Esse sou eu

oh, mundo cruel

Universidades: autonomia não é autocracia
Há pessoas indignadas, é claro, com o que escrevi sobre as universidades. Outros me mandam quase tratados sobre o que seria o “verdadeiro problema” — às vezes, no plural — da área, não tocados por mim, nesse meu desvio direitista, sim, sim, sei... O que ninguém é capaz de me dizer é por que a universidade tem de ser “pública e gratuita” independentemente de sua clientela. Não entendi se terceiro grau gratuito é:
a) direito natural;
b) política social;
c) investimento público.
Direito natural, numa rápida vista d’olhos pelo conceito, não é. Política social, a julgar pelos principais beneficiários da mamata, também não. Quanto a ser um investimento do país, bem, aí seria preciso verificar o que efetivamente o Brasil está ganhando com isso. Vamos ver quanto de dinheiro nos custa o serviço em comparação com o que a universidade brasileira tem rendido em:
a) pesquisa;
b) atendimento às necessidades dos brasileiros.
Exigimos, com razão, eficiência de todo mundo, especialmente dos políticos. Por que não exigir também das universidades? Autonomia, sim, todo apoio. Autocracia, não.
Volto, a propósito, à observação que fiz sobre o R$ 1,2 bilhão que a USP tem em caixa, investido, certamente, no mercado financeiro — espero no mínimo isso, não? Só faltava o dinheiro estar parado. É verdade: universidades do mundo inteiro investem o seu dinheiro. São doações, no mais das vezes, que recebem de particulares. Não ficam estocando verba do orçamento público, que sai também do bolso dos que nunca botarão o pé num curso de medicina ou de direito. Os reitores se comportaram muito mal em chorar uma miséria que, definitivamente, não têm.
O episódio da universidade expõe um dado dramático da cultura política brasileira: todo mundo quer a democracia, desde que seja no quintal alheio. O que foi que o governador Serra pediu de tão grave a estes senhores? Que exponham os seus gastos, que os tornem públicos. Por que a universidade não quer ser submetida ao mesmo escrutínio das outras esferas da República?
Porque está com a boca torta. É mais uma das heranças invertidas do regime militar. Chamo de “herança invertida” certa disposição de fazer o rigoroso contrário de tudo o que se fazia durante a ditadura, ainda que esse contrário seja uma estupidez.
Temos aí a Constituição de 1988. Como a esquerda havia decretado que o regime militar era de exclusão, então saiu por aí “incluindo” direitos, sem nem querer saber de onde viriam os recursos. Deu no que deu. Como a autonomia universitária foi pra cucuia durante a ditadura, ao ser restabelecida, confundiu-se a dita-cuja com autocracia. Ela quer a grana pública e quer dar uma banana para os mecanismos de transparência nos gastos. E nem me venham com a história de que já prestam contas a este ou àquele tribunais. O governo federal tem o TCU, mas tem também o Siafi. Do que as universidades têm medo?
Essa história foi sendo meticulosamente plantada na mídia, numa escalada. Agora, os “aloprados” do PT querem greve. Se sou Serra, exponho todos os números das universidades estaduais num site especialmente criado para isso, mostro o quanto custa o serviço a cada paulista que nem sabe onde ficam USP, Unesp e Unicamp e digo aos reitores um sonoro: “Virem-se”.
Não sem antes tentar votar na Assembléia — será que isso é possível? Não sei — uma lei que atrele o repasse de recursos à existência efetiva de aulas. Vale dizer: sem aula, sem grana. Quem paga tem a preferência. O público paga. Pode, por meio dos poderes constituídos, exigir que o serviço seja prestado.

http://www.reinaldoazevedo.com.br

vários comentários:

Primeiro, acho um pé no saco essa coisa de ser primeiro ainda que de escola pública. Passar em primeiro no vestibular não significa taxa de sucesso na vida, etc, etc, etc. Aliás, ai´ esta´ uma pesquisa que os mano FFLCH (ops, agora temos um: desculpa, Aldo ) podiam fazer para passar o tempo. Qual é a relação entre estar entre os primeiros no vestibular e "se dar bem na vida" (ok, "se dar bem na vida" é subjetivo, mas eles podiam perder tempo pensando numa boa definição). Conheci um mano desses retardados no IFUSP: o cara era bom, mas retardado...

Outra coisa é o mano ganhar pontos por ser pardo (whatever that means) e/ou de escola pública. Deplorável...

E outra é que o mano estudou em colégio militar, que não é colégio público no sentido "pooobre, etc, etc"

Enfim, notícia idiota que só coloquei aqui pq chamou minha atenção por ter tanta bobagem junta....


11 - Aluno de escola pública passa em 1º na Unicamp

João Francisco, que se declarou pardo, foi beneficiado por ação afirmativa


Maurício Simionato escreve para a “Agência Folha”:

Ele tem 17 anos, se declara pardo, estudou em colégio militar desde a quinta série, não fez cursinho e foi aprovado em sete das principais universidades do país neste ano.

