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.

Word of the Day: Censorship

Somebody from Canada spends time every night looking for the word 'censorship' in this blog. I have no idea why. This post is for you, whoever you are.

Modern ideas about censorship are pretty odd. For a start, the word has been prostituted for so long that it now admits to any kind of activity. What you don't do is a form of tacit censorship; what you don't say is some sort of self-censorship; there is nothing you can do that isn't not-something-else, and so you are always a censor.

But if you are always a censor, then what's the point of the word?

A Roman censor was an official who was in charge of conducting a census. He would obtain, tabulate and announce the results. In later times, this took on the sense of 'pronouncing judgement'. 'Censorship', therefore, ought to mean nothing more that 'having the state of being a censor, or of holding that office.'

A careful look will see that a censor is defined by what he does, and not by what he doesn't do. We've known for a long time that proving a negative is difficult, if not impossible. To say that acts of decision which are not specifically acts of public judgement (that is, you choose without attempting to impose your choice on others in public or in the public sphere) are also acts of censorship is a bit silly. To include random acts, on the principle that they aren't other acts, is worse.

If I make a random blog post, it isn't a form of censorship just because it means I didn't post something else. You'd have to say what exactly I was actively suppressing, and show that it would have had import in the public sphere. That act of suppressing a specific thing which would have had import (impact, or significance) in the public sphere is true censorship — not that wimpy vague postmodern idea of it.

The Arbiter And The Butterfly

This post is the result of reading posts from two of my colleagues in the great endeavour. Hence the title.

I had a D H Lawrence moment (1) the other day, while walking in between the long columns of desks in the Great Hall. There was a certain quality of light upon the heads of the gathered students. Examination times are, in some sense, sanctified; there is some sort of holiness about the total silence offered to the powers of education. That moment was filed away in my head. I said nothing about it; perhaps the butterfly's internal censor interdicted it. Or maybe the arbiter's transcendent self squirrelled it away for future development. Whatever caused it, it took up residence to wait for today.

This morning it ambushed me.

It struck me that there is no human way to evaluate optimal behaviour in humans. What could you possibly consider optimal? An IB Diploma with 45 points out of 45? At what cost does it come? Can you compute that cost down the lonely years, the desecration, the loss, the triumph or the golden sunset? Do you amortize it or pay it off across the months? Can you mortgage your invested time? These measures, and indeed any measures of our lives, cannot possibly describe the value of each unforgiving minute, of each sixty seconds' worth of distance run (as Kipling writes).

In theory, there are two approaches.

One is to calculate everything; the ultimate computation of all human endeavour in the universal reference frame. Assign a single dimension along which you will seek the maximum value of that overall human function. If a single maximum exists (what an assumption to make!), that would be the resultant of all optimal behaviours.

The second is to assume that there is a maximum defined, and somehow determine all possible paths leading to it. Then, induce behaviour such that one of those paths is followed. It's a lot like game theory, in the sense that if you can determine all possible outcomes, you can even see if the optimum is not the maximum and go for that instead.

In practice, there are none. The information required to game the universe exceeds the capacity of the universe. This is why a single butterfly flapping its wings in the hills can cause a lowly underpaid minion of the state to blog a few thousand words and forget the blinding pain in his acromion. It's a kind of transcendence. At the same time, the realisation that the universe must be arbitrary in one way or another is also freedom.

Why should the universe be arbitrary? That's an odd question, and one which better minds than mine have toiled at for centuries. But I will use my usual tactics of etymology and gaming to produce a reasonable answer.

It is either arbitrary in the sense of having a solution (or lack of solution) which is not convincingly justifiable compared to other possible solutions, or it is arbitrary in the sense of being under an arbiter – some metauniversal entity or law which just happens to want things (or cause things to be) that way because it thinks (2) (or has got an intrinsic property that determines) that things should be that way.

If the universe were not arbitrary in either of these senses, then what would it be? There are even fewer satisfactory answers to that. Which brings me back down to Earth with an audible bump. As Alexander Pope said, "The proper study of mankind is man."

So why should we say anything, since everything is arbitrary? The answer, I suppose is because we are communicating animals, we are expressive animals, we are creative animals in the sense that we must synthesize and produce new things by nature. Some people say censorship (internal or external) defeats this basic right. I don't think that's true.

So why should we say anything nicely, if everything is arbitrary? For a start, without some kinds of censorship, some kinds of communication lose their power. The editorial process cuts crap, or at least makes it more palatable. This caters to the aesthetic sense of some audience or other, but what kind of communication doesn't? Even measures of communication in terms of efficiency (e.g. the minimum number of bits required to transmit data with 100% success) are an aesthetic decision; your aesthetic in this case is that less is better (or small is beautiful, as Schumacher used to say).

More to the butterfly's point, if we didn't take time to add value to our communications by censoring and/or packaging, we would have one fewer class of methods to show others how much we cared about them. The censorship that produces courtesy, politeness, and social etiquette is decried by some as hypocrisy – but the point is that all humans are hypocrites or psychotics, and the hypocrites outnumber the psychotics immensely.

But can we trust the internal censor? And do we need an external censor?

The answer is that we can never entirely trust any kind of censorship. In the human world, there are no perfect censors, polishers, or hypocrites. But that doesn't mean that we can't try, and some do.

The Christians have a solution for it. They call it grace. One part of it is a sort of mutual consent by which we overlook each others annoyingly bad attempts at self-censorship without being overly censorious. Another part of it is that we learn to say things not for others to approve, but in ways which express that we are taking time to be careful, to add value to our speech, to show that the persons we communicate with are valued and we will not waste their time or comprehension.

This is why we pray for 'grace to follow my Master and my Friend'. If Jesus is indeed the ultimate role model in some way that we can somewhat understand (or be granted understanding of), then it makes sense to gain that grace which makes our internal censors better. Then they will not be crude choppers and crafters, but a high-quality editorial staff that seasons our speech with just enough salt and illuminates our thoughts with just enough light so that we can all be the better for it.

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Notes:

1. D H Lawrence spent three years as a teacher. I remember learning about his poetry in high school and being haunted by his love-hate relationship with his students. The two poems The Best of School and The Last Lesson are diametrically opposed; the former is positive and the latter is painfully negative. I reproduce the former poem here to show what it is I actually mean by 'a D H Lawrence moment':

The Best of School

The blinds are drawn because of the sun.
And the boys and the room in a colourless gloom
Of underwater float: bright ripples run
Across the walls as the blinds are blown
To let the sunlight in: and I,
As I sit on the shores of the class, alone,
Watch the boys in their summer blouses
As they write, their round heads busily bowed:
And one after another rouses
His face to look at me
To ponder very quietly
As seeing, he does not see.

And then he turns again, with a little, glad
Glad thrill of his work he turns again from me
Having found what he wanted, having got what was to be had

And very sweet it is, while the sunlight waves
In the ripening morning, to sit alone with the class
And feel the stream of awakening ripple and pass
From me to the boys, whose brightening souls it laves
For this little hour.

The poem reminds me of Gnomus, whom some of you know.

2. Who can understand the mind of God? In terms of information theory, understanding the complete mind of God-the-arbiter is not possible, since it must necessarily exceed the capacity of the universe. Some would say that God-the-arbiter would therefore not be able to understand Himself, but that assumes information theory's underpinnings maintain their value outside the universe. [It isn't really a meaningful statement because any statements about 'beyond-our-universe' cannot have meaning to us. Such statements therefore are ignored by logical positivists such as Russell because there is no way to assess them as true or false. However, the fact that we can make them means we can consider their implications if they were true. And their implications are sometimes profound.]