The End of Average

There is, I’m told, an exam for four-year-olds. And another for the sevens. In Korea, small children sit entrance tests for English-immersion kindergartens and the academies that come after—vocabulary, grammar, a few words spoken aloud to a native examiner. Fail, and the door stays shut. People call them the four-year-old exam and the seven-year-old exam, as though they were civil-service boards. I was watching a documentary about it when something in my chest tightened. A child not yet five, seated at a desk, straining to summon a word she doesn’t know. I think I was angry. Or maybe just heavy-hearted. I couldn’t quite tell.

The exam is something the parents want; it’s the child who has to sit it. And I won’t pretend I don’t understand the impulse. Everyone else is doing it—won’t my own child fall behind? Any parent knows that fear in the gut. But when the fear sets a five-year-old down in an examination room, who exactly is racing ahead? Not the child. The one in a hurry is always the parent.

Whenever I hear these stories, I end up turning the question on myself. My daughter is in school in Singapore; I’m in Busan. Most evenings I open a tablet and we look together at the math problems she couldn’t crack alone. I had given her a laptop, to get her used to a keyboard—but working through equations by hand, back and forth, was awkward on it. So a while ago I sent her a pen tablet, the flat kind you plug into a laptop and write on with a stylus. With an hour’s time difference between us, we fill one screen with numbers, side by side, as if I were scribbling in the margin of her notebook. For a moment it feels like sitting next to her. Then the screen goes dark and the distance returns. A video call can’t stand in for being there.

I never had my daughter do what Koreans call seonhaeng—running ahead of the school curriculum, learning next year’s material this year. If I said it gave me no anxiety, I’d be lying. When people ask whether she’ll be all right once she’s back in Korea, something in me wavers. Had I been in the thick of Korea, I might not have managed it either. Still, for whatever stubborn reason, I haven’t changed my mind. I tell her only two things. Do math slowly, thinking as you go. And asking a good question matters more than producing the answer.

When I was a boy, seonhaeng was a word I didn’t know—or perhaps only I didn’t know it. What I had instead was this. One day in elementary school my father handed me a problem: find the area of the lens-shaped sliver where two circles overlap. This was long before I’d learned about pi. Solve it on your own, he said, and there’s a prize. It took me a full day just to discover that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is constant, and that we call it pi. Days more to reach the answer. I can’t easily put the joy of it into words. I still remember the two thousand won he gave me—not the sum, but those few days. That wasn’t getting ahead of anyone. That was a dare I took.

Todd Rose’s The End of Average came to me around that time. Reading it, I felt something close to relief—not that I’d been proven right, but that someone had quietly nodded at the road I’d taken.

Rose’s claim is plain: there is no average person. The average is a fiction. And yet, from schools to workplaces, it reigns as the unquestioned measure by which we are ranked against one another—like air, so ordinary that we forget we’re breathing it. There were reasons it became the scaffolding of modern life. As industry began to handle people by the thousand, it needed a way to teach them, sort them, and assign them all at once. The average was wonderfully convenient for that.

In the nineteenth century the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet measured a person’s worth by nearness to the average. To him the average was the ideal; individual difference was nature’s mistake. The average man was the true man. The Englishman Francis Galton inherited the idea and turned it somewhere darker—he sorted people by how far, and in which direction, they strayed from the mean. The average became the line dividing the superior from the inferior.

Soon the notion climbed down from the academy into ordinary life. Frederick Winslow Taylor carried it into the factory, breaking work into standardized fragments and stripping workers of any say in planning or judgment. What we now call Taylorism began with him. Edward Thorndike then carried the same thing into the school, where it became the ruler that separated the able pupil from the slow one. A single idea marched through factory and classroom in turn.

In time, people began to crack that settled faith. In the 1950s the U.S. Air Force was losing planes to accidents no one could explain. A young researcher named Gilbert Daniels measured more than four thousand pilots across ten bodily dimensions. The cockpits had been built to fit the average pilot. Daniels wondered: how many pilots actually fell near the average on all ten? The answer stunned him—not one. The cockpit built for the average fit no one alive. There lay the cause of the crashes. The remedy was not to fit the pilot to the cockpit but the cockpit to the pilot. Once the seats and pedals could move, the accidents fell away.

Fit the cockpit to the person—the lesson opens onto a larger question. If not by the average, then how are we to understand a human being? Rose answers with three principles: jaggedness, context, and pathways. This is the heart of the book.

Jaggedness first. Talent is never one thing you can shrink to a single number. A tall man needn’t have large feet; within one person, ability runs uneven from one domain to the next. So do intelligence, temperament, creativity. I see it in my daughter. She stalls over long division, then races past everyone once the problem turns to shapes. To grade such a child by a single rank is to flatten her mountains and valleys into a plain and call it level ground.

