"Grit" - Part 3: Is it "an abundance of possibility" our kids need?

Note: Clearly, I will need a "Part 4" here, but I will publish this today, to support the ongoing conversation...

Dave Meister left a comment on my last post which included this story:

"Days like today remind me of my first year as an elementary administrator and going to school and finding a student in the window well of the school on a sub zero morning. She had a horrific life at home that the authorities (and I) failed to save her from. Her progress through school followed my mine ascension to a high school position. She became a very angry high school student that eventually dropped out. As far as I knew she never had any slack. She was smart in her own way...avoiding the worst of her world, but she became pregnant and dropped out. I have lost track of her, but know that we as a community failed her, but I know this, she had grit. It was ground into her by life experiences and she could not get past the scars."

The discussion of "grit" heated up across the Twittersphere in fascinating ways, and with that discussion a deeper conversation began about the components of "grit" and the origins of Angela Duckworth's theories.

Nancy Flanagan: Kiss My Grit 
Grant Lichtman: Does Grit Need a Deeper Discussion? which has become, perhaps, the conversation on the topic.
Josie Holford: Grit Hits the Fan 
Joe Bower: Let them eat grit - 4 reasons why "grit" is garbage  
Grit: Part One 
Grit: Part Two
and Vicki Davis: True Grit 

There are two key questions to get to, but first, maybe we should define "grit" if we're going to argue about it. And because of her deep role in "the selling of grit," let us use Angela Duckworth's definition as expressed in her "Grit Test" (pdf):

"Author Rose noted the key elements of the Protestant ethic to be “diligence, punctuality, deferment of gratification, and primacy of the work domain”' (Rose 1985, 102).

• I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.  This is good according to Duckworth, and perhaps, to all of us.
• New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.  This is bad according to Duckworth, but certainly might be debatable for many of us, and for many who work in what is called, "the creative economy."
• My interests change from year to year. Also bad according to Duckworth, but also quite debatable. 
• Setbacks don’t discourage me. This is good according to Duckworth, but, really? We do not get discouraged by repeated failures? What would we need to accomplish that?
• I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest. Again, bad according to Duckworth, but also highly debatable.  
• I am a hard worker. Of course, the very heart of "good" according to Duckworth and the essential belief behind the "Protestant Work Ethic." But what if someone said, "I'm a good caregiver" instead, or "I'm a deep thinker"? Why aren't those statements here?
• I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one. Very bad in the world of Duckworth, which makes everyone from Steve Jobs to Paul Allen, Thomas Edison to Sergei Brin, a loser on this grit scale.
• I have difficulty maintaining my focus on projects that take more than a few months to complete.  Another bad one on the Duckworth scale, keep your noses to your grindstones, lads.
• I finish whatever I begin. Of course, this is what Duckworth wants, and why anyone who drops out of any school-based thing is a failure in Paul Tough's How Children Succeed. But is giving up on a task really a sign of weakness?
• I have achieved a goal that took years of work. Another Duckworth "gold star"- you can see the type of personality being prized here. In school this is the single-minded pursuit of all As and graduation.
• I become interested in new pursuits every few months.  Bad, how could it not be here? People who have wide-ranging interests make poor drones on the assembly line.
• I am diligent. Ah, yes, like "hard worker," this is another Duckworth code word for "compliant" and "self-sacrificing to white middle class expectations." It is another "good" on the scale.

Note: if you use the PDF those questions with an asterisk are "bad" - they're marked to make it easier for us to judge our students.

Let's put this together - anything at all like ADHD is very bad, those "renaissance" types are bad, kids with high-level street survival skills are bad, but compliance with the expectations of "white" "western" society is very good. Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, Bill Clinton, John Kennedy are all in the problem mode. The winners on Duckworth's measuring stick? The guys who spend their lives hunting for Big Foot in all kinds of weather, the Unibomber, the person spending 30 years in the same job.

If you read through Duckworth's "scale" you will see a pattern. Everything she sees as "good" is about scarcity - scarcity of time, scarcity of resources, scarcity of attention, even scarcity of support - her "good" is relentlessly independent, single-focused, and committed to whatever is expected. Everything "bad" is about abundance - many ideas, many projects, many interests, a belief that there is time to get things done.