João Francisco Ferreira de Souza soube ontem que é o primeiro colocado geral no vestibular da Unicamp (Universidade Estadual de Campinas) de 2007.

Aprovado no curso de engenharia química, Souza cursou o ensino médio em colégio militar de Campo Grande (MS), cidade onde o pai era tenente-coronel do Exército.

Por se declarar pardo, Souza largou com dez pontos a mais no vestibular da Unicamp -medida prevista em programa de ação afirmativa e inclusão social da instituição. Também ganhou 30 pontos extras por ter cursado o ensino médio em escola pública.

Sem os 40 pontos, segundo a universidade, ele alcançaria a segunda ou a terceira colocação geral do concurso. Com eles, chegou a 759 pontos. Segundo a assessoria de imprensa da instituição, a maior pontuação obtida por uma calouro da Unicamp foi de 765 pontos.

O estudante diz que a disciplina militar dada pelos pais influenciou seu desempenho. "Não sou gênio. Sou organizado no horário para estudar. Em casa há regras bem definidas."

Souza conseguiu a vaga no colégio militar há sete anos por ser filho de oficial e porque morava na cidade havia menos de dois anos. Na época, a família ainda vivia em Brasília e ele estava na quinta série.

"Estudar nunca foi uma tortura para mim. Leio de tudo um pouco. Mas não deixo de me divertir e de sair com os amigos. Meu sonho agora é ser pesquisador ou cientista."

O estudante foi aprovado ainda em mais seis universidades, entre elas a USP e a PUC-São Paulo. Em quatro instituições, ficou em primeiro lugar.

Souza se diz indeciso entre a Unicamp e a USP, onde passou em primeiro lugar para engenharia mecatrônica.

Dados do Inep (Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais) divulgados na semana passada indicam que, entre as 20 escolas melhores classificadas no Enem 2006 (Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio), apenas três são públicas. Souza teve nota 88,9 no Enem 2006. A média nacional foi de 42,5 pontos.
(Folha de SP, 15/2)

como ele passou em primeiro para engenharia mecatrônica na USP se na USP vc entra em Engenharia Genérica?

a USP tem engenharia em Sao Carlos tb... não sei se tem mecatronica e/ou é genérica...

Independentemente do lances do ENEM, cotas e etc, o cara deve ser bom... meganerd, mas é bom...

Agora, vou ser sincero, prefiro esse jeito (notas adicionadas) do que simplesmente estabelece uma quota... 20% de negros... ou 50% de escola pública... como muita gente sugere... dos males o menor...

How Not to Talk to Your Kids

The Inverse Power of Praise.

* By Po Bronson




What do we make of a boy like Thomas?

Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. They are “the smart kids.” Thomas’s one of them, and he likes belonging.

Since Thomas could walk, he has heard constantly that he’s smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was statistically confirmed. The school is reserved for the top one percent of all applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didn’t just score in the top one percent. He scored in the top one percent of the top one percent.

But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’ ” With no more than a glance, Thomas was dividing the world into two—things he was naturally good at and things he wasn’t.

For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn’t very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. When Thomas took his first look at fractions, he balked. The biggest hurdle came in third grade. He was supposed to learn cursive penmanship, but he wouldn’t even try for weeks. By then, his teacher was demanding homework be completed in cursive. Rather than play catch-up on his penmanship, Thomas refused outright. Thomas’s father tried to reason with him. “Look, just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you don’t have to put out some effort.” (Eventually, he mastered cursive, but not without a lot of cajoling from his father.)

Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges?

Thomas is not alone. For a few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.

When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent. Everyone does it, habitually. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short.

But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.

For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she’s now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work—a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints the picture most clearly.

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.”

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

Why did this happen? “When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote in her study summary, “we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” And that’s what the fifth-graders had done: They’d chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study’s start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn’t focused hard enough on this test. “They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,” Dweck recalled. “Many of them remarked, unprovoked, ‘This is my favorite test.’ ” Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all. “Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.”

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.

Jill Abraham is a mother of three in Scarsdale, and her view is typical of those in my straw poll. I told her about Dweck’s research on praise, and she flatly wasn’t interested in brief tests without long-term follow-up. Abraham is one of the 85 percent who think praising her children’s intelligence is important. Her kids are thriving, so she’s proved that praise works in the real world. “I don’t care what the experts say,” Jill says defiantly. “I’m living it.”

Even those who’ve accepted the new research on praise have trouble putting it into practice. Sue Needleman is both a mother of two and an elementary-school teacher with eleven years’ experience. Last year, she was a fourth-grade teacher at Ridge Ranch Elementary in Paramus, New Jersey. She has never heard of Carol Dweck, but the gist of Dweck’s research has trickled down to her school, and Needleman has learned to say, “I like how you keep trying.” She tries to keep her praise specific, rather than general, so that a child knows exactly what she did to earn the praise (and thus can get more). She will occasionally tell a child, “You’re good at math,” but she’ll never tell a child he’s bad at math.

