can pass tests, but so that all the generations the grandparents the parents and the children are certain to be comfortable with a shared set of ideas and tastes and values.
Elite boarding school parents want leadership exercises taught to their children. That’s an important ongoing theme of curriculum. They are not interested in their children being part of a managed herd.
A major concern of boarding school parents is that their children get individual attention.Their children are in small classes. By small, I mean nine or less.
They want continuous pressure put on their children to stretch their individual limits. That is, if you find four or five talents emerging, you don’t allow the kid to be satisfied with minimal performance.
There’s an emphasis in elite schools on hands-on, face-to-face experience. You never go to a book if you can go to the person who wrote the book or someone close to that person. You get as close to the origin and the idea as possible.
There’s an emphasis on writing. Homeschoolers read well but they don’t necessarily write so well. 300 words is good enough for a lot of uses. But if you can write a thousand words you can hold your own in any sort of debate, you can write op-ed pieces for the newspaper …it isn’t very hard to do.
They want kids at elite schools to develop the power of accurate observation. They don’t have to be Picasso or Rembrandt. They have to accurately transcribe what they’re able to see. The reason Charles Darwin’s book made such an enormous impact was Darwin drew; there are thousands of drawings in the book. And they’re not Rembrandt, but they’re accurate enough that you can see what the thing is.
Have experience with the master creations of music, of painting, of sculptor, of architecture, dance, poetry, the other arts. And have a familiarity with folk art as well.
Scientific knowledge of the sky above and the earth below.
Practice in learning how to handle pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, and intellectual pain. If you wonder where the tremendous American interest in sports came from, it comes from the aristocratic boarding schools of England.
The development of a determination to demand the highest quality performance from yourself. Even if other people say hey that was wonderful, and you know that it’s a lot less than you could have done I think you’re better off.
Conclusion
Nothing I thought was an education, and nothing that the wealthiest people in the country think is an education costs anything at all. Fifty million public school children in the United States could be reared this way. It wouldn’t cost anything.
In 2012, Richard Grove conducted and produced a 6-hour video interview with John Taylor Gatto. For those who don’t have the time to read and digest J.T. Gatto’s excellent work in book form, this interview provides an alternative. I’ve found it to be ideally listened to at double-speed! That makes it an ideal use of the next 2.5 hours of your time as John is a game-changer in the area of education.
The transcript of the interview is 41,500 words. All the material (and excerpts, below) is owned and copyrighted by Tragedy and Hope and please consider supporting their work in creating, presenting, and posting such presentations on Youtube.
The excerpts, below, are 1/20th of the entire transcript. They are not a summary of the presentation.
RG: is Richard Grove JTG: is John Taylor Gatto
RG: Is there any connection between frustration and aggression? And what effect does schooling have on that?
JTG: Well, you answer your own question by asking it. The connection is intimate. School removes your volition in all important ways, even who you speak to. Are not they arts of association as valuable or more valuable than anything else you learn when you’re young?
Getting Into Harvard
I read how executive hiring is done and it almost never has to do with your training in whatever you’re been hired for. I’m thinking of Apple now, I believe. Is this the person we’d like to have around three years from now, bend an elbow with, or play golf with or just talk with? And that’s why you’re passed from set of executives, to set of executives. So they can sign off, yeah he’s ok, you know… We don’t tell kids that. It’s people who have the highest grade point average in the highest SAT scores. Well I spent an hour, not so long ago, within 10 years, with the admissions officer of Harvard College and, about 30 years ago an hour with the admissions director at Princeton. And let me tell you their polite dismissal of grades and SAT scores was intimidating to listen to. As if you’d have to be crazy to let somebody in.