This is not a "scientific" divide. Rather, it is a religious divide, and division created by whether one believes in Social Darwinism or not. Angela Duckworth believes in Social Darwinism, the root of the reprehensible eugenics movement of the 20th Century. She extensively quotes Francis Galton, "the father of eugenics," in her work, and, one tends to believe than an Ivy League professor knows who she is quoting and chooses to quote someone for a reason. 

But Angela Duckworth is also fierce in her religious convictions, a true believer in what I call "American Calvinism" - a secularized version of the Calvinist Protestantism which mythically arrived in North America with the early Massachusetts settlers.  

Let's see how Duckworth and the Puritans line up:

"[T]he key elements of the Protestant ethic [are] “diligence, punctuality, deferment of gratification, and primacy of the work domain” (Rose 1985, 102)"... "[John Calvin] believed that people could serve God through their work. Professions were useful, and work was the universal base of society and the cause of differing social classes, every person should work diligently in his own occupation and should not try to change from the profession into which he was born. To do so would be to go against God's own ordination since God assigned each person to his own place in the social hierarchy (Lipset 1990, 61-69)."

In Twitter conversations people have argued that the "work ethic" expressed above - and in the work of Duckworth and Paul Tough - is "not religious," and cannot really be seen as "racist." Those promoting "grit" are not "Calvinists" they say, and Duckworth isn't even "white," but in fact the nature of Duckworth's work, and the essence of Tough's reporting, are both fundamentally religious and fundamentally "racist" in terms of belief in what those back in the day might have called "Godly behavior," and in terms of group identities being "closer" or "further" from "God's plan."  

That the myths of the Protestant Work Ethic, and mythic identity racism, are embedded in the American power structure does not make them less religious in nature or origin, simply more troubling, because they have been used for all time to abuse those not wanted within that power structure. The Irish, as I noted in the last post, are lazy, illiterate, drunkards. African-Americans are lazy and uninterested in success. Italians are lazy and disrespectful of the law. Latinos are lazy, illiterate, and can't stay put and focus.

The myths of the Protestant Work Ethic and identity racism grew in America and has been carried forward for almost four centuries because it made those born to wealth and power feel good about themselves. How much better to describe your ancestors as having struggled alone against a brutal wilderness and wild savages than saying that your ancestors were "illegal immigrants" who stole a remarkably resource rich continent from its inhabitants. How much better to embrace Jackson's "Frontier Theory" than to worry about slaves and underpaid immigrants who built the early national roads, dug the Erie Canal, and built the railroads. How much better to celebrate "American Invention" than to discuss the wholesale intellectual property theft - from woolen mills to those railroads to the telephone debuting across those 1876 fairgrounds - which had enriched the American Republic's first hundred years.

Those myths continue to this day. How much better to say that your children get into the University of Pennsylvania, or Harvard, or the University of Virginia because they are smarter, because they work harder, because you, as a parent, have educated them better, than to discuss the advantages of race and class. How much better to say that you have succeeded in business because you speak correctly, or have the right "work ethic," than to discuss what you inherited.

This is "understood" so deeply that it has been "naturalized." To quote Edward Said (from his essay on Rudyard Kipling's Kim in his 1994 book Culture and Imperialism, in a way which describes Paul Tough's work quite well, “its author is writing not just from the dominating view-point of a white man in a colonial possession but from the perspective of a massive colonial system whose economy, functioning, and history had acquired the status of a virtual fact of nature.”

In other words, the myths of the Protestant Work Ethic and Identity Racism explain why we need not bother to build a fair and equitable society. And the myth of educational "grit" explains why we need not create fair and equitable schools. Life made easy for those in power.

But what if the key to resilience in school, in life, was abundance. What if "grit" was something which taught you the lessons of scarcity - of pure survival - but abundance offered you the "slack" you needed to get where you might want to go?

After all, would there be a Facebook if Mark Zuckerberg, from 18 to 21, had been working 40 hours a week at a mini-mart in White Plains while commuting to Westchester Community College? Where might Apple be if Jobs and Wozniak had not had that famous garage and food provided by parents? Where would I be if not for a fabulous high school teacher who gave me the time, space, and resources to keep going?

"Grit" - that response to scarcity - taught me to cheat. to lie, at times to steal (yes), to find any shortcut, to fight, to flee. Abundant moments, that opportunity for "slack" - those very Catholic "feast days for the soul" - taught me what I could aspire to.

