Today is International Walk to School Day--but not for some communities where walking and biking have been banned. Two recent news stories are discouraging on many levels, but do not represent the norm as more and more communities are, in fact, adopting alternatives to driving.

• In Saratoga Springs, NY, a woman and her 12-year old son are defying school officials who, on the day before school started, advised all parents that "walking and biking to school would not be tolerated."
• In Marblehead, MA, the town's participation in today's event was cancelled while the school works out "issues related to program administration, safety, and liability."

These stories are "easy targets," for walkability advocates and that is my first complaint. The newspaper coverage of the New York story in particular follows the pattern that has become so typical of print-based media's clumsy attempt to remain relevant in an online world. Controversy-baiting stories leave little room for reasonable discourse as dozens of intemperate commentors react to the story that has set up the town for criticism without providing adequate context to explain why presumably reasonable adults in the community made decisions and now find themselves on the online hot seat. Online media (including this post of mine, to some extent) jump on the bandwagon as the Sarasota Springs story makes it to the Huffington Post, shows up in my LinkedIn Groups, and will undoubtably be a feature item in the many Pedestrian and Bike update email newsletters to which I subscribe.

Maybe the folks in Saratoga Springs ARE idiots, but I suspect there is much more to the story...the policy has been in place since 1994. The parents and administrators are probably focused on 100 other issues and it is unfair-based on the limited information reported-to leap to conspiracy and anti-progressive theories. But it is more fun to do that and it sells papers and generates online traffic. Meanwhile, the parents and community members probably feel angry and misunderstood, but dare not venture into the online argument of anonymous people who know nothing and judge everything.

In Marblehead, the local newspaper, the Marblehead Reporter, does a better job of providing context. Parents, administrators, and school officials are not characterized as opposing walking, but it seems the promotional effort "got ahead of itself." The town had recently experienced a tragedy when a high school sophmore was hit and killed by a motorist...then, a "Wellness Committee" coincidentally launched a promotion of Walk to School Wednesdays. School Board Chairman Dick Nohelty said that the program was not passed through the proper channels before launching.

The Marblehead story is a cautionary tale for walkability advocates about the importance of inclusion and consensus. These ideas--promoting walking and bike-riding--are not self-evident truths or causes "against" anyone. In fact Marblehead, like my town of Westwood, is fully signed-up for the Safe Routes to Schools program. School Superintendent Paul Dulac noted that he'd like to see that program "more integrated" before a walking campaign takes place.

It should not be controversial to organize a walk to school or choose to ride a bike. But anything involving the safety of children is an extremely touchy issue that, when it makes people uncomfortable for whatever reason, will prompt conservative reactions. I'm learning for our own committee, it is easy to make mistakes and to not include the right person, talk to people the right way, promote an idea prematurely, etc.--but I think it can be managed by maintaining a positive attitude and accepting criticism as a learning process. We can't lose sight of our overall goals as we navigate the details.

Update: a torrential downpour here has cancelled today's walk...so perhaps next week, I'll report on how this went.

Several days ago, MIT announced that admissions director Marilee Jones was fired/resigned because, 28 years ago, she lied on her resume when applying for her first job at MIT, an administrative assistant position. Much confusion remains over exactly what and when she misled people, but it seems obvious that bad choices and bad decisions caused an initial mistake to harder to fix with time. They had to fire her; I don't dispute that. But it is disturbing to read how quickly others are quick to want to punish her.

The letter to the editor of the Globe from Chester Claff, an MIT alum, is just what I would expect from the old school types of fixed mindset people at MIT:

How do we alumni now know what criteria have been applied for decades in selecting the pool of MIT freshmen each year?

I find this letter annoying for a couple of reasons:

1. A large component of the MIT experience is based on the concept of entitlement. First, you have to be "good enough" to be admitted. Then, once you graduate, you have been judged to be in a unique class of super-intellectuals. Anything that threatens that world view is personally threatening because it calls into question the validity of the validation. In this case, the fear is that because the admissions director is a liar, a whole crop of substandard students might have been admitted. That mistake will eventually be proven by the deteriorating reputation of MIT graduates.

2. Along similar lines, people are either good or bad. Once judged bad, they have no value. Graduating MIT presuably gives you a "good" card that you can carry around for the rest of your life. Lying on your resume is a ticket to the stocks.

When I read Carol Dweck's book about MindSet, one of the things that did not "fit" was the superficial idea that fixed = limiting and avoiding challenges. That's partly true. But for achievement-oriented individuals, it is possible to have a fixed mindset and yet be very successful. Part of the strength of the fixed mindset is the power of the entitlement belief. When you believe you are special, that you have native talents that have been validated by your historical successes, it gives you a measure of confidence that is a bit more than just bravado.