Let me see if I can condense how you get into Harvard or Princeton. Of course, you can get into both by donating a building but how do other people get in? They are being analyzed on the basis of their ability to either become wealthy or famous. Either one will work. Fame is like wearing a billboard saying I went to Princeton. There’s that actress Jodie Foster, “I went to Princeton”. Look at where the rest of the actors and directors went, they didn’t go anywhere (laughter). But Jodie did so that’s one we hear about. The Harvard lady said, “we look for a record of excellence and what this excellence consists of.” It’s sometime in the first 18 years of your life, figuring out how to add value to the people around you. She didn’t say this in a way that catches public attention, so you might walk across the United States or bicycle the perimeter of the country or row across the Atlantic Ocean, as a physical way. You might start a little charity or set up some weather service or some pollution monitoring around Hartford. There are a substantial number, a small fraction but a substantial number, of kids doing this as we sit here. They’re writing a record of being able to add value to the community around them.
Hobbies
And then the other fellow, the Princeton guy said the same thing in different words. I asked him in 1968 roughly, asked him what part of a resume submitted to you do you look at first. The answer metaphorically caused my jaw to open. “Hobbies,” he said. I said, “I’ve been taught all my life to leave that off because it’s not germane.” He said, “on the contrary, it’s the only honest information you’re likely to get.” How did someone spend their time when it’s their free choice to spend? He said “it’s a window into their mind and their heart”.
What Kind of Hobbies?
I said what kind of hobbies? He said, “well ideally someone would have a physical hobby, an intellectual hobby and a social hobby”. That would show they are exploring these large… well, physical hobbies you mean football, baseball? Well, he said “it’s better than nothing but we would prefer not to see team sports”. I said I’d been told all my life that team sports identify your ability to work in a team. He said what happens in a team sport is if you decide to dog it, it’s very hard to tell which guy on the line has dogged it or not, or which running back has gone down quicker than he should have gone down. He said we prefer solo hobbies that involve physical danger. You mean you want kids to put their necks at risk? For example, what? He said well horseback riding is a dead giveaway. The horse weighs a half ton or more. If you do trail riding and you don’t know what you’re doing, your head gets caught on the branch and you’re the headless horseman. If the horse doesn’t like you it’ll roll over on top of you. I know immediately because the last time I rode a horse was down in Veracruz, Mexico and the horse didn’t like me and took me out on the main highway with crazed Mexican drivers going a hundred miles an hour in 18 wheelers. And it laid down on top of me. I was terrified! I could see these trucks coming. I didn’t like it and it’s the last time I rode. So he said you have to actually know what you’re doing. You can’t say is this an A job, or a B job . If you live in are intact, it is.
Then he said, “sailing a small boat”. These little 12 footers outside of land. If you don’t know what you’re doing you wind up in the middle of the Atlantic, you know. Or if wind comes up you can’t see landmarks because of the waves. I said, but those things are associated with the prosperous classes. What can somebody in ordinary circumstances do? He says well, we just let somebody in and this is probably one of the nicest factoids in my mind, in my life. We just let someone in who invented his own sport and kept records competing against himself, his past performance, his present performance. It was–get ready for this, visualize this—seat-less unicycle riding over broken terrain. If I had 10 lifetimes the plot of doing that wouldn’t occur to me. Aside from getting on a unicycle, let alone without a seat, let alone riding it over broken terrain. So they let him in because they knew he was on the fast track.
So we tell these lies and, of course, many of the people who tell the lie, believe the lie. Well surely they’re going to take valedictorians. Well, last year Harvard turned down eight out of every ten valedictorians who applied. And the two they took in, they didn’t take in because they were valedictorians. So by removing this component from the student imaginations y, u can control to some extent who even applies to Harvard and then who gets in. Because they don’t know what they’re doing. What’s the IT… “garbage in garbage out”.
Standardized Tests Don’t Matter
The evidence that all of us know standardized tests don’t measure what they claim they measure is that nobody, I mean nobody, that you encounter on the upper reaches of society would dream of hiring somebody on the basis of those tests or grade point averages. You’d be playing Russian roulette because they measure nothing. The grades largely measure that you memorize what you are told to memorize. I mean, there are a few other things but that’s the heart of it. So now you know you have somebody who’s obedient, and probably for a clerk that is a good measure. Not for someone who has to adapt to changing circumstances, you know, by the natural selection process of reality.