This is not an idle, theoretical, conversation. In my "debate" with Paul Tough on Grant Lichtman's blog, I brought up examples of high schools which have provided "abundance," and Tough fought back by saying that these schools lacked the "concentrated poverty" of the schools he visited. But as I responded, that is the point. The schools he visited exist in school systems which have created a vicious level of socio-economic segregation, the schools I suggested exist in systems have done the opposite. New Rochelle, New York, or even Albemarle County, Virginia, could easily create significant sized high schools filled with nothing but poverty, as the City of Chicago has done. All it would take to do so would be for those places to mimic Chicago's school policies. But they have not. And the result of those political choices - even though both school systems do lose a good number of children to less inclusive private schools - are inclusive public secondary schools which offer abundant possibility and strong supports. Diverse academic and arts programs, strong counseling programs, and student-based choices.

creating "abundance" - time, space, choices, safety

Here are two examples. In Albemarle County, Virginia, in our most "at risk" high school - no, not a Fenger - we have not allowed that to happen, we added, a few years in response to student request, a music studio in our library.  This allowed a range of high poverty students, and we’re talking both black and white poverty, to come together around an existing set of community passions, from rap to hillbilly blues, and then to bring the middle class students, with rock, show tunes, and classical added, to join with them. We allowed these students to present their work, and to construct their core course learning via music, we did not impose our passions, our paths on them – rather we embraced theirs. From there we expanded an already inclusive theater program, including what we might call “street dance” and “street music” if we had real streets in that area. We kept kids in school. We kept kids in class. We kept kids engaged and involved in the positive. It changed, the students told us, the entire character of the school for the better. We have continued to build on those kind of efforts in that high school and others, because we have discovered the value of abundance.

"slack" generated by "abundance"

In our "at risk" elementary schools we have pursued a differing, but similar course. Our classrooms are now designed around what we call "choice and comfort," with kids able to discover what makes them comfortable in terms of learning environment and learning style. Kids lie on the floor, perch on stools, lean against high tables, sit on low tables. They write using differing technologies, from pencils to handhelds to tablets to laptops. They move when they need to. We no longer enforce Calvinist church behaviors, and so now we allow children to harness the full power of their cognitive energies on their learning. By providing an abundance of choice, an abundance of time, an abundance of tools, we have encouraged persistence in ways that "grit theorists" can only hope to emulate.

In other words, offering children abundance is a choice. It is a choice a community - a nation - can either make or not. And if a community, or a nation, chooses not to offer children abundance, I still find it remarkably unfair to complain that our children of scarcity lack character.

What Paul Tough ignores, from his perch at The New York Times, is the responsibility of organizations such as The Times to promote fundamental change. Tough does call for a better welfare system, which is lovely, I suppose, but not the equity our children need. In fact, The Times has waged quite the war for inequity in education through the reporting of Matt Richtel, an Tough, in a book which - whatever he says now - promotes the sense that what is primarily needed is "character," has done his own substantial harm.

Myth matters in the struggles for power. And understanding mythic belief matters even more. And as I have said on more than one occasion, education is the most political thing a society does, because it is a struggle for our future.

What Duckworth and Tough do in their, perhaps conscious for her, unconscious for him, unquestioning belief in the Protestant Work Ethic, is to give the power structure a pass, no matter how much either of them calls for more charity.

That is a a pass I will not sign on to.

- Ira Socol

_______________________________________________

I need to repeat, if necessary, those beliefs of mine which underlie my commitment to what I am writing. I was thrilled when @jonbecker (Dr. Jonathan Becker) called me a "scholar/advocate" in a tweet about my last post, because while some others would pretend otherwise, I never hide what drives me to tell the stories I am telling. So let me say again, I am the job-changing son of a job-changing father. I've given up on many things - attempts at school, careers, political efforts, writings, hobbies. I like to nap. I like to lie around and stare at the television. I cannot focus through a half hour meeting - none of which particularly matters. What does matter is that I am committed to the future of children who "fail to meet" societal expectations. I see ADHD as a positive, not usually a pathology requiring high levels of medication. I see social and cultural variety as a tremendous positive, and efforts like "the Common Core" as misguided attempts at homogeneity. I see age-based expectations and standards as an assault on the natural differences in children. And I believe that much which we take for granted in "white," "educated," "middle class," society needs to be questioned if opportunities are to be democratized.