But that’s at school, as a teacher. At home, old habits die hard. Her 8-year-old daughter and her 5-year-old son are indeed smart, and sometimes she hears herself saying, “You’re great. You did it. You’re smart.” When I press her on this, Needleman says that what comes out of academia often feels artificial. “When I read the mock dialogues, my first thought is, Oh, please. How corny.”

No such qualms exist for teachers at the Life Sciences Secondary School in East Harlem, because they’ve seen Dweck’s theories applied to their junior-high students. Last week, Dweck and her protégée, Lisa Blackwell, published a report in the academic journal Child Development about the effect of a semester-long intervention conducted to improve students’ math scores.

Life Sciences is a health-science magnet school with high aspirations but 700 students whose main attributes are being predominantly minority and low achieving. Blackwell split her kids into two groups for an eight-session workshop. The control group was taught study skills, and the others got study skills and a special module on how intelligence is not innate. These students took turns reading aloud an essay on how the brain grows new neurons when challenged. They saw slides of the brain and acted out skits. “Even as I was teaching these ideas,” Blackwell noted, “I would hear the students joking, calling one another ‘dummy’ or ‘stupid.’ ” After the module was concluded, Blackwell tracked her students’ grades to see if it had any effect.

It didn’t take long. The teachers—who hadn’t known which students had been assigned to which workshop—could pick out the students who had been taught that intelligence can be developed. They improved their study habits and grades. In a single semester, Blackwell reversed the students’ longtime trend of decreasing math grades.

The only difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons, a total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores.

“These are very persuasive findings,” says Columbia’s Dr. Geraldine Downey, a specialist in children’s sensitivity to rejection. “They show how you can take a specific theory and develop a curriculum that works.” Downey’s comment is typical of what other scholars in the field are saying. Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist who is an expert in stereotyping, told me, “Carol Dweck is a flat-out genius. I hope the work is taken seriously. It scares people when they see these results.”

Since the 1969 publication of The Psychology of Self-Esteem, in which Nathaniel Branden opined that self-esteem was the single most important facet of a person, the belief that one must do whatever he can to achieve positive self-esteem has become a movement with broad societal effects. Anything potentially damaging to kids’ self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise.

Dweck and Blackwell’s work is part of a larger academic challenge to one of the self-esteem movement’s key tenets: that praise, self-esteem, and performance rise and fall together. From 1970 to 2000, there were over 15,000 scholarly articles written on self-esteem and its relationship to everything—from sex to career advancement. But results were often contradictory or inconclusive. So in 2003 the Association for Psychological Science asked Dr. Roy Baumeister, then a leading proponent of self-esteem, to review this literature. His team concluded that self-esteem was polluted with flawed science. Only 200 of those 15,000 studies met their rigorous standards.

After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction: He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: It’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”

By and large, the literature on praise shows that it can be effective—a positive, motivating force. In one study, University of Notre Dame researchers tested praise’s efficacy on a losing college hockey team. The experiment worked: The team got into the playoffs. But all praise is not equal—and, as Dweck demonstrated, the effects of praise can vary significantly depending on the praise given. To be effective, researchers have found, praise needs to be specific. (The hockey players were specifically complimented on the number of times they checked an opponent.)

Sincerity of praise is also crucial. Just as we can sniff out the true meaning of a backhanded compliment or a disingenuous apology, children, too, scrutinize praise for hidden agendas. Only young children—under the age of 7—take praise at face value: Older children are just as suspicious of it as adults.

Psychologist Wulf-Uwe Meyer, a pioneer in the field, conducted a series of studies where children watched other students receive praise. According to Meyer’s findings, by the age of 12, children believe that earning praise from a teacher is not a sign you did well—it’s actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. And teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an extent that they believed it’s a teacher’s criticism—not praise at all—that really conveys a positive belief in a student’s aptitude.

In the opinion of cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, a teacher who praises a child may be unwittingly sending the message that the student reached the limit of his innate ability, while a teacher who criticizes a pupil conveys the message that he can improve his performance even further.

New York University professor of psychiatry Judith Brook explains that the issue for parents is one of credibility. “Praise is important, but not vacuous praise,” she says. “It has to be based on a real thing—some skill or talent they have.” Once children hear praise they interpret as meritless, they discount not just the insincere praise, but sincere praise as well.

Scholars from Reed College and Stanford reviewed over 150 praise studies. Their meta-analysis determined that praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and students’ “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.”

Dweck’s research on overpraised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes their primary concern—they are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. A raft of very alarming studies illustrate this.

In one, students are given two puzzle tests. Between the first and the second, they are offered a choice between learning a new puzzle strategy for the second test or finding out how they did compared with other students on the first test: They have only enough time to do one or the other. Students praised for intelligence choose to find out their class rank, rather than use the time to prepare.

