Parkinson's Law

Parkinson's Law, or The Pursuit of Progress was written by C Northcote Parkinson during his time at the University of Lemuria in Atlantis, in the 1950s. It is one of the most perceptive books ever written by modern man. Yet, for all that insight, it is a slim volume at 109 pages, with ten short chapters and a preface all included.

Sadly for the current state of education in Atlantis, it is not compulsory reading for the educated. It would take not more than a handful of hours for most people to read, and the insights it brings on institutional processes and characteristics are invaluable.

I will now attempt to summarise the ten chapters. The original writing is much funnier, more humorous and full of droll insights. I am certainly doing it a disservice. Each chapter is presented with its original title and subtitle.

01: Parkinson's Law (or, the Rising Pyramid)

Work expands to fill the available time. So do many other things.

02: The Short List (or, Principles of Selection)

Competitive written examinations, despite many flaws, discriminate best. The problem is figuring out what to examine.

03: Directors and Councils (or, Coefficient of Inefficiency)

No effective committee has more than five real members. If a committee or council exceeds that, an inner council will be formed that is the real one.

04: The Will of the People (or, Annual General Meeting)

Forcible manipulation drives decision-making. Or at least, biases its essential randomness.

05: Personality Screen (or, the Cocktail Formula)

The genuinely important people in a room are those who leave unnoticed at the right time.

06: High Finance (or, the Point of Vanishing Interest)

The Law of Triviality states that the time spent on any agenda item is inversely proportional to its value (or the sum involved).

07: Palm Thatch to Packard (or, a Formula for Success)

Chinese businessmen work by evasion until they become so wealthy that ostentation is more useful. They also work by confusing the bureaucracy.

08: Plans and Plants (or, the Administration Block)

Perfection of planned layout is only achieved by institutions about to collapse. A large admin block with many administrators in one place indicates an institution is past its best.

09: Injelititis (or, Palsied Paralysis)

Organisational paralysis is caused by individuals. There are three stages: 1) incompetence mixes with jealousy, resulting in an individual who tries who control the institution; 2) individual tries to eject those more able or who might one day be more able; 3) all institutional intelligence is eliminated.

10: Pension Point (or, the Age of Retirement)

The correct age of retirement can be determined by the frequency of air travel and the quantity of paperwork to be completed for any given individual.

=====

As you can tell, if every student at the Citadel of Wyverns had been able to obtain this book, certain crimes against humanity (or at least, against common sense) might not have been perpetrated. Fortunately, as a humanitarian initiative, our Russian friends have provided the complete text online. Everyone should, however, note that in this edition the chapters have been rearranged. Injelititis is now Chapter 8. You have been warned.

Integrated Programmes (Part IV): Towards a Golden Age

In 1972, the official press release for the Apollo XVII mission included this sentence: "The colors of the emblem are red, white and blue, the colors of the U.S. flag; with the addition of gold, to symbolize the golden age of space flight that will begin with this Apollo 17 lunar landing."

It was a horribly cynical statement, even by American standards. Two years earlier, it had been decided that the 17th Apollo mission would be the last. Man would stop at the moon; operations would be suspended for the forseeable future. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that the myth of the 'golden age of space flight' would evolve from the history that ended on 19 December 1972, the day the America command module splashed down in the Pacific, off Samoa.

I remember the sensations of the 21st century, as Integrated Programmes launched all over Atlantis. The Argonaut left in 2004, Gnomus arrived. We were all hoping that our 'Apollo 17 mission' would usher in a golden age of education. And in that year, after five years of planning, it all began to fall apart at the Citadel.

The programme was being driven towards accountability and a strong theoretical basis by two members of the working group (or Commissariat, as some of us joked). However, some people realised they would be sidelined because of their lack of one or both of these elements. They began a counter-revolution.

Using the structures and terminology prepared for the new programme, they began to institute a newer programme that looked exactly like the old one, but had been gutted of its main systems. In the messy coup that followed, the intelligentsia were purged from the Commissariat and the true Stalinist era began. The golden age had been erased and replaced with an age of steel.

Nobody outside the Citadel noticed. After all, the advertising material was still the same. Yet, as careful examination shows, the advertising hype no longer matched the programme as deployed. Teacher development for the IP ended in 2004, with subsequent development completely outsourced (except for one last-gasp training effort nominally led by Iron Man in late 2007).