"Scholars are often wary of citing such commitments, for, in the stereotype, an ice-cold impartiality acts as the sine qua non of proper and dispassionate objectivity. I regard this argument as one of the most fallacious, even harmful, claims commonly made in my profession. Impartiality (even if desirable) is unattainable by human beings with inevitable backgrounds, needs, beliefs, and desires. It is dangerous for a scholar even to imagine that he might attain complete neutrality, for then one stops being vigilant about personal preferences and their influences—and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice.

"Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference. Moreover, one needs to understand and acknowledge inevitable preferences in order to know their influence—so that fair treatment of data and arguments can be attained! No conceit could be worse than a belief in one's own intrinsic objectivity, no prescription more suited to the exposure of fools." - Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasurement of Man (revised), p. 36

Designed to Fail - Education in America: Part Three

part one   part two  part four    part five

With the exception of John Taylor Gatto and a few others, "contemporary" (since 1980) historians of American education ignore Ellwood Cubberley [1]. They also significantly limit their interest in Henry Barnard. Instead, future teachers hear a great deal about Horace Mann and John Dewey, who, I may argue, are among the "losers" in the educational wars of the United States.

Yet, to understand the debate in America today you need to think of two names: Ellwood Cubberley and Rudyard Kipling. Mann is sweet, Dewey brilliant, Barnard essential to the process, but it is Cubberley who made the U.S. educational system virtually unchangeable and it is Kipling who may offer the explanation re: why?

Let's take a look - just to turn them into examples - at Camilo Acosta [2] ("TheRebull" on Twitter) and Mark Zuckerberg [3]. These two might be seen as "typical" America's young generation seeking to lead on minority education. Acosta through prodigious fundraising for Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C. (though why a highly paid, and wealthy-by-inheritance schools superintendent needs fundraising has never been obvious to me), Facebook CEO Zuckerberg through his recently concocted ties to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Oprah Winfrey.

I do not pick these men because they are intellectual or policy leaders, but specifically because they are not. The question of why they feel compelled to join this crusade, without knowledge or study, is what is illuminating.

Both of these young men grew up with the resources of exceptional wealth, and attended exceptional schools - schools completely unlike those they advocate for the poor of color in America. Both are the products of America's "Ivy League" universities. Both are fully willing to embrace Kipling's White Man's Burden [4] or, that is only partially true, neither will actually risk anything themselves to shoulder that burden, not even in political/career terms as Benjamin Disraeli or William McKinley might have. But they are fully willing to "Take up the White Man's burden--, Ye dare not stoop to less--, Nor call too loud on Freedom."

And they are fully happy to do this, because Cubberley made the American education system not just something for missionaries (Mann), and not something just for economic policy (Barnard) but literally "pleasurable" for those born to power, just as - in Edward Said's grand explanation, Rudyard Kipling made British colonialism pleasurable for Britain's upper class young men.

[Edward Said (1935-2003) is an important author in understanding this construction. Said was the leading intellectual bringing postcolonial literary theory together with politics and human actions "on the ground." In part, this series, and this blog as a whole, is inspired by something he said in a 2001 interview: "But I don't write about just anything - I don't think I'm capable of doing that. I write about things that matter to me, and obviously one of those things is the idea of tribalism - one's origin, and the place that I was born in. But never without clarifying it in as dispassionate a way as possible, and always with some commitment to greater values - more universal values than just the ones of nation, tribe and family. Those issues would be issues of justice, oppression, giving a historical context when it's lost." For a wonderful appreciation, and place to begin, I recommend Terry Eagleton's review of Said's last book.]

Cubberley does not sound joyful. He has none of the soaring oratory of Mann, nor even the ability of Barnard to conjure the future, but he is clear and absolute:

"It is the attempt to remould the school and to make of it a more potent instrument of the State for promoting national consciousness and political, social, and industrial welfare that has been behind the many changes and expansions and extensions of education which have marked the past half-century in all the leading world nations, and which underlie the most pressing problems in educational readjustment to-day. These changes and expansions and problems we shall consider more in detail in the chapters which follow. Suffice it here to say that from mere teaching institutions, engaged in imparting a little religious instruction and some knowledge of the tools of learning, the school, in all the leading nations, has to-day been transformed into an institution for advancing national welfare. The leading purpose now is to train for political and social efficiency in the more democratic types of governments being instituted among peoples, and to impart to the young those industrial and social experiences once taught in the home, the trades, and on the farm, but which the coming of the factory system and city life have deprived them otherwise of knowing." - The History of Education (1919) pp. 737-738