Getting through MIT is hard. And we are right to congratulate ourselves on the fact that we did it. But we should not need it to validate us.

When I see these kinds of judgmental attitudes, dripping with elitism and superiority, it bothers me and reminds me of why the MIT pedigree can seem at times a mixed blessing.

When I was at MIT, one of the things people worried about was the idea that MIT graduates ended up working for Harvard graduates. Everyone wanted to change that. So they started up entrepreneurship programs and modified the admissions criteria (always causing friction for the two reasons above) and did all kinds of things to try and create more entrepreneurial graduates.

Did it work? Maybe. But it is all so based on the fixed mindset idea...why should I care if my boss graduated from Harvard or MIT or the University of Phoenix online? We are not better than anyone else. Every day is a new day.

These attitudes are not universal at MIT; I have plenty of friends who don't think like this at all. But it is an attitude that is reinforced and often amplified in competitive, high-pressure environments. And ultimately, while it can be individually powerful and motivating--as long as you can hide your arrogance from people you need to work with--it is fundamentally limiting because it is just plain impractical. What do you do when you eventually fail? What happens when something you didn't think was a big deal comes back to haunt you in a context you did not anticipate? It's not just a matter of compassion, to cut somebody a little slack, it is also just good sense to recognized that everyone makes mistakes, but if we can't recover from those mistakes, how can we ever make any progress?

Lying on a resume does not invalidate your life's work. It's not OK to do and it not something that can just be excused and forgotten. It will be hard to recover from. But people deserve a chance to do so.

Front page article in the Globe today on how middle-class city residents in the South End and JP are "making over" their kids' schools.

I think it partially illustrates my comment in my long choice of neighborhood post that, in the end, what you do after you move in is more important than the choice process. It's also an indicator of how important it is to attract "activist-oriented" young people in the first place. One they start having kids, it is hard to move, but if they are the type of folks who feel empowered to get involved and change things, they will invest in the community.

My question to these parents is why they did not just move to the suburbs? It's great that they are working to improve the schools and it sets a great example for their kids...but wouldn't it be easier to move someplace where you didn't have to change everything to fit your needs?

I'm probably the last person left to read Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point. Like I've alluded to before, I've been busy for the past few years as I managed more important parts of my life like starting a family and avoiding an emotional meltdown at my stressful job. So now, I'm catching up.

But I found, as I read this fascinating book, many of my own self-defeating "achievement demons" bugging me. The optimist and creative part of me is just plain fascinated to learn things. But there is a voice in my head that is constantly saying things like, "OK, why aren't you like that?" when he talks about the key types of people that make a difference in the world.

"Connectors" are people who have many "weak ties"--they know everyone, it seems. These people are the ones who make it possible to connect anyone to anyone else. As Gladwell says, it is not that everyone is connected to everyone else through a vast network; it is more like everyone is connected to at least one person who is connected to everyone else. And that is more due to the connector's initiative and luck than it is to the non-connector person. I'm not a connector. What's wrong with me?

OK, then there are the "mavens." Mavens are people who become experts on things and want to help others by sharing that knowledge. So, for example, Robin Liss, created CamcorderInfo.com where you can find out everything you ever wanted to know about camcorders. I worked for a company where the fundamental business model was based on creating communities of mavens, most successfully for mountain biking and audiophiles. But I didn't really become a maven for anything, although it is my tendency in many areas...So again, why did I "fail?"

Finally, there are "salesmen." The great persuaders. Gladwell describes his conversation with financial planner, author, and motivator, Tom Gau. It is truly amazing the power an authentic person can have in terms of persuasion at so many levels. I'm so logic-oriented that if someone is making an argument or presenting a theory they want me to understand, I tend to look off to the side so I can picture in my mind what they are talking about instead of even looking at them. So I'm not going to be a sales guy. But I've known that for a long time.

My point here is not specifically to reiterate the ideas in the Tipping Point, but to consider my "achievement demon" problem. It's a product of how I grew up and was driven to always be #1, etc. It is a powerful motivator. But it can't work for everyone and it sets up expectations that don't allow for alternative paths to happiness and fulfillment.

This weekend, I was thinking about education and it occurred to me how we really need to figure out ways to motivate our kids in some way that doesn't create such a "winner-take-all" mindset. It can be so all-encompassing. Gladwell talks about the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) in terms of context; how we tend to ignore context and just assume given behaviors or talents are the result of fundamental character traits, skills, etc. Some of us are such internalizers that it's like everything is about us...so you can't read a book without thinking the author is passing some kind of judgment on your life. That's nuts.

So, when I read about the need to prepare kids for a competitive global economy...or to prepare myself to launch a new career or whatever...it can be very self-defeating to think in such absolutist terms. It's the same kind of thinking that allows people to believe everything has already been invented, there is nothing left to discover, etc. We get so good at evaluating the rules we think we can just find the new rules and follow them. But we need a leap.