Meanwhile, at the Gryphon Academy, big plans were afoot. The Sith Lord in residence called me up and asked for my opinions. Treading on dangerous ground, I offered some. After all, it was not as if I was doing useful work anymore at the Citadel. It was the beginning of my life as a consultant.

Back at the Citadel, the main idea had crystallized. Instead of teaching the students, the focus would be on producing results. That sounds odd, but you who read this should understand that the two need not necessary be coupled together.

There are some decoupling strategies: 1) you can make the students teach themselves, by dumping huge amounts of material on them and insinuating that any real IP student should know all of it; 2) you can focus on meeting examination rubrics as disconnected objectives rather than as a whole; 3) you can take in students likely to succeed and maintain that likelihood till the endpoint arrives. There are some others, but these are the main ones.

Up to the time I left the Citadel, I had not seen a serious official discussion of the theoretical basis of teaching, the methodology of teaching, nor the art of classroom teaching, in the Citadel. It was assumed that teachers were proficient, and if not, that the system could compensate by administrative fiat.

Accordingly, teachers were assessed largely by political utility, under the guise of 'pastoral care' (which meant how well they got along with the right people and projected the right image) and 'co-curricular activities' (which meant the ability to win gold medals and complete projects). There was no open appraisal; such a thing would have exposed certain deficiencies.

This was why the 'Apollo 17 mission' of the Citadel's IP heralded a golden age that would result in space shuttles and Skylab rather than in spaceships and starships. We ended up with an orbiting experimental station, instead of Moonbase Alpha — although at times, especially in the basement staff room, it felt like the latter.

To cut a long story short, I stayed behind in Samoa. The life was better there.

Word of the Day: Performativity

This term was introduced to me by he who oversees my work in this mortal plane. He described it almost as if it were some loathsome, noxious potion best identified by the stench of 'accountability' and 'competition'. The word is derived from 13th-century Anglo-French performir, meaning 'accomplish' or 'fully provide'. However, from Latin it could mean something like 'for appearances' sake'.

The first point about 'performativity' is that it allows for simplistic and selective ranking. You create (or obtain) a rubric or a checklist or some other simple method of evaluation. This allows you to carry out ranked value judgements, assign numeric or quantitative value, and/or plot trend lines so that you can compare the performance of one institution with that of another.

The second point about 'performativity' is that it is all about performance. Nobody cares what is done, how it is done, or why it is done, as long as the rubrics, checklists, and methods of evaluation allow the institution to come up with values indicating success. These values, despite the selective and subjective nature of their origin, are touted as objective indicators of quality.

The third point about 'performativity' is that it allows for performers to act in such a way that they can be seen to be successful without actually thinking very hard. Think about the following example:

In Atlantis, elite students regularly win international awards for performance in English Literature. This is seen as a sign that Atlantean education is performing well in that domain. However, no mention is made of the fact that many Atlanteans schools don't offer the subject or offer it only to select individuals — it is considered difficult to teach and difficult to learn and thus not very good for a school's performance statistics. In some schools, it isn't even given that name, but styled as something else: 'Language Arts', perhaps.

The performers in this case are institutions who cultivate elite classes of students by streaming, and then, after weeding out the undesirables, proclaim the wonders of those who are 'left on the island' (so to speak). Similarly, you can have institutions who take in the top 10% of the population, eliminate 40% of those, and then use test-retest methods to ensure that the students have done enough work to do well.

Students who have not done so may be prevented from registering for examinations, thus ensuring that good results are always obtained. Thus, no matter how good or bad the quality of the teaching, administrative fiat can compensate for it — the authorities merely have to control who takes the exams better than who prepares the students for exams, and ensure that no matter how they are taught, they work hard on their own. Some of them, of course, find private tutors to enhance their performativity, so that they don't have to go to special study camps where they are taught to concentrate (supposedly).

Oh yes, to my Atlantean colleagues, have a very happy Teachers' Day! And may your performance statistics always appease the savage powers of your citadels of learning.

The Teaching Machine

I remember the days in a certain school when the staffing levels were such that every year, the school magazine could fit on a single page all the information on who had joined, who had left, who had got married or spawned or suffered a death in the family. One year, I leafed through the latest magazine, only to realise that the information on who had joined and who had left was... missing.

