No one is average. Not your neighbors, not your co-workers, not your kids, and not you. This isn’t hollow sloganeering or ivory tower esoterica—it’s a frank mathematical fact with enormous practical consequences for your chances for success. Our schools and businesses are all designed to evaluate and promote talent based upon the mythical notion of the average person, a one-size-fits-all model that ignores the true nature of our individuality.
“The hardest part of learning something new is not embracing new ideas, but letting go of old ones.”
We’re misusing averages to our peril, says Todd Rose in his book The End of Average. Our society has developed "norms” in education and business that ignore human diversity. These standards are mirages thrown up by the misuse of a seemingly innocent mathematical operation, the average.
A new science of the individual, championed here by Rose, seeks richer models of humanity that acknowledge our complexity instead of hiding it behind one-dimensional metrics. The author, director of the Mind, Brain and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, shares the history and science of social averaging, as well as his own battles against unfavorable comparison to the mythical average person.
“It is not that the average is never useful. Averages have their place... But the moment you need to teach this child or decide whether to hire that employee—the moment you need to make a decision about any individual—the average is useless. Worse than useless, in fact, because it creates the illusion of knowledge, when in fact the average disguises what is most important about an individual.”
Averages have a place in astronomy. When one astronomer measures the movement of a heavenly body, the measurement contains some error. However, if many astronomers take measurements that are then averaged, they converged toward an accurate answer. Rose tells us how the magic of this “method of averages” inspired Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet to create the concept of the “average man”.
“Our modern conception of the average person is not a mathematical truth but a human invention, created a century and a half ago.”
During the Belgian Revolution, Quetelet’s Brussels observatory fell under the occupation of rebel troops. His work thrown into chaos by social revolt, Quetelet wondered whether the methods of physics, capable of accurately modeling the heavens, could be used to model, predict, and even manage society. In a practice he dubbed “social physics” (a term he appropriated from Auguste Comte leading Comte to rename his combination of psychology and economics “sociology”), he studied statistics of crime, marriage, and suicide. Compiling average body measurements of thousands of individuals, he created what he called the “Average Man”, a model of the human physique he believed to be ideal. In fact, Quetelet believed that a person’s deviations from this form were a kind of disfigurement or disease. His studies of the body gave us the Quetelet Index, or Body Mass Index, still in use today.
Francis Galton, a scholar who saw Quetelet as “the greatest authority on vital and social statistics”, took the idea of average in a new direction. To him, the average was not ideal, it was mediocre. He ranked individuals against the average, casting them into types. Those who fell below the average were imbeciles; those who rose above it, eminent.
“From the cradle to the grave, you are measured against the ever-present yardstick of the average, judged according to how closely you approximate it or how far you are able to exceed it.”
The problem with the “Average Man” is that he doesn’t exist. Neither does the average woman. In 1943, artist Abram Belskie and doctor Robert Latou Dickinson created Norma, a white alabaster composite of the measurements of 15,000 women. The Cleveland Health Museum, having purchased the statue, ran a contest awarding a cash prize to any Ohio woman whose measurements matched Norma’s. Of nearly 4,000 entries, less than 40 came close to Norma, and no one was an exact match.
In 1950 Lt. Gilbert S. Daniels was tasked by the U.S. air force to compile average measurements of their pilots. There had been a rash of plane accidents. It was believed that redesigning the cockpit around the average pilot would put control back in their hands. Daniels grew suspicious that these averages were not representative of the variation in individuals. He decided to see how many individuals came close to the average measurements.
“Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all ten dimensions... There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.”
The air force wisely heeded Daniels, discarded the average, and designed adjustable cockpits. Rose believes we should embrace Daniels’s findings and root out the misuse of averages in all social endeavors.
Why is the average failing us when it served astronomers so well? It all comes down to application. In the earlier example, astronomers were averaging readings of a single object. Applying the average works well in this kind of problem. But when studying a group, Rose says, one can only apply averages under certain conditions found in a branch of mathematics called ergodic theory: 1) every member of the group is identical, and 2) every member of the group will remain identical in the future. Human bodies and aptitudes satisfy neither condition.
“Most of us know intuitively that a score on a personality test, a rank on a standardized assessment, a grade point average, or a rating on a performance review doesn’t reflect your, or your child’s, or your students’, or your employees’ abilities. Yet the concept of average as a yardstick for measuring individuals has been so thoroughly ingrained in our minds that we rarely question it seriously.”
Rose tells us how in the early 1900s Frederick Winslow Taylor brought the average to industry. Organizations would achieve the greatest success and stability, Taylor claimed, if they relied not on geniuses driven by inspiration but on mediocre workers operating within well-designed policies. “In the past the man was first…. In the future the system must be first”.
This same philosophy echoes in a publication of John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board. Frederick Gates, Rockefeller’s philanthropy and business advisor, wrote in 1913:
“In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply."
To cure the zealous misuse of the average (what has been called “averagarianism”) and the systemic mediocrity of Taylorism, Rose prescribes adherence to three principles.
The Jaggedness Principle states that the statistics of human characteristics are naturally variable; graphs of these characteristics appear jagged with variation. Averaging measurements of individuals hides the inherent jaggedness.
The Context Principle states that people are not static but change depending on their surroundings. A change in their physical environment, their social context, the time of day, their diet, will change them.
The Pathways Principle states that people can arrive at the same outcome by different paths. The sequence of milestones in a child’s physical development or literacy are not the same for all individuals.
Rose’s principles complement those of Ken Robinson. We must acknowledge that people are nuanced, that they change, and that they are inclined to go their own way. Our educational system needs to be redesigned, like those air force cockpits, to be adaptable to each individual.
