Counterproductive Sea of Sameness in PME.

摘要

In his 2012 Mission Command White Paper, General Martin Dempsey highlighted the increasingly competitive and interconnected world and noted the commander s need for mental agility. He also emphasized the role education plays in developing mental agility. Additionally, in a 2013 interview on National Public Radio, General Dempsey stated that he foresees a military that has to adapt to a changing world, [and] not just a socially changing world but literally a demographically changing world. In terms of how those changes would affect military recruitment, he stated, we re going to need to attract as much diversity and as much talent as we can possibly attract. 3 Diversity is important not because of some sense of entitlement or to meet potentially self-imposed minimal quotas, but because of the value that multiple perspectives bring to any learning organization. Alex Pentland, named by Forbes as one of the seven most powerful data scientists in the world and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology s (MIT s) Human Dynamics Laboratory, recently wrote about the value of diversity in Wired: The collective intelligence of a community comes from idea flow; we learn from the ideas that surround us, and others learn from us. . . . When the flow of ideas incorporates a constant stream of outside ideas as well, then the individuals in the community make better decisions than they could on their own. Diversity of viewpoint and experience is an important success factor when harvesting innovative ideas.4 In the corporate world, research is increasingly showing that companies with a critical mass of women executives financially outperform their peers. This has led to a movement across the business world to get more women on corporate boards, in executive positions, and in employee ranks in general.