In Cubberley's world the education system has not been either a political or an economic decision, but has naturally "transformed" into "an institution for advancing national welfare." It is also, again as Said says regarding Kipling, an instrument of benign imperialism. "When the United States freed Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines from Spanish rule, a general system of public education, modeled after the American educational ladder, was created as a safeguard to the liberty just brought to these islands, and to education the United States added courts of justice and bureaus of sanitation as important auxiliary agencies. As a result the peoples of these islands have made a degree of progress in self-government and industry in three decades not made in three centuries under Spanish rule" (p. 740). We "comfortably" skip over the brutal Philippine War, and the destruction of representative government in Puerto Rico, and the occupation of Cuba, in order to "prove" the perfect progressivism of the system.

To young people of privilege, this is a grand game they want to be in on. To miss it is to miss the flow of history. So whether Acosta - who seeks to be a colonial apparatchik, or Zuckerberg - who will use his great wealth to endow a school in a colonial backwater, or all those who seek the resume line "Teach for America" (the contemporary equivalent of that old post in the Foreign Service), these silver spoon children seek out the joys of what Said calls "orientalism" and "adventure" while getting the powerful feel that they are riding the wave of history - which is more appealing to self-identity than seeing yourself as a passive inheritor of wealth.

It is a grand game, but it is not played on a level field. And like those who joined that old British Foreign Service (you may want to watch Lawrence of Arabiafor some clues), today's education colonials see themselves as always superior, and always knowing what is best for those beneath them. The result is the fawning response to power and the brutal dismissal of the powerless one sees most clearly now in D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee:

'"I think part of the problem in public education to date has been that we all have to feel good; let's not ruffle too many feathers," Rhee told a group of bigwigs gathered at the Newseum recently for the premiere of the documentary "Waiting for 'Superman,' " which features her as a hero.

"What Rhee didn't say is that she has gone all out to make residents who live in the wealthier, predominantly white parts of the city feel good. And if their feathers got ruffled and needed smoothing, she went so far as to visit their homes for coffee klatches and pep talks.

"So what happens when black residents on the other side of town start waving their hands - don't forget about us; we'd like to feel good, too? Rhee holds them up for ridicule. School reform is not "warm and fuzzy," she says." - Courtland Milloy, Washington Post

Cubberley, like his university-level and political parallel Woodrow Wilson, was remaking the world as safe for the white elite. Creating a rational, stable planet for both the business of America and its middle class joys. What was being done for "the other," whether that was working class children or Czech independence proponents, was being done for a potent combination of the economic self-interest of the powerful (nations economically and militarily dependent on France, a stable and low-wage workforce) and the "feel good" warmth of liberal accomplishment. Thus Cubberley, and Wilson embarked on a systemic re-design of the world - Cubberley through schools, Wilson through borders and government structures - which would be permanent because they were inevitable. It does not matter whether one is discussing "technique of instruction" (p. 749) and "the scientific organization of education" (p. 824) or "defensible borders" and "national self-determination" - both are the products of logical evolution in a "just" universe.

Just how enduring this inevitability is can easily be seen in both education and political spheres. In education "we" continue to pursue the scientific and the "proper technique" (though we now say "evidence-based practice") despite never finding an actual way to measure human learning. In the global political realm we continue to pursue "self-determination" unless - of course - we don't for reasons of "defensible borders" and the status of allies (Kosovo good, Catalonia bad. Georgia good, South Ossetia bad).

And our young continue to be called into service for both missions - educational and global military - and are both demonized if they fail to achieve results which remain as impossible now as they were in 1899 or 1917.

Still not "English"

The issue which joins these failings of the "American Century" together, lies in the very concept underlying both. Whether nations are to become "American" in form and substance, or differing American students are to become "White" in form and substance, neither group can ever catch up. Just as, no matter what the Irish, the Indians, the Nigerians, the Kenyans did, they could never truly become "English." And this impossibility, crafted by forcing "the other" to continually chase a moving objective, manufactures a permanent inequality.