That is when I got curious. So I asked the (ahem) Human Resource Department (which, as my better half reminds me, normally exists to treat humans like resources and not humans). Apparently, that sent up a warning flare, hoisted a red flag, and gained me a black mark. They told me nothing. So I resorted to a very simple method.

I got out the phone extensions list for the previous year. Then I got out the phone extensions list for the current year. And I painstakingly cancelled all the names that appeared on both lists. That is when I realised why all the information was missing. The 'exchange rate' was too high to publish without looking as if the school was becoming a rather unhappy place.

It has often been said (and so far, I've not reliably found a first attribution for it) that teaching is a profession that eats its young. My examination of a certain school also threw up two interesting things: the profession sometimes mummifies and varnishes its older members, and sometimes, it summarily mortifies and vanishes others. According to several studies, the main determining factor as to how a given member is treated is whether that person gets along well with the principal or not.

You see, my dear friends out there who have just become teachers, the key competency is not how well you teach, but how well you get on with the principal. Think about it, and if you ever get to become a principal, try not to use that as a criterion for teacher retention. I say this with forlorn hope, because the studies also show that when people become principals, their value systems are very likely to change so that loyalty and conformity become much more valued traits.

And that, I think, is the best way to explain why school magazines can sometimes reveal things about the teaching machine, and how it works. There's a long and interesting article here, if you're interested. And of course, a careful look at one specific edition of a certain school's magazines will also reveal something a lot like this.

I've always enjoyed taking machines apart to find out what makes them tick. Now, when I do it, people call it 'educational research'. Sometimes, in my more lucid moments, I wonder what kind of research is not educational. Haha.

Traditional Jestice

It was the Hierophant who reminded me of the work of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo. The two men are (were, Milgram died in 1984) both New Yorkers, born in 1933 and schoolmates from an interesting era.

More relevantly, the two are (were) psychologists who examined the psychology behind the way the exercise of power corrupts authority. Authority by itself is a neutral given. It is conferred by position and status in human societies; the Greeks called it kratos, and that word is still in common English usage, as the suffixes -crat and -cracy. 'Aristocracy', for example, means 'the ruling authority of the highborn', while 'democracy' of course means 'the ruling authority of the population at large'.

I've posted several times about power, and I continue to believe that it comes in three forms: kratos, dünamis and bia. An English equivalent would be to call them 'authority', 'inspiring motivation' and 'coercive force'. It's not possible, as far as I can tell, for humans to use just one or two; all three tend to come in together eventually. This tripartite division of power is thus a somewhat common motif (and a problematic one) in human societies.

The problem really is that they undermine while magnifying each other. If you have authority, real authority, people would do things because they accept that authority. But one is often tempted to add the suasion of personal motivation and/or the application of force in order to get things done faster. One is often tempted to add titles and honours to one's resumé in order to justify one's use of superior physical or numerical force. And so on. The three thus tend to form an unholy constellation even when they start off pure and unsullied. This is what I mean by 'undermine' (in the sense of 'erode the moral and ethical basis of') and 'magnify' (in these sense of 'increase the perceived importance or necessity of').

Conventionally, the idea is that powers should be separated (e.g. 'Church and State', or 'Legislative, Executive and Judicial'). This separation of powers thus reduces the quantities of power (kratos, dünamis and bia) to manageable little pieces, thus preventing abuse. Or so the theory goes. The problem is that in many states, it's really not possible to separate the powers; power tends to agglomerate, to agglutinate, to clump together in big and dangerous masses which then go critical to everyone's confused dismay.

The solution really is therefore not so much that they should balance each other, but be balanced by something else. In old and historically messy countries like the United Kingdom, you have so many competing traditions that even the law draws upon at least three main strands (Anglo-Saxon, Roman and Hebrew) and many others. In some places, hierarchy is so dispersed that it's hard to know who is really boss, so everyone is (like some small states or autonomous entities). In some places, like Vatican City, everyone is an employee of a higher authority and that is supposed to diffuse power while concentrating it.

Different balancing solutions thus exist. But I think two of them tend to be more successful than most, based on their longevity and their ubiquity.

The first is tradition (although some might say it comes later than the other). The force of tradition tends to keep new powers from consolidating, and it tends to check uncultured power with a cultural authority of its own. Tradition alone cannot stop a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao from abusing their authority and consolidating their power, but it can keep some things alive, and it can create a viable alternative, counterculture, or resistance. It hasn't always worked that way, but it keeps cropping up. Of course, 'bad' tradition can resist 'good' power; but power tends to corrupt anyway, so it doesn't remain good for long.

