Indirect Thinking

Let's take a look at a hypothetical case, the subject of a thesis in the field of education. Supposing you have a school whose results are among the best in the world, statistically speaking. To what might you attribute the cause of this happy state?

Asking this about the results is somewhat similar to evaluation of any product. The logical causes are the management, manpower, materials, machines, or methods. There might be some overlap, but these generally fall into separate categories.

Then five kinds of research problems might be said to arise, one for each of these putative causes. You need to see if any of these is sufficiently and provably superior to the equivalent somewhere else in order to possibly attribute good results to it.

In the case of my research, extensive brain-contorting (and sometimes brain-convulsing) work has shown that I can only prove the case for one of these categories.

And yet, in the general media and in our general way of thinking, we tend to attribute success to the other four categories more than we attribute success to this one. Why?

Perhaps, the problem with schools is the self-fulfilling nature of education. It's easy to show that superior students produce superior results. What we'd like to know is if they are superior in any other ways besides previous results, and how they got that way. Are they smarter, do they drink more coffee, have they got richer parents, are they motivated by fear (or pride, or greed, or any other one of a thousand human motivations)?

When a school spends huge amounts of money on staff, structures, and administrators, how can it be shown that this has any impact on the final result? And yet, people assume that it has.

In some cases, this is easier to show: a science lab or a dance studio are strongly facilitating aids to improvement in their respective disciplines. In some cases, this is harder to show: can a 35-year-old ex-government policy wonk do better than a grizzled 67-year-old matriarch as a school leader? Do oak panels depicting past triumphs and famous alumni encourage modern students to do better? Or is all of this simply reducible to the ancient axiom, 'Money Breeds Success'?

It would be kind of sad if I had to reduce my answers to the two ideas that a) people with good previous results tend to produce good future results in the same general area, and b) money breeds success. I would have done no better than many previous generations of researchers, then.

But hold on, you might say. How about all the examples that buck the trend? The poor minority kid who becomes valedictorian, the uncouth gangster who becomes a leader, the ramshackle makeshift hut that becomes a centre of great learning? What about the rich kids that flunk out, the expensive schools that flop?

I'd have to say, "Exactly." They buck the trend, they are newsworthy precisely because they are some distance away from the norm. The statistics don't lie. Live in a rich estate, go to an expensive school, you'll do better academically. You'll do better in life too.

Yet, there is one small factor that gives hope to the rest of us. It's sometimes the case that a person from a less-advantaged background can show superlative success because of a rare confluence of factors: seizing a rare opportunity, showing great personal drive, having enough coffee, and so on. This success may have vastly disproportionate effect across time, thus shifting things enough for society to change somewhat.

It is this sort of success story that partly drives the altruist in us. The human altruist (teacher, doctor, pastor) doesn't mind providing services to anyone. But somehow, it's a lot more satisfying when someone makes maximal use of such services to do far more than you'd expect from the statistics. I don't mind teaching smart kids who assume they are smart all day — it's great if they learn to be smarter or if they learn that 'smart' is something that they were taking too much for granted. It's even better, though, when people who kept telling themselves they weren't smart suddenly realise that they are smarter, and can be even smarter. (Yes, however you want to define 'smart'. What I mean is 'good at something'.)

And it's best when the norms are shifted so that there is a broader range of successes. Which leads me to one last point about schools. A school should be able to take in anybody and help that person become a better person. What a school shouldn't be doing (unless compelled to by higher authority) is to deliberately deny students who look like they are going to be harder to teach. Without these students, how on earth are teachers going to learn? Heh.