In another, students get a do-it-yourself report card and are told these forms will be mailed to students at another school—they’ll never meet these students and don’t know their names. Of the kids praised for their intelligence, 40 percent lie, inflating their scores. Of the kids praised for effort, few lie.

When students transition into junior high, some who’d done well in elementary school inevitably struggle in the larger and more demanding environment. Those who equated their earlier success with their innate ability surmise they’ve been dumb all along. Their grades never recover because the likely key to their recovery—increasing effort—they view as just further proof of their failure. In interviews many confess they would “seriously consider cheating.”

Students turn to cheating because they haven’t developed a strategy for handling failure. The problem is compounded when a parent ignores a child’s failures and insists he’ll do better next time. Michigan scholar Jennifer Crocker studies this exact scenario and explains that the child may come to believe failure is something so terrible, the family can’t acknowledge its existence. A child deprived of the opportunity to discuss mistakes can’t learn from them.

My son, Luke, is in kindergarten. He seems supersensitive to the potential judgment of his peers. Luke justifies it by saying, “I’m shy,” but he’s not really shy. He has no fear of strange cities or talking to strangers, and at his school, he has sung in front of large audiences. Rather, I’d say he’s proud and self-conscious. His school has simple uniforms (navy T-shirt, navy pants), and he loves that his choice of clothes can’t be ridiculed, “because then they’d be teasing themselves too.”

After reading Carol Dweck’s research, I began to alter how I praised him, but not completely. I suppose my hesitation was that the mind-set Dweck wants students to have—a firm belief that the way to bounce back from failure is to work harder—sounds awfully clichéd: Try, try again.

But it turns out that the ability to repeatedly respond to failure by exerting more effort—instead of simply giving up—is a trait well studied in psychology. People with this trait, persistence, rebound well and can sustain their motivation through long periods of delayed gratification. Delving into this research, I learned that persistence turns out to be more than a conscious act of will; it’s also an unconscious response, governed by a circuit in the brain. Dr. Robert Cloninger at Washington University in St. Louis located the circuit in a part of the brain called the orbital and medial prefrontal cortex. It monitors the reward center of the brain, and like a switch, it intervenes when there’s a lack of immediate reward. When it switches on, it’s telling the rest of the brain, “Don’t stop trying. There’s dopa [the brain’s chemical reward for success] on the horizon.” While putting people through MRI scans, Cloninger could see this switch lighting up regularly in some. In others, barely at all.

What makes some people wired to have an active circuit?

Cloninger has trained rats and mice in mazes to have persistence by carefully not rewarding them when they get to the finish. “The key is intermittent reinforcement,” says Cloninger. The brain has to learn that frustrating spells can be worked through. “A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they’ll quit when the rewards disappear.”

That sold me. I’d thought “praise junkie” was just an expression—but suddenly, it seemed as if I could be setting up my son’s brain for an actual chemical need for constant reward.

What would it mean, to give up praising our children so often? Well, if I am one example, there are stages of withdrawal, each of them subtle. In the first stage, I fell off the wagon around other parents when they were busy praising their kids. I didn’t want Luke to feel left out. I felt like a former alcoholic who continues to drink socially. I became a Social Praiser.

Then I tried to use the specific-type praise that Dweck recommends. I praised Luke, but I attempted to praise his “process.” This was easier said than done. What are the processes that go on in a 5-year-old’s mind? In my impression, 80 percent of his brain processes lengthy scenarios for his action figures.

But every night he has math homework and is supposed to read a phonics book aloud. Each takes about five minutes if he concentrates, but he’s easily distracted. So I praised him for concentrating without asking to take a break. If he listened to instructions carefully, I praised him for that. After soccer games, I praised him for looking to pass, rather than just saying, “You played great.” And if he worked hard to get to the ball, I praised the effort he applied.

Just as the research promised, this focused praise helped him see strategies he could apply the next day. It was remarkable how noticeably effective this new form of praise was.

Truth be told, while my son was getting along fine under the new praise regime, it was I who was suffering. It turns out that I was the real praise junkie in the family. Praising him for just a particular skill or task felt like I left other parts of him ignored and unappreciated. I recognized that praising him with the universal “You’re great—I’m proud of you” was a way I expressed unconditional love.

Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern parenting. Out of our children’s lives from breakfast to dinner, we turn it up a notch when we get home. In those few hours together, we want them to hear the things we can’t say during the day—We are in your corner, we are here for you, we believe in you.

In a similar way, we put our children in high-pressure environments, seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use the constant praise to soften the intensity of those environments. We expect so much of them, but we hide our expectations behind constant glowing praise. The duplicity became glaring to me.

Eventually, in my final stage of praise withdrawal, I realized that not telling my son he was smart meant I was leaving it up to him to make his own conclusion about his intelligence. Jumping in with praise is like jumping in too soon with the answer to a homework problem—it robs him of the chance to make the deduction himself.