Schooled to the Point of Extinction
It’s fairly easy without being a wise guy or very learned as long as you retained the ability to think independently from the data in front of you, to penetrate the masks, the contentions that don’t conform to everyday reality. So no one will hire you as a CEO and ask you what your… but if you examine the data that’s available about big-time politicians. Now we have, and I don’t think it would surprise anybody, that George Bush, the most recent one was a C average high school/prep school and a C average at Yale. What does surprise people is that the candidate he ran against was a C average in prep school, in the C average at Yale, and the lower C average than George Bush. Kerry of Massachusetts. The best evidence that the nation has been schooled to the point of extinction is that they were fraternity brothers at Yale and I’ll skip its interesting reputation; it only has 15 members. And they were fraternity brothers at Yale. There’s 308 million of us! I mean, mathematically I wouldn’t know how to set the odds but they would be stupendous. No one mentioned it, or if they did it was to quickly get over that. That should have been headlines of the New York Times and the Washington Post. “Fraternity Brothers at Yale Run for President!”
That the Amish have done so well puts a realistic base of possibility under the ideal of an independent citizenry as the proper goal of schooling. — John Taylor Gatto
(Note: Rather than put everything in quotes, I’d prefer to make this article more readable by keeping John’s words in standard text. I have shortened and condensed John’s speech for quick reading but these are his ideas and words. I’m the beneficiary of John’s wisdom and experience while making them more accessible to other homeschooling parents who may be on the same path.)
Virtually every adult Amisher has an independent livelihood as the owner of a farm or a business.
There’s almost no crime in the community, no violence in the community, no alcoholism in the community, no divorce in the community, no drug taking. There’s a little bit of each of those things, but it’s so microscopic that when it happens, it makes the front page of newspapers because it just doesn’t happen.
They accept no government help with health care, with old-age assistance, or with schooling after the eighth grade, and for most of the century not even that. They were compelled by the government to accept 1 through 8 schooling.
The success rate of Amish in small business is 95% (the rate for non-Amish business is 15%.)
All Amish children have a chance to take an expense-paid sabbatical year away from Amish life when they arrive at the verge of adulthood. The Amish don’t want someone in the community who doesn’t want to be there… and that is a principal reason that this group has grown 3,000 percent in the 20th century.
Almost every group member, when interviewed by outside investigators, reports total satisfaction with their lives, whether they’re children or adults.
They don’t have high school educations, they don’t have specialized training, they don’t use computers, they don’t use electricity, they don’t use automobiles, and they don’t have training in how to create a marketing plan.
And yet, the resources that have transferred over from the farm are these: an entrepreneurial spirit, a willingness to take risks, innovativeness, a strong work ethic, a cheap family labor pool, and high standards of craftsmanship.
The Amish Fought the Law and the Amish Won
You can figure out a lot of what an Amish believes in education is from the things they fought the government about and won.
When the Supreme Court ruled they had to go to school from 1st to 8th grade, they were prepared, in mass, to go to prison unless concessions were made, and they won these concessions.
They demanded that any school be within walking distance of home, they would not allow their children to be carried on buses.
They refused large schools where pupils are sorted into different compartments and assigned different teachers every year.
They demanded that all school decisions had to be signed off by the parents.
They demanded a maximum eight-month school year.
They demanded the teachers who taught their children to be knowledgeable in, and sympathetic to, Amish values in rural ways. They refused to hand their children over to professional educators.
They insisted their children be taught that wisdom and academic knowledge are two different things.
They insisted that their kids have practical internships and apprenticeships supervised by the parents. They were prepared to go to jail and lose everything before they would surrender their children to any form of state indoctrination, called schooling, which would break up their families, their traditions, and their communities, and leave their children restless, trained to leap and jump but without purpose or direction not knowing where they would land.
An education to an Amish-er is being independent, living in a closed community, as a valuable neighbor, and living a godly life.
On the cusp of the 21st century where you and I are perched, it hardly seems possible for a definition of education like this to have survived and even thrived. Yet how can we explain the baffling Amish who do it their own way, in spite of expert advice, and have abundant prosperity and abundant happiness?
That the Amish have done so well puts a realistic base of possibility under the ideal of an independent citizenry as the proper goal of schooling. It’s something I hope you’ll think about.