Penelope Trunk blogged today about Newsweek's article on women role models making the point that these success stories don't resonate with GenXers who are not willing to sacrifice life for career anymore. It is all part of the same treadmill; these women are supposed to be examples of success...but maybe it is not really how I would define success. On the other hand, just aspiring to balance your life can come across as a sellout or even capitulation to the reality that you are not going to win the "game". That feeling can prevent us from pursuing a better path because we feel we are giving up.

In the same way, educating our children...if we don't have standards, what do we have? Somebody has to win; that's the motivator. If nobody wins, who wants to play the game? People who already "get it" think this kind of talk is nonsense, but the rest of us cling to it desperately because it has worked for us in the past and we don't know what to replace it with. On the one hand, people tell us to balance our lives, but then they acknowledge that usually, work life balance is a bunch of crap. Winners sacrifice. Losers rationalize.

But we need to get beyond it. It is not just about redefining success...that is just rationalization. It is about deciding what you really want and having the courage to make it happen. That is a challenge for everyone, not just me, and the bigger challenge is how to think of ways to get more people thinking that way without using the simplistic carrot and stick approach of the winner-take-all game.

Thinking back to the "high powered" private elementary school...or MIT...how do we make "average" great? How do we change the learning environments so we create a competition in which everyone can win and every win has meaning? Or is it just me that's nuts?

This topic could fill a library. But a couple of events this past weekend got me to thinking.

First, MIT released a report recommending a number of fundamental changes to the core curriculum. The headline grabber was recommending that all students engage in some form of international experience. That's a huge leap for the MIT community for the reasons I'll describe below, and it represents the potential to lead the way towards an acknowledgement of the realities of global competitiveness.

Second, I attended a "Family Fun Fair" at the Charles River School, an "independent pre-K - 8th grade school" here in the Boston Suburbs. It was quite a production--they even had carnival rides set up for the kids. It's all a fundraising and community event for a private school that charges 16-20+K/year tuition. My kids are not even 3 years old yet, but I am starting to think about what their education should be like. Schools like this one make me very ambivalent.

When I was a student at MIT, one of the biggest issues was an effort to abolish or change the first year pass/fail grading system. As students, we had a lot of passionate ideas about the value of going through the first year without the pressure of grades. The common experience is a great leveler--especially for someone like me who came from a tiny school in rural Virginia. Getting in to MIT was the greatest accomplishment of my life at that time, and I really looked to MIT to set the standard and give me a roadmap for success in the future.

But you have to adapt and grow. The education is like taking a drink from a firehose. It is all you can do to figure out how to survive. The idea of leaving school to go somewhere else for a year is a radical, scary idea. I can understand how many students will not be receptive to it. I did an "alternate major"--I was a management + political science major and that was weird then and now. Student follow certain paths to their majors and if you are out of sequence, it means it is harder to find people to work on problem set with and you can easily feel "behind." The same is true of moving around from living group to living group--most students choose a dorm during their first week and live there for 4 years.

Interjecting an international component to the education is radical in two dimensions--first, it will involve going outside MIT to learn something. But potentially more radically, it requires making the education more flexible to accomodate the "disruption" of leaving the campus. In both dimensions, it will force growth and change. That's good, even without the specific value of the content.

My high school was a private school, but it was no Charles River. The principal advantage of my school was a lack of discipline problems. The public school, in the 1970s, had a reputation for problems. My school was one of those post-massive resistence inspired academies that were all-white in a county where the majority population was black. Someday, when I run for public office, I'm sure I'll be called to explain that background, but it's not really what the school was about. What it was about was that teachers inspired their students and helped us develop a love of learning or at least not a hatred of it.

So I have mixed feelings now when I look at these modern day private schools. Aren't our public schools here in the Boston suburbs good enough? Are these schools just elitist snob factories? What matters to me is whether the school will provide the comprehensive foundation--not that they have to teach the kids advanced calculus, but will my kids learn to love or hate education? How do we figure that out? I'll let you know in a couple years.

How does it all fit in? Well, people like me have to figure these issues out as we raise our kids who face a complex future. It's not about taking a class in international relations or getting the most advanced math classes possible. It is about teaching our children to be more adaptable and more skilled at the same time. Helping them develop ways of seeing the world that will allow them to contribute more creatively. Helping them learn, from an early age, that there is no one roadmap to success. The MIT degree or the Charles River School ring are not magic talismans that concur weatlh, prosperity, and happiness...but what does? Where do we find that stuff so we can give it to our kids? The search for that answer is what drives parents to spend 20K/year to send their kids to nursery school. But not everyone can or should afford that.