But what if he makes the wrong conclusion?

Can I really leave this up to him, at his age?

I’m still an anxious parent. This morning, I tested him on the way to school: “What happens to your brain, again, when it gets to think about something hard?”

“It gets bigger, like a muscle,” he responded, having aced this one before.

eu penso que é o inverso: não é falta de confiança, é excesso.

8 - A USP e a Escola de Economia de Paris, artigo de Roberto Macedo

Com a PSE surge ao menos a esperança de que, vindas da França, idéias nessa linha sejam acolhidas com boa vontade pelos professores ainda renitentes a elas


Roberto Macedo, economista, com doutorado pela Universidade Harvard (EUA), pesquisador da Fipe-USP e professor associado à Faap, foi secretário de Política Econômica do Ministério da Fazenda. Artigo publicado em “O Estado de SP”:

Há grande novidade nos meios acadêmicos franceses, a Escola de Economia de Paris, criada na forma de uma fundação sustentada por recursos governamentais e privados.

Inaugurada com pompa e circunstância pelo primeiro-ministro francês, Dominique de Villepin, em 22 de fevereiro, a escola tem nove patrocinadores governamentais e cinco privados.

Entre os primeiros estão as grandes escolas francesas, como a de Altos Estudos Sociais (EHESS), a Universidade de Paris I-Sorbonne e a Escola Normal Superior (ENS), bem como o Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas Científicas (CNRS).

Do lado privado se destaca a Fundação Americana para a Escola de Economia de Paris.

O objetivo é juntar forças para enfrentar a hegemonia de americanos e ingleses no ensino e pesquisa de Economia, claramente demonstrada pela predominância deles, principalmente dos primeiros, na produção acadêmica da área, inclusive no recebimento dos Prêmios Nobel.

O desafio está até no nome: a nova escola assumiu também a denominação de Paris School of Economics (PSE), ao lado da correspondente em francês, École d’Économie de Paris, e aquela vem em primeiro lugar no site da escola.

É um contraponto à britânica e famosa London School of Economics and Political Science, conhecida como LSE.

A disputa já começou, pois há na internet um texto atribuído à LSE no qual esta derrota a PSE por 4 a 1, numa avaliação que pondera a abrangência dos campos de estudo, os recursos financeiros disponíveis, a fama acadêmica e o tamanho do corpo de pesquisadores.

A PSE só ganha pelo último critério, pois reunirá um número maior deles, oriundos das escolas francesas que a constituíram.

A criação da PSE é um assunto polêmico, particularmente na França, com sua tradição de ensino público superior gratuito e acesso irrestrito a cursos de graduação.

Sabe-se também que a nova escola vai operar apenas no nível de pós-graduação e selecionará seus estudantes. Presumo que haverá também um programa de bolsas para sustentá-los enquanto estudam em tempo integral, sem o que o propósito da escola estaria comprometido.

E nós o que temos que ver com a PSE e esses desdobramentos? Evidentemente, o assunto interessa a economistas, em particular aos acadêmicos e a estudantes que buscam oportunidades de estudar no exterior.

Mas há também implicações mais abrangentes. Nossa universidade mais importante, a USP, foi criada na mesma tradição francesa de ensino público gratuito, aqui implantada sob a orientação de missão de professores daquele país.

Na USP o acesso à graduação é restrito pelo vestibular. Mas não é uma diferença importante, pois a França elitiza suas universidades de outras formas.

Por exemplo, soube que em escolas como as de Medicina fazem isso mediante um sistema de funil, em que muitos entram, mas poucos saem.

Com essa tradição, a USP apresenta problemas similares aos da estrutura universitária francesa e que levam à falta de competitividade internacional das suas escolas: muita burocracia, politização da gestão, estabilidade precoce no emprego, falta de cobrança de desempenho, ausência de incentivos para produzir mais, dificuldades para atrair professores de prestígio com maiores salários, e assim por diante.

Assim, a PSE é uma tentativa de sair de um jogo com essas regras por meio de uma fundação, com sua maior flexibilidade e autonomia de gestão.

Não há como avaliar hoje os resultados dessa experiência, mas o importante é que ela rompe com um paradigma sabidamente ultrapassado na sua eficácia, como o demonstra a má posição das escolas francesas nas avaliações internacionais, em particular na área de Economia.

A moda que vem da costura francesa chega rapidamente a estas plagas, mas a estrutura de ensino superior à francesa é de difícil mutação tanto lá como aqui.

Como dizia Madame Chanel sobre seus vestidos, é mais um estilo do que moda. Mas seria bom se essa novidade da PSE fizesse escola nas universidades públicas brasileiras.

Nelas, algumas áreas, inclusive a de Economia, criaram fundações numa tentativa de contornar a pasmaceira da gestão tradicional. O que tentam essas fundações?

Buscam contratos de pesquisa, com órgãos oficiais ou entidades privadas, com o que complementam salários de professores com o objetivo de retê-los na vida acadêmica.

