Rationalising Football
Let's for a moment put aside personal philosophies and such, and say that based on likelihood of winning the English Premier League, Manchester United Football Club is often said to be the #1 club in England. It is tempting to say, therefore, that it is a 'better' club than others, since the statistics don't lie, supposedly.
This is exactly the problem that academic league tables face. If a club is successful, or a school is successful, as a matter of fact, then it is assumed that whatever it does must be somehow cleverer than what its rivals do. This is called ex post facto rationalisation; you invent reasons for victory and/or loss after the result is determined.
I have no quarrel with this practice in terms of its entertainment value, but I will point out that it is actually a sort of pseudo-science. What happens on a pitch is a social event; the interactions are too complex to map adequately and the rules (and their enforcement) are unevenly implemented. The difference between defeat and victory, often irrevocably etched, can go down to one man's opinion about whether enough time has passed, or whether another man fell, dived, or was pushed.
You can say of a team that always wins 1-0 that they have no plan B, and if the '1' doesn't materialise, they'll be down to 0-0 or 0-1. But if they always win 1-0, and another team alternates between 4-0 and 0-1, the 1-0 people will win the competition. The 'no plan B' argument never takes into account the fact that every stadium is different, the team itself is different from day to day, the weather is different, and the plan itself, on closer inspection, is never the same. There is no plan B, because there is no plan A; there is just an endless cavalcade of different plans, tweaked on the spur of the moment.
It's the same with schools. You can buy a team, spend money on buildings, and so on. But attention to each student, a plan for each student — these are the things that make a school great. If each student is a winner, then the school wins. The school shouldn't be aiming to 'win the championship' by making some big wins and some small losses out of its students; it should aim to make them all winners.
Sometimes, it seems like a matter of luck. Sometimes, there are allegations of referee bias or undetected fouls. But the fact remains that despite the detailed analysis, sometimes all we have is the factual situation, and no deep explanation as to why it is so. Ask Manchester United how they beat their City rivals last night, and how they lost to Burnley at Turf Moor, and you will hear a tonne of explanations that do not amount to truth.
This is exactly the problem that academic league tables face. If a club is successful, or a school is successful, as a matter of fact, then it is assumed that whatever it does must be somehow cleverer than what its rivals do. This is called ex post facto rationalisation; you invent reasons for victory and/or loss after the result is determined.
I have no quarrel with this practice in terms of its entertainment value, but I will point out that it is actually a sort of pseudo-science. What happens on a pitch is a social event; the interactions are too complex to map adequately and the rules (and their enforcement) are unevenly implemented. The difference between defeat and victory, often irrevocably etched, can go down to one man's opinion about whether enough time has passed, or whether another man fell, dived, or was pushed.
You can say of a team that always wins 1-0 that they have no plan B, and if the '1' doesn't materialise, they'll be down to 0-0 or 0-1. But if they always win 1-0, and another team alternates between 4-0 and 0-1, the 1-0 people will win the competition. The 'no plan B' argument never takes into account the fact that every stadium is different, the team itself is different from day to day, the weather is different, and the plan itself, on closer inspection, is never the same. There is no plan B, because there is no plan A; there is just an endless cavalcade of different plans, tweaked on the spur of the moment.
It's the same with schools. You can buy a team, spend money on buildings, and so on. But attention to each student, a plan for each student — these are the things that make a school great. If each student is a winner, then the school wins. The school shouldn't be aiming to 'win the championship' by making some big wins and some small losses out of its students; it should aim to make them all winners.
Sometimes, it seems like a matter of luck. Sometimes, there are allegations of referee bias or undetected fouls. But the fact remains that despite the detailed analysis, sometimes all we have is the factual situation, and no deep explanation as to why it is so. Ask Manchester United how they beat their City rivals last night, and how they lost to Burnley at Turf Moor, and you will hear a tonne of explanations that do not amount to truth.
Labels: Epistemology, Football, Schools
etched with acid at 9:54:00 am
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