The second is humour (although some might say it comes first). The force of humour seems to sustain people even when power is being used on them. It is a common thread of humanity which by its nature ameliorates and alleviates the heaviness and awe of myth and tradition. It is the reason why rulers need jesters; rulers can't (don't, or won't) do self-criticism because to do so would be to undermine the effect of power (to which they must be beholden). A self-critical ruler, if such a creature exists, must subvert himself by laughing at himself; but in these times, such a ruler runs the risk of looking ridiculous — if he can laugh at himself, surely someone else can laugh at him.

I live in a state where to make jokes about judges (or to mock the Magistratum, haha) is to commit the offence of trivialising, scandalising, or undermining the judiciary. If you make a politician or judge look like a figure of fun, it is a problem for the Internal Security Act. After all, if you undermine the sources of power, doesn't it weaken the security of the realm? This key argument is what runs many states the way they're run. It is just that some states and institutions are better at hiding it than others.

The sad corollary to all of this is that almost all rulers can't actually have a real sense of humour. If they do, it is 'humour lite' or 'humour without slapstick' or some other dignified (and here I use the word in a similar way to 'gentrified' or 'bowdlerised') form of it. It is as if a ruler's humour is something from ancient philosophy, and not something which alleviates the gloom and ameliorates bitterness.

The good corollary to all of this is that power can be balanced by mechanical (or at least, procedural) means. If you enforce a rotation of authority, which itself cannot be undermined by authority (good luck there!) then rulers have a chance to recover their sense of humour and become human once more. Some other poor sap can have the job. You can also insert a professional subversion agency: a jester, or as Frank Herbert suggested, a 'Bureau of Sabotage'.

In the end, it boils down to this. An institution or a state cannot thrive morally, aesthetically or creatively unless power is subvertible. Humour, for this purpose, is more flexible and useful than tradition. If the king will not have a jester, he should be adjested. That way, jestice will be served.

'Inspiration' (Part II): Psychobabbleon (And On, And On...)

As Trivandrum pointed out, the bowels of that ancient city and one-time Babylon of the West have vomited forth a great edict concerning what they used to do and now swear never to do again... indulging in bureaucratese. The reason that this particular piece was so inspirational to so many is that this great city was once the headquarters of the largest corporate dominion ever created by humans.

Oh, do not blame the Americans; they are but a young and benighted nation compared to that great Lion of the Sea!

Unfortunately, I have yet to think of a version for the education sector that won't be immediately recognizable as proceeding from the mouth of... urgh. Let us not think about it, but pray. I shall leave this as a stub for now.

The Perils of Goal-Setting

In every local organisation that has come to pay tribute to the new form of evaluation, the practice of goal-setting is considered laudatory, and in fact, the pinnacle of excellence in process management. This is especially prevalent in organisations going for so-called quality awards (which ought to be debunked forthwith).

Last night, I had the opportunity, thanks to a certain elf, to read an article by four academics concerning the perils of goal-setting. These four are from the Eller College of Management, the Wharton School of Business, the Kellogg School of Management, and Harvard Business School. It is an eye-opener, this paper entitled Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal-Setting.

Their conclusion is summarised in the form of a 'warning label' which they would like people to use more often. The text on that bright yellow warning label says:

WARNING!

Goals may cause systematic problems in organizations
due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking,
decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation.

Use care when applying goals in your organization.

It immediately put in me in checklist mode. I realised that the organisation I've been looking at is very much like that. And the details in the paper (especially those on page 11, thanks to the elf!) make it very clear where the blame should lie.

Departmentalism

It is a sad but enduring truth that sometimes some people think of a concept and then espouse it without considering the concomitant problems. One of those concepts is holism, or an holistic education (which is one of the many kinds of holism on sale these days).

In several of my previous posts, I have pointed out the shortcomings and difficulties of current 'holistic' thinking in education. Now, I am going to take a different tack. Let's consider things which are manifestly not holistic.

The first candidate is obvious. It is compartmentalism. If you can segregate or ring-fence anything within an educational system or programme, then by definition, the resultant structure is no longer holistic. For example, if you say that student discipline will be run independent of student academic achievement (whether explicitly or implicitly), then you are denying the holistic. Of course it is possible to claim till your face is purple that by putting discipline and achievement together – in the same forum, boat or igloo – that you are conducting holistic education. You would be wrong, since having two peas in a pod does not make a single bean out of them.