Também procuram ministrar cursos de pós-graduação, em particular os de especialização e lato sensu, cobrando taxas de seus alunos.

Essas fundações, contudo, são mal vistas pelos apegados à tradição francesa, na USP ainda muito forte em áreas como Filosofia e Ciências Sociais, estas com papel que extrapola seus números em face da politização da gestão.

E, também, porque seus professores não têm as mesmas oportunidades que o mercado de trabalho oferece em áreas como Engenharia, Medicina e Economia, entre outras.

Como resultado, as fundações ligadas à USP passaram a sofrer as restrições dessa animosidade, que criam muitos obstáculos ao seu trabalho.

Não estou aqui para defender o interesse desta ou daquela fundação, mas o recurso a todas as já existentes e a outras novas para superar algumas das dificuldades do inadequado modelo de gestão das universidades públicas brasileiras.

Se houver uma reforma universitária que supere essas dificuldades de um modo geral, tanto melhor.

Com a PSE surge ao menos a esperança de que, vindas da França, idéias nessa linha sejam acolhidas com boa vontade pelos professores ainda renitentes a elas.

Ou será que na USP ninguém pensa nessa ou noutras estratégias para torná-la nacional e internacionalmente mais competitiva?
(O Estado de SP, 8/3)

The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle Review

From the issue dated March 23, 2007

OBSERVER
Huckleberry Who?

By LENNARD J. DAVIS

The University of Paris literature professor Pierre Bayard's best seller How to Talk About Books That You Haven't Read is flying off the shelves in France. Not only does Bayard tell readers how to fake literary orgasm, but he admits to giving lectures on books he hasn't bothered to read. I'm sure Bayard's book will be met with outrage from many academics on this side of the Atlantic who lack the French national penchant for public display and intellectual pretension. Obviously, there is something seriously reprehensible about Bayard's know-nothing chutzpah (or whatever the French word for that is). Our goal as teachers is to teach what we know, not what we don't. But, outrage aside, perhaps it's time to admit that not reading has its virtues as well as its vices.

An all too predictable moralism surrounds the reading of books. There is a prescribed way of reading: one page at a time, starting from the front of the book to the back, paying close attention to every single page in order, no skipping around. But the reality is that most of us graze — read a bit, put the book down, start up again. We may pay more attention to one part than another, skim boring parts, and even (heaven forfend) leap over long, dull tracts. Some very strange people even admit to reading the end of a book before the beginning, which is sort of like eating dessert before dinner.

But let's remember that even one of the greatest readers of literature, Samuel Johnson, admitted that "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is." In fact, Johnson seemed to have made quite a career of not reading. He once lamented to his friend Mrs. Thrale, "Alas, Madam! How few books are there of which one can ever possibly arrive at the last page." And reacting to advice that once started, a book should be read all the way through, he opined, "A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?"

Is it always a good thing to read an entire book? When I was a graduate student, it dawned on me that I often had the most intelligent things to say about books I'd only half- or quarter-read. I was surprised by my observation — it didn't seem to make sense. But it just seemed to work out that professors preferred my insightful and trenchant comments on, say, the first part of Tristram Shandy than on the whole wandering thing.

In that way, a little knowledge can be a practical thing.

Of course as teachers — particularly those of us who teach novels, poetry, and drama — we want our students to read the works we assign. Philosophically, we believe in educational standards. Practically, we find it boring to teach to a class of blank faces, students who fail to react to our insights or even jokes about literary characters and situations.

Most of us believe that there are a certain number of great works that define our national culture and our global literature. It is therefore a good thing that our students read those works in their entirety, know them, and remember them, so that we can have a common culture. E.D. Hirsch even published a book that told us what we should read in order to have a standard of "cultural literacy." Any student who fails to read, or only half-reads, a great work is dodging his or her responsibility as a citizen. Or so the argument goes.

However, Bayard's salvo can't be entirely dismissed by our raising the banner of educational standards. After all, having once read a book isn't the same as having recently read it. Lionel Trilling once famously told Edward Said that he thought the Columbia University humanities core, one of the early great-books curricula, "has the virtue of giving Columbia students a common basis in reading, and if they later forgot the books (as many always do) at least they would have forgotten the same ones."

Most teachers can tell you that in any given class, there's a bell curve of compliance in reading. The professor says hopefully, "I'm sure you all remember the chapter in which. ... " My working and charitable assumption is that half the class has read half the work. I even semi-seriously thought it might make sense to teach a course in the fall called "The First Half of Long Novels," followed by the spring course "The Second Half of Long Novels." The reality is that if you are a teacher, you will have to teach to the half-readers as well as to the ones who've finished every word. That students will read everything you assign is devoutly to be wished for but unlikely to happen.