"Through analyses of colonial schooling, anthropology, and the formation of academic subjects instrumental in the expansion of empire (history, geography, science, language and literature), Willinsky argues that education was and is the research and development arm of imperialism. Drawing on contemporary classrooms and materials, he considers how schools continue to educate the young within the "colonial imaginary." Through primary texts, cutting-edge scholarship and students' voices, Willinsky examines schooling itself, arguing for the incorporation of the imperial legacy into a multicultural education that does not dismiss the achievement of the West but gives an account of the divided world that achievement has created."

The "colonial imaginary" is what Cubberley brought into full-flower in American schooling, taking disparate intentions - moral and commercial, religious and imperial - and merging them into a coherent whole which the American intellectual elite could fully enjoy and feel good about. As Wilson sent Americans off to fight to "make the world safe for democracy," Cubberley sent them to build the American ideal: "The problem of the twentieth century, then, and probably of other centuries to come, is how the constructive forces in modern society, of which the schools of nations should stand first, can best direct their efforts to influence and direct the deeper sources of the life of a people, so that the national characteristics it is desired to display to the world will be developed because the schools have instilled into every child these national ideals" (p. 837).

The world, and all within America, would be reconstructed on the American ideal. And the young vanguard of American society would, then as now, set out to accomplish this.

The problem, then as now, is unequal beginnings on that path to either Americanness or Whiteness. Not only is a single conception of life, of government, of learning, of behavior, declared "correct" and thus all others declared "incorrect" ("It’s worth thinking about not matching the child’s supposed learning style to how they are supposed to learn, but rather think about the content and what is it about this content that I really want students to understand and what’s the best way to convey that.” – Daniel Willingham). Not only does it encourage racially-based labelling of behavior ("When white burnouts give wedgies to white A students, the authors argue, it is seen as inevitable, but when the same dynamic is observed among black students, it is pathologized as a racial neurosis." - Paul Tough in The New York Times Magazine). Unless Americans and Whites choose to stagnate, stand still, or regress, it is simply not possible for others to ever actually catch up. The further you start from the expressed ideal the further "behind" you are, and the further behind you will remain.

Next: What those in power get from the failure of education...

- Ira Socol

[1] As noted in Part Two of this series, Cubberley, who dominates the "post war" histories of American education by Cremin and others, is barely mentioned in Tyack's work or that of other contemporary authors.

[2] Acosta in his own words: "Before starting Root Orange, Camilo worked for his mom’s government communications company,The Media Network, where he introduced newfangled tools young people use like Facebook and Twitter to the company’s communications offerings. Years later, the federal government is still figuring out how to use social media. He also oversaw the company’s website re-design, which introduced him to the headache of website re-design. Camilo’s previous gigs include stints at the Corporate Executive Board and New Vantage Group, a venture capital firm in Northern Virginia.
"During the rare times he is not working on Root Orange, Camilo does fundraising and advocacy work for education reform efforts, a cause both he and Frank fervently support. He was almost assaulted once by an angry mob of former public school teachers while testifying at a D.C. City Council hearing. Camilo enjoyed the experience and The Washington Post found it newsworthy.
"Camilo received his B.A. in Politics from Princeton University, where his thesis on micro-finance in South Africa inexplicably managed to receive the Picard Prize. He is a graduate of the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C, where he enjoyed pasta dinners with Al Gore at the Vice President’s residence and seeing Hillary Clinton in frumpy mom clothes."

[3] Mark Zuckerberg in his own words: "Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Facebook, which he started in his college dorm room in 2004 with roomates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
"Zuckerberg is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for Facebook. He leads the design of Facebook’s service and development of its core technology and infrastructure.
"Earlier in life, Zuckerberg developed a music recommendation system called Synapse and a peer-to-peer client called Wirehog. However, he abandoned both to pursue new projects.
"Zuckerberg attended Harvard University and studied computer science before founding Facebook.
'While at Harvard, Zuckerberg created Facemash, a website that compared students’ dorm photos side-by-side in a fashion similar to HOT or NOT. Harvard administration was not amused, and Zuckerberg faced subsequent disciplinary action. Less than three months later, he launched Facebook.
"Zuckerberg won the 2007 Crunchie Award for ‘Best Startup CEO.’"

[4] The White Man's Burden (1899) - the poem was written as a critique of the U.S. colonial conquest of the Philippines.
"Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!"