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Ask bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell who he would class as a personal hero, and the answer might surprise you: Howard Moskowitz.
Moskowitz was not an astronaut or a football player or a social justice campaigner.
The man Gladwell says "has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years" is best known for his work with tomato sauce, or what Americans call spaghetti sauce.
Moskowitz, a Harvard-educated food consultant and psychophysicist who has worked with Pepsi and Campbells Soup, among others, pioneered the idea "intermarket variability" — creating many different types of a product to appeal to as many different tastes as possible.
"His great observation was that he had a great respect for human variation," the Canadian author of Outliers and The Tipping Point, works considered the gold standard of popular psychology, told Lateline.
"And this seems like a kind of trivial thing, but it has actually transformed the food industry.
"People were who were in the spaghetti business thought there was such a thing as the perfect spaghetti sauce. He was the one who disabused them of that."
Moskowitz, Gladwell says, believed a company producing spaghetti sauce should be trying to understand all the different dimensions of human taste and catering to them.
"How many people out there like there spaghetti sauce thick and chunky? How many like it spicy? How many like it heavy on the meat? How many like it thin, like classic Italian spaghetti sauce, which is very finely grained?" he asked.
"He educated that world about the width and depth of human difference."
OK, what does this have to do with education?
Good question. Gladwell, who will speak in Melbourne and Sydney later this year, says humans have a long way to go before they fully appreciate the significance of Moskowitz's observation, and how it might apply to other parts of life.
"We are still operating on a model [that] says that almost all children will benefit from a system where they arrive at 8:30 in the morning, they stay at school until 4:00, they are supposed to sit still at their desks and memorise things, and be quiet, and speak only when they are spoken to," Gladwell said.
"That's an insane notion."
And it comes back to Moskowitz and his spaghetti sauce. Different arrangements — or tastes — will work for different people, Gladwell believes.
"There is far more variety in the way in which we experience the world than we care to admit," he said,
Will technology allow for a more personalised experience?
Gladwell isn't convinced.
"My great fear is that we will make the same mistake with technology as we did with the previous paradigm," he said.
"In other words, we'll come up with some way of developing an online curriculum or an online classroom, and we'll assume that everyone will thrive in that setting.
"I am quite convinced that there will be as many children who are deeply unhappy in an online-heavy educational experience as there are [children] deeply unhappy in a traditional classroom."
An infinitely customisable experience, Gladwell says. That's what he is interested in.
"In people being able to experiment with as many different modes as possible until they find something that works for them," he said.
Watch the full interview on Lateline at 9:30 on the ABC News channel or 10:30 on ABC.
Topics: education, schools, author, psychology, australia
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