Professors can't afford to take a holier-than-thou position on this subject. After all, who watches the watchman? Have you really read all of War and Peace, or only Peace? Do you still remember it? All of it? Can I give you a pop quiz about your knowledge? And (be truthful!) isn't it a vice rarely acknowledged that everyone occasionally nods "yes" when asked if they've read some major work — Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, Paradise Lost, or even Lord of the Rings — when in their own heart they know they didn't really, or at least not all of it?

Reading habits, like sleeping habits, are individual and varied. I like to read four or five books at once. It's like being at a horse race — only one or two of the books might win. I don't feel committed to finishing every book I start, and, in a way, isn't it the writer's fault if I'm not pulled along? I'm an inveterate book buyer, but like many collectors I don't always think the proof of the pudding is in the reading. I've got some beautiful volumes that I will probably never read. Do I really want to read all the books of Sir Walter Scott or von Krafft-Ebing? I just like owning them.

Not reading something also can be like saving a piece of pie for later. I've comforted myself by thinking that when I have a chronic and fatal illness, I'll finally settle down and read the last five volumes of Proust. Or finish The Magic Mountain (which has a great start and then goes on and on). I'm really looking forward to reading The Man Without Qualities at some unspecified time in the future, preferably at the beach or in the mountains.

It's the guilt and fear of not being well read, of having missed out on reading a work that everyone else has read that makes us shy about admitting our nonreading. Remember back when everyone was reading the same book at the same time — in my case it was The Alexandria Quartet, The Hobbit, The Greening of America, Amerika, or anything by Herman Hesse — and you weren't? You felt so out of it, and then it was just too late. David Lodge has brilliantly captured that embarrassment in his novel Changing Places (which I've read ... have you?), in which academics play a parlor game called Humiliation. In this game you have to admit to not having read a book that you think everyone else in the room has read. When a character admits to never having read Hamlet, he ends up garnering the scorn of all and eventually loses his job.

Perhaps we need a little less guilt and one-upmanship in this enterprise of reading. Let's openly acknowledge that there are a library of ways to read, and that, being humans, we are somewhat prone to forgetting, imagining, delaying, and even not doing. If we were a little more open and honest about what we haven't read, and if our colleagues were a little less judgmental and sanctimonious, we might loosen the harness of guilt that holds us back from actually picking up some book we've forsaken in the past. Who knows? Admitting that we don't read might actually help us to read again.

Lennard J. Davis, who actually reads most of what he teaches, is a professor of English, disability and human development, and medical education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 29, Page B5

April 4, 2007
A Great Year for Ivy League Schools, but Not So Good for Applicants to Them
By SAM DILLON

Harvard turned down 1,100 student applicants with perfect 800 scores on the SAT math exam. Yale rejected several applicants with perfect 2400 scores on the three-part SAT, and Princeton turned away thousands of high school applicants with 4.0 grade point averages. Needless to say, high school valedictorians were a dime a dozen.

It was the most selective spring in modern memory at America’s elite schools, according to college admissions officers. More applications poured into top schools this admissions cycle than in any previous year on record. Schools have been sending decision letters to student applicants in recent days, and rejection letters have overwhelmingly outnumbered the acceptances.

Stanford received a record 23,956 undergraduate applications for the fall term, accepting 2,456 students, meaning the school took 10.3 percent of applicants.

Harvard College received applications from 22,955 students, another record, and accepted 2,058 of them, for an acceptance rate of 9 percent. The university called that “the lowest admit rate in Harvard’s history.”

Applications to Columbia numbered 18,081, and the college accepted 1,618 of them, for what was certainly one of the lowest acceptance rates this spring at an American university: 8.9 percent.

“There’s a sense of collective shock among parents at seeing extraordinarily talented kids getting rejected,” said Susan Gzesh, whose son Max Rothstein is a senior with an exemplary record at the Laboratory School, a private school associated with the University of Chicago. Max applied to 12 top schools and was accepted outright only by Wesleyan, New York University and the University of Michigan.

“Some of his classmates, with better test scores than his, were rejected at every Ivy League school,” Ms. Gzesh said.

The brutally low acceptance rates this year were a result of an avalanche of applications to top schools, which college admissions officials attributed to three factors. First, a demographic bulge is working through the nation’s population — the children of the baby boomers are graduating from high school in record numbers. The federal Department of Education projects that 3.2 million students will graduate from high school this spring, compared with 3.1 million last year and 2.4 million in 1993. (The statistics project that the number of high school graduates will peak in 2008.) Another factor is that more high school students are enrolling in college immediately after high school. In the 1970s, less than half of all high school graduates went directly to college, compared with more than 60 percent today, said David Hawkins, a director at the National Association of College Admission Counseling.

The third trend driving the frantic competition is that the average college applicant applies to many more colleges than in past decades. In the 1960s, fewer than 2 percent of college freshmen had applied to six or more colleges, whereas in 2006 more than 2 percent reported having applied to 11 or more, according to The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 2006, an annual report on a continuing long-term study published by the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Multiple applications per student,” Mr. Hawkins said, “is a factor that exponentially crowds the college admissions environment.”

