Stephen Colbert Featured in Ken Bain's “What the Best College Students Do”.

Combining academic research on learning and motivation with insights drawn from interviews with people who have won Nobel Prizes, Emmys, fame, or the admiration of people in their field, Ken Bain identifies the key attitudes that distinguished the best college students from their peers. These individuals started out with the belief that intelligence and ability are expandable, not fixed. This led them to make connections across disciplines, to develop a “meta-cognitive” understanding of their own ways of thinking, and to find ways to negotiate ill-structured problems rather than simply looking for right answers. Intrinsically motivated by their own sense of purpose, they were not demoralized by failure nor overly impressed with conventional notions of success. These movers and shakers didn’t achieve success by making success their goal. For them, it was a byproduct of following their intellectual curiosity, solving useful problems, and taking risks in order to learn and grow.

Ken Bain’s interview with the TV satirist Stephen Colbert is revealing both for its insight into Colbert and for its ideas on how higher education ought to work.

Colbert grew up in South Carolina, as the youngest of 11 children in a family that prized curiosity and reading. When he was 10, his father and two brothers were killed in an Eastern Air Lines crash. “After that,” he told Bain, “I saw my job as making my mother laugh.” He did so with jokes and antics. When he went off to college — first Hampden-Sydney and then Northwestern — he immersed himself in philosophy, then theater and improv. Both taught him about “momentary” failure and disappointment, set against “the light of eternity.”

He told Bain, the provost at the University of the District of Columbia, that bad grades didn’t “control him” but were “feedback.” Aided by interested professors, Colbert’s world view “freed him to take risks, to explore, to probe deeply, to find self-motivation in what he liked to do, and of all that to find an outlet for his creative energies.” If you think about The Colbert Report’s putative buffoon as someone steeped in Shakespeare, Shaw, and “A Man For All Seasons,” you may never watch it in quite the same way again.

This inner drive also marked the engineers, economists, and other successful, innovative professionals whom Bain interviewed for the book. “They sought not just material advancement or fame,” he writes, “but an inner growth, a curiosity about the world that led them to explore the humanities, the arts and the world of ideas.”

Full Article: CNN Money.

Released August 27, 2012 Amazon | Harvard University Press.