Development Fail

I could hardly credit it, but the UNDP once put its fingerprints on Atlantean education. The UNDP report for 1982 is full of interesting stuff, four points of which were:

• School administrators should be encouraged to study administrative theory and incorporate their learning into practice.
  
• Administrators should be encouraged to develop their professional competency and rely on professional authority rather than legal authority in carrying out admin duties.
  
• Research activities should be encouraged and results effectively disseminated so that usable information can be shared.
  
• The talents of able practitioners should be utilised in training programmes for potential school administrators.

It turns out that this is sometimes not the case. Rather, the last 25 years since the Diploma in Educational Administration was first begun in 1985 have shown us that there are some competent administrative staff who are subcompetent school administrators. The best way to test this is to check on the staff who are under such administration.

• Is there a culture of theoretical study followed by praxis?
  
• Do teachers rely on professional authority rather than legal authority when dealing with students?
  
• Are research activities encouraged and are findings and results shared openly throughout the school?
  
• Are talented practitioners used to train less talented practitioners?

If the answer is no to one or more of these points, the institution has systemic problems. By analogy with the human body, it is as if an organic system has begun to show signs of failure — the effects will spread to other systems if countermeasures are not instituted promptly. A transplant of a major organ may become necessary.

What's worse is that you might find another sign of serious developmental failure when you ask the question, "What is the main mode of knowledge-building here?" In many cases, this is inductive. The teacher demonstrates problem 1, 2, 3 etc and shows solutions. Then the teacher shows problem n and asks for answers. These answers are normally based on patterns and processes from problems 1, 2, 3... (n-1). The inductive method of teaching allows students to simulate process learning while actually only knowing one process: how to generate a product that looks as if complex cognitive processing has occurred, when all that has occurred is pattern-recognition and selection of a match.

What's even worse is that this pattern-recognition-matching idea can be taken to the logical end of studying elements out of context but faking the contextual knowledge. You could be blithely answering questions on World Literature without actually having read the text, since the question is matched in your mind by an appropriate answer that you've memorised. This is similar to the Chinese Room test of intelligence. You can indeed almost create a semblance of intelligence as long as the input generates the right corresponding output, whether or not real intelligence is present.

In order to defeat this, you need to make the machine synthesize answers to problems with no real solutions or problems which are outside its data domain. For example, you could grab a random student who claims he has studied a certain literary text, give him a random comic book, and then put him in isolation to write a 2000-word essay on the relationship between the text and the comic.

I believe that a good test of whether a teacher is competent is to randomly grab a teacher and set a synthesis problem in an isolated workroom. For example, a test of expertise in organic chemistry might be to put a chemistry teacher in a lab without access to external input and ask her or him to synthesize a sample of p-nitroaniline (or 1-amino-4-nitrobenzene) within a 3-hour time limit. Another good example would be getting a TOK teacher to write a passable full-length TOK essay in 3 hours without prior preparation or choice of topic. This kind of test would probably work in most disciplines.

And most of all, it would be fun! Any teacher who didn't think so would automatically fail, since all teachers ought to enjoy demonstrating their competency. Why else would they be teachers?