One reason that students are filing more applications is the increasing use of the Common Application, a form that can be completed and filed via the Internet.

The ferocious competition at the most selective schools has not affected the overall acceptance rate at the rest of the nation’s 2,500 four-year colleges and universities, which accept an average of 70 percent of applicants.

“That overall 70 percent acceptance rate hasn’t changed since the 1980s,” Mr. Hawkins said.

But with more and more students filling out ever more applications, schools like the California Institute of Technology received a record number of applications this year — 3,595, or 8 percent more than last year — and admitted 576 students. Among so many talented applicants, a prospective student with perfect SAT scores was not unusual, said Jill Perry, a Caltech spokeswoman.

“The successful students have to have shown some passion for science and technology in high school or their personal life,” Ms. Perry said. “That means creating a computer system for your high school, or taking a tractor apart and putting it back together.”

The competition was ferocious not only at the top universities, but at selective small colleges, like Williams, Bowdoin and Amherst, all of which reported record numbers of applications.

Amherst received 6,668 applications and accepted 1,167 students for its class of 2011, compared with the 4,491 applications and 1,030 acceptance letters it sent for the class of 2002 nine years ago, said Paul Statt, an Amherst spokesman.

“Many of us who went to Amherst three decades ago know we couldn’t get in now; I know I couldn’t,” said Mr. Statt, who graduated from Amherst in 1978.

Eles têm de estar na cadeia, não na USP
A Universidade de São Paulo, a USP, a maior do país, conta com 80.589 alunos matriculados — 48.530 na graduação, 12.706 no mestrado, 12.301 no doutorado e 7.052 alunos especiais. Pois bem. Um grupo de 300 (segundo os estudantes) — 0,37% — decidiu invadir a reitoria para entregar um documento à reitora, Suely Vilela. Informados de que ela estava fora do país, não tiveram dúvida: partiram para a depredação Quebram tudo e expulsaram mais de mil servidores que trabalhavam no prédio. Em clima de guerra, armaram uma barricada. Eles também diziam protestar contra o governo José Serra, que estaria agredindo a autonomia universitária.

Com a devida vênia, esse barraco foi armado pelas reitorias das três universidades. No começo do ano, enquanto o Orçamento do Estado não tinha sido votado pela Assembléia, houve uma pequena demora no repasse de verbas — temporária, questão já solucionada. As três instituições tinham dinheiro em caixa. Mas saíram gritando “Fogo, fogo na floresta”. Agora se colhe isso aí.

Trata-se de abuso, banditismo, vandalismo. A autonomia universitária não suspende os direitos constitucionais ou o Código Penal. O que leva menos de 0,5% dos estudantes da USP a partir para o terrorismo é uma coisa só: a impunidade. Não são estudantes, mas militantes de um partido político. O lugar deles não é na universidade, onde estudam com o seu dinheiro, leitor amigo, mas na cadeia.

http://www.reinaldoazevedo.com.br

Na USP, quem manda é um sindicato; escritório do MST na área de moradia
Recebi o comentário de um aluno da USP e morador do Crusp, a área residencial dos estudantes. Vou omitir o nome dele. Parece-me o mais prudente. Eis aí:

Meu nome é (...) e devo ser o único aluno da abominável FFLCH e morador do famigerado CRUSP que lê regularmente seu blog e concorda com quase tudo o que você diz.

Hoje pela manhã, acordei com uma garota berrando pelo corredor do condomínio com um megafone, conclamando os moradores a se levantar logo para "ocupar" (sic) a reitoria. Era uma das marionetes do PSTU que moram aqui e se fingem de alunas de algum dos cursos de humanidades: letras, história e similares.

Meu comentário é o seguinte: não há qualquer razão para ficar surpreso com o que houve de ontem para hoje aqui na USP. Não há surpresa dado que:

1- O sindicato dos funcionários da universidade, o Sintusp, que, na prática manda e desmanda na instituição, é uma organização de extrema esquerda que, ainda no ano passado, promoveu um seminário para pedir o fim do estado de Israel;

2- A universidade criou, há dois anos, na faculdade de Educação (?), um curso específico para formação de quadros do MST, batizado pomposamente de Pedagogia da Terra;

3- O próprio MST possui um escritório (sim, senhor, um escritório) nas dependências do bloco F do condomínio, que lhe foi generosamente cedido pelo lobby do PSTU que integra a coordenação dos moradores do CRUSP;

A USP consome dos cofres públicos estaduais mais de R$ 1 bilhão por ano. Essa dinheirama toda ainda não rendeu nenhum prêmio Nobel que seja, mas, no que se refere à idéia de implantar o socialismo no país, os impostos recolhidos da sociedade burguesa têm sido muito frutíferos e prometem ainda mais para o futuro, como se vê.

Felicidades.

http://www.reinaldoazevedo.com.br