“Give and Take” by Adam Grant is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of achievement and success in our highly interconnected world. Although many parts of Grant’s business oriented book are applicable to education, the discussion about “the strength of weak ties” (p. 47-49) is especially important because the success of our students partially depends upon how well our schools and classrooms nurture “the strength of weak ties.”
Where Grant defines strong ties as “close friends and colleagues” that we trust, weak ties consist of “our acquaintances, the people we know casually.” Mark Granovetter, a Stanford sociologist studying the success and failure of people attempting to change jobs, was the first to observe that weak ties were more likely than strong ties to yield new opportunities. “Strong ties provide bonds,” according to Grant, “but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information.” Weak ties are what children have mostly experienced in our country’s classrooms and schools but the “bridges” are slowly being deconstructed by the mechanization of education.
Grant’s book is centrally about how society’s “givers” as opposed to “takers” succeed more in the long run because the former can connect and “reconnect” to strong and weak ties. (Grant defines “givers” and “takers” along with “matchers” on pages 4-5 with this synopsis: “Whereas takers tend to be self-focused, evaluating what other people can offer them, givers are other-focused, paying more attention to what other people need from them.”) Grant provides a couple of reasons why givers rather than takers can reconnect to strong and weak ties. In addition to the karmic idea that “what goes around comes around,” he focuses upon the skills of his model giver—Adam Rifkin—by stating that “His secret was deceptively simple: he asked thoughtful questions and listened with remarkable patience.” Isn’t that what our classrooms should be about? In order to strengthen and reconstruct the “bridges” of weak ties in our schools we need to promote classrooms filled with thoughtful questioning and listening rather than standardized testing.
Because of our unmitigated focus on standardized testing, we have forgotten the importance of taking time to thoughtfully question. Striving to attain a bureaucratically derived standardized test score has become more important than learning how to ask the right questions. The skill of taking tests is useful for succeeding at one day exams such as the SATs and GREs but the skill of developing thoughtful questions is useful for everyday success throughout our working and personal lives. If we want our children to be able to provide answers in school, work and life, we must help them learn how to ask the right questions. In the words of E.E. Cummings: “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.”
In a society where listening to react has replaced listening to understand (i.e., watch any of the cable news networks and the growing polarization of our political system), the ability to “listen with remarkable patience” is truly remarkable. Our children grow up in the culture that we construct: in and out of school. They are the reflections of what we model and teach them. When we emphasize that the purpose of school is to recite one right answer (i.e., standardized tests), are we teaching them to patiently listen for the possibility that there may be a variety of answers for a wide range of problems? Listening to different perspectives is crucial for strengthening weak ties and we are teaching it right out of them. We need to heed the Native American proverb “Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.”
A 27 April 2014 article in the New York Times highlighted the importance of strengthening weak ties for our society, as a whole, when it summarized the results of a research project stating “Even the bit players in our lives may influence our day-to-day well being.” The authors of the article contend that a simple “fleeting glance” has shown to increase a person’s well being. “The social norm of avoiding eye contact seems harmless,” according to the authors of “Hello Stranger,” “but it might not be.” In schools, over the last decade, our children have learned more about how to fill in bubbles and less about how to learn together; more about darkening ovals and less about understanding each other. Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler, in The ADHD Explosion argue that it isn’t a coincidence that there has been a 41% increase in ADHD diagnoses of school children over the last decade; that is an estimated 6.4 million children with over two-thirds of them receiving prescription drugs.
Grant’s book came to mind again yesterday when I finished reading T.M. Luhrmann’s New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Our Flinching State of Mind.” Luhrmann writes that we cannot “stop the slight flinching expectation of the possibility of carnage we feel as we walk into a school or office building” because of (1) the way the media portrays incidents such as the Isla Vista rampage as events that will inevitably reoccur and (2) the belief that in society “now everybody is alone.” Grant’s “givers” clearly show that we are not alone and that when we are networked together, we can achieve “beautiful” solutions to seemingly daunting problems. Let’s put away the smartphones and URLs a little more often than we do and connect eye-to-eye via IRL (in real life) in an effort to strengthen weak ties. The strength of weak ties is important not only for building a healthy “state of mind” throughout American civil society but for teaching our children to thoughtfully question and listen to understand.
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Chris is Professor of Political Science at Western Connecticut State University, a Fulbright Scholar, Director of the Kathwari Honors Program, and founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity & Innovation. He is also the author of "The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Success" (HarperOne, 2017).
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