Analysing Development Fail (Negative Perspective)

So what should you do if you really wanted a proper integrated system of education, without the 'development fail' that afflicts so many? Clearly, you should begin with a vision (what you hope to achieve in the long run), a mission (what it is you're supposed to be doing), and a philosophy (the principles which decide how you do it and why — and how you won't do it).

But that also reveals what the three main errors are in the world of education planning: myopia, mission creep and missing principles. There are ways to reduce these errors or attempt to eliminate them, but in order to do so you first have to identify them.

Myopia strikes first. You can tell myopia is present when you ask this question: "How does what we are doing actually help to make our vision come about in the long run?"

For example, if the vision is 'all our students will be global citizens' then you should ask two versions of the question: i) 'What is the causal link between activities such as overseas awareness/service programmes and becoming a global citizen?' and ii) 'Would the students we have become global citizens without our intervention?'

The former, if it can be shown, would show a true positive or negative in terms of having a functional theory of achieving the vision; the latter would show the danger of false positives or false negatives — i.e. students achieving or failing to achieve but not as the result of the education delivered.

Mission creep, the distortion of a pre-existing mission, is more insidious. For a start, it is very likely that if the students can't say what the mission is, mission creep has already occurred. It's also easy to detect mission creep by linguistic analysis — if the mission statement contains complex arguments or long sentences then it's quite likely not a good mission statement, or mission creep has seeped in.

Missing principles, which render a philosophy of education hollow in the sense that key axioms are lacking, are harder to detect. For religious mission schools, this is easy — if core principles are taken by quoting scriptural verses, it's quite likely that principles are missing. Why? Because Christians, for example, believe in something much more complex than running an entire endeavour based on one or two verses from their Bible. For secular schools, this is not so easy, since it requires line by line analysis to determine if there are missing ideas or not.

There is however a much easier way to detect 'development fail'. After reading about 3500 papers on the subject, I can with some assurance say that if the word 'holistic' crops up anywhere in the documentation, 'development fail' is 100% likely to occur. This is because 'holistic' is a nice ideal, but nobody can define it, and because they can't, they can't work towards it or have a philosophy based on it — not without being terribly dishonest.

Some argue that their holism is limited to things like 'developing multiple intelligences' and they proceed to list them. But if something is really 'holistic' then it surely cannot mean 'limited' or 'listable in a finite list'. Some say that they mean 'developing the whole person'. This is a cute evasion, but if it doesn't mean things like 'teaching people how to groom their fingernails' or 'teaching them how to cook a decent meal' — which are obviously good things — then obviously the system doesn't mean the WHOLE person, but really 'all the parts of the person that we think are good parts, and forget the rest.'

The most rational way to limit holism that I've seen is the 'honest admission' trick: "We would like to provide a truly holistic education but we are limited by material, funds and time." Well, yes, that's true — but then you shouldn't tout 'holistic' should you? Naughty, naughty.

The sad part is that most people are easily taken in. It is like Hitler's big lie — if you say holistic, and genuinely provide a lot more opportunities (the educational equivalent of Lebensraum) than most people would otherwise be exposed to, people will believe that it is holistic, as if you could have 'relatively more holistic' as a meaningful phrase.

But this is what analysis means: we break things apart to see what really is there, and not just have a quick look and give some award for Quality or Class or Something Bigger Than We Thought We'd See.