David Brooks The Importance Of Education

Rene Guerrero
02/23/2015
Eng 101
Education is undoubtedly an essential and important tool for every single person. It plays an important role to shape and define the success of an individual. The lack of a good education will complicate a person’s efforts to move up in the world, seek a better job, and achieve a successful career and life. The importance of education is crucial and it starts at an early age. Parents give a great amount of effort to give their children the best education. Everyone has different views and argue on what is the most important way to educate children. This essay compares and contrasts different views of education offered in the articles by the New York Times columnist and radio and television political commentator
She is depraving her kids from the most useful skills. “Her kids can’t possibly be happy or truly creative. They’ll grow up skilled and compliant but without audacity to be great.” A lot of these skills are learned in school plays, sleepovers, and play dates since during these activities you communicate with other people. Brooks believes understanding people’s points of view, having good social skills, interacting with other people, and working adequately in groups are important factors to achieve success and happiness. “Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group - these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.” He criticizes Chua for not recognizing the value of working in groups and developing social skills. This is a clear difference to Amy Chua’s argument, which affirms intensive practice and being the best at certain areas that can be mastered such as piano, math, violin, etc. will achieve
Unlike Amy Chua and David Brooks, Gladwell suggests that there is a logical explanation as why some of the most brilliant and remarkable people in history, such as The Beatles, Mozart, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, achieved their success. In order to master anything you want to accomplish, there is a combination of practice and luck. Luck plays an indispensable role according to Gladwell “We pretend that success is a matter of individual merit. That is not the whole story. Their success was not their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.” Gladwell believes that besides the desire, study and practice, in some cases there are a series of events and certain circumstances that leads to the success of some people. He gives Bill Gates as an example. Bill Gates outshined the brilliance and ambition of thousands of the programmers at his age, but, according to Gladwell, Bill Gates gained the success he has now due to certain circumstances. Besides his brilliance and ambition, he was exposed to software development at his early age. This gave him a better chance to become one of the most influential and richest people. Gates was presented with several opportunities that helped him gain thousands of hours of computer programming practice at an early age. Gates was one of the