The second (and often more insidious, stubborn and recalcitrant) is not so obvious. It is departmentalism, that modern bureaucratic descendant of feudalism. In departmentalism, it is often assumed that a school needs to be separated into independent fiefdoms (oops, I mean departments) in order to function like a school. It is also assumed that if you get the department chairs in the same room for a few hours (in what is called a school steering committee meeting, or the equivalent), you will get a miraculously holistic transdisciplinary outcome.

Well, you won't. This would be like putting different flavours of jelly beans in one bag, shaking the lot up, wagging your finger at them and saying, "Play nice, now!" and then expecting them to become a single large lump of jelly which evokes all the possible separate flavours while not being completely indigestible.

But the skeptical administrator will argue (and rightly so, in a sense) that there is no alternative to departmentalism. Fine. Then you can have two possible types of responses. The first response to this is, "Since there's no alternative to departmentalism, there is no possibility of holism." The second response to this is, "There are a few alternatives. Here are some."

Alternatives to departmentalism? Really? Well, yes. They might not be very good, but they are decent alternatives.

There's the concept of holistic units. In some large schools, small consortia are formed, comprising teachers who together offer all the necessary subjects for an all-round education. Each consortium holds to its own philosophy while seeking to fulfill the overall mission of the school. The idea is akin to that of combined-arms assault teams. A team that combines counselling, discipline, academic, service, sports and dietary elements (among others) in a single seamless programme would be delivering one variety of holistic education. In a small enough school, this approach would include all members of the school.

There's the concept of interdisciplinary units. Immediately, you might say that this is obviously not an holistic approach. Hmmm, maybe not. But it can be brought quite close. For example, consider a team of teachers, each offering a discrete area of interest, subject, approach or course. Then think of them working together flexibly to deliver a combined programme in which they actively worked to reinforce and support each other while retaining their own perspectives and biases. In a sports analogy, this would be a lot like basketball rather than American football – you don't have special teams, but you do have players with specific functions and you can rotate elements around for different team purposes.

There's the concept of knowledge webs. A clever 'spider' can spin connections between all the separate nodes in such a system. You could still have discrete areas, but the 'strand coordinator' is an agent who has enough of an holistic perspective that she (women tend to see more holistically) or he can tweak them until they appear to flow freely across the old functional boundaries.

Now here's a last point. 'Departmentalism' doesn't mean 'departments'. In reality, you might still need departments of some sort, just to reassure the masses and to handle some admin functions. The point is that you cannot make department chairs the cornerstones of the admin system. You need deputy principals or strand coordinators or programme coordinators with the genuine ability to think across disciplines and help weave them together into a functional whole.

Life is messy, sometimes miasmic. Nothing in reality can be easily shoved into a departmental box or a box labelled 'Discipline H'. At the very least we owe it to learners to give them an educational experience that, even if it does consist of discrete elements, includes pointers towards ways of combining them into holistic approaches for handling all their later life.

Jungian Archetyping

I've always been somewhat difficult to type; my maternal grandfather was one of those educators who liked testing his grandchildren and he used to shake his head at my odd responses. Over the years, the venerable Jungian-type tests have generally portrayed me as INTJ, but the last has always been somewhat in doubt.

Today, reminded of the test once more by the *Acxis, I got these results:

• Introverted (I) 54.29% Extroverted (E) 45.71%
• Intuitive (N) 65.79% Sensing (S) 34.21%
• Thinking (T) 58.33% Feeling (F) 41.67%
• Perceiving (P) 51.43% Judging (J) 48.57%

I guess that makes me INTP. The test site says:

"Architect". Greatest precision in thought and language. Can readily discern contradictions and inconsistencies. The world exists primarily to be understood. 3.3% of total population.

On a hunch, trying to seek underlying patterns, I found something interesting. When I was a high-profile administrator, I was INTJ; when I had stepped down, I was more INTP. I was also INTP for exactly one other year: the year before I became an administrator.

Administrative structures in this part of the world, and in many other parts, tend to be more J than P. This is not unexpected, but a P administrator tends to detect and baulk faulty thinking faster. J administrators are 'manager entities'; they detect faults quickly and assign blame precisely (if not accurately). It all depends on what kind of administration you want, I suppose.