Beyond Average | Harvard Graduate School of Education
Todd Rose isn’t your average Harvard professor — but not because he dropped out of high school, spent time on welfare, and had 10 different minimum wage jobs and a wife and kid before he even finished being a teenager.
Todd Rose isn’t your average Harvard professor because when it comes to people, the average is a statistical myth, he argues. There is no average. Repeat: There is no average. No average professor. No average worker. No average soldier. No average Joe.
And what might just be the single most important lesson for educators: There definitely is no average student. Not one. Yet, as Rose, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’07, a lecturer at the Ed School and director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program, writes in his forthcoming book, The End of Average, from the moment we’re born to the moment we die, we are measured against a mythical yardstick — the average human — and it’s hurting everyone. That’s why with this book and through his nonprofit, the Center for Individual Opportunity, Rose is on a mission to dismantle this myth of the average and instead help the public understand the importance of the individual.
“We talk so much about the individual, ” he says, “but there’s such a divide between what we say we believe and what we actually do.”