Context next. Character isn’t a fixed thing we carry intact from room to room; it shifts with the situation. The child who chatters without end at home falls silent in the exam hall. Do we call her shy? When we say someone is timid, or aggressive, we are often judging the whole person from a single scene. Rose warns against the habit: before asking what kind of person someone is, ask first what a given setting draws out of them. This one stung. How often had I pinned a label on someone at work—this one’s like this, that one’s like that—without once asking which room I’d left them standing in.

Pathways last. We tend to believe the route to any goal is already laid out, that success means walking the road others have cleared ahead of us. By this grade you should be this far along; employed by this age, married by that one, promoted by the next. The timetable society hands us never ends. The pathways principle says otherwise: there are many roads to the same place, each its own, and the one that fits you depends on who you are. Years ago, in an autobiographical essay, I gave one chapter the title Everyone has their own timetable. Looking back, that was the pathways principle all along.

The three principles point one way: a person cannot be reduced to an average. Only then did I understand why I’d balked at seonhaeng. Running ahead assumes a single road—this much by this age, that much by the next. I had felt the frailty of that assumption without being able to name it. Seonhaeng itself, when you think about it, is a child of averagarianism. To get ahead presupposes a standard—the average—to be measured against. Without that standard, the very word loses its meaning. My father’s lens-shaped problem gave me nothing to get ahead of. I simply made my own road.

Rose is just as sharp about the averagarianism of the workplace, and I find I’m not free of its shadow either. The father who refuses to force a fixed pace on his daughter submits to a fixed curriculum himself, on the job. Civil servants like me must log a set number of training hours every year, and no small part of that is filling time for the sake of filling it. Whether the content touches my actual work, whether it sharpens me—no one asks. It is schooling built for the average civil servant, standardized for all. The contradiction wasn’t far off.

Come back to Taylor and a strange thing surfaces. He warned workers against indulging their own originality—foolish, he said, to replace a method the average man already used well. And yet the very idea of standardizing all work and lifting judgment into a separate class was itself wildly original, a thing no one had done before. An argument against originality, born of originality. Taylor resolved the paradox with the figure of the manager. Originality hadn’t vanished; it had moved upstairs. Planning, judgment, decision gathered in the manager, while everyone below was left only to follow. But here I can’t help asking: can someone who has only ever followed suddenly lead? Can a hand that never made a judgment, never paid the worthwhile tuition of trial and error, take the seat of judgment overnight?

The question lands hard in the age of artificial intelligence, which is kicking out the lower rungs of the ladder of experience. The fumbling, stumbling work by which a novice once learned, machines now do faster. The very apprenticeship that grew a person’s judgment is being skipped whole. What Taylor took from the worker, the machine now comes for at the very first rung.

I can’t file this under someone else’s problem. It is the world my daughter will grow into. Not something to comment on from a comfortable distance, but something to wrestle with. If our children learn only to follow a path laid down for them, how will they carve out a life of their own in a world ringed by machines—and keep their dignity as human beings? I find myself stopping at that question, often.

Maybe the answer, or at least a clue, isn’t so far off. Artificial intelligence is itself a product of averagarianism. Its replies are pressed from the common sense of multitudes—Quetelet’s average man, distilled. When we say it surpasses the human, there is a cold breath of Galton’s superiority in the phrase. But that is exactly where the way out lies. The average is what machines do best. So long as we refuse to be average, no machine can stand in for us. The jagged, particular ground outside the average is the one place only a person can occupy. To set down averagarianism, then, is also to keep our seat from the machine.

I first opened the book for the author’s life, which reads like a reversal staged in a play. Todd Rose was diagnosed with ADHD and dropped out of high school on failing grades. For a time he worked factory shifts to feed his children. He passed an equivalency exam, entered a community college, ground through night classes, and came out the far side with a doctorate in human development from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education—and, finally, a professorship there. Then he left even that chair, to build an organization of his own devoted not to the average but to the potential of the individual. The boy his school had marked as a problem now sits where education is studied most closely. That turn is what drew me in.

At the bottom, Rose felt the world’s verdict on him was unjust. There was a wide gap between who he really was and who the world took him to be. He stopped trying to fit himself to the system and set about fitting the system to himself. That turn carried him to where he stands now. Fit creates opportunity—the line is his. Equal opportunity isn’t handing everyone the same thing; it opens only when each is given what fits. If I had to press the whole book into a single sentence, that is the one I’d choose.

I have two stations now. One is the office where I work; the other, the family I belong to. At work I sometimes think of leaving the post for some larger freedom. But leaving ends nothing. Perhaps the most meaningful thing I can do from this chair is to wear down the average here—to help the people under me move as human beings finding their own road, not as interchangeable parts.

The work at home is no different. Tonight, across the screen, my daughter turned another page of her workbook at her own speed. Slower than her friends, perhaps. But that page is a road she laid herself, not one cleared for her. I believe in that road. I waver, of course. There are nights I can’t quite settle—whether going at her own pace is all right in a world where machines do everything, whether she’ll fall hopelessly behind. Then I set my mind again: it is the child who walked her own road, not the one hurried down someone else’s, who finally goes farthest. Across the screen, she turns to the next page. I watch her do it for a long while.