Mass Education

After watching the effects of multiple generations of teacher activity in the small but densely populated Petri dish of Atlantis, I can safely make some oracular pronouncements about mass education.

1. The education of the masses reaches a minimum level of competence for 90% of the population and then stalls. Of this 90%, the lower 50% will be below the mean and hence seen as 'poorly educated'. The remaining upper 40% will fight to be seen as educated.

2. The top 10% is the limit for 'good education'. The reason is simple. As the world gets more complex, you need more educational resources to teach people enough to get along. Don't be deluded by what people seem to know—the old 'wow, kids these days know a lot of stuff' fallacy—rather, see what they do with it to change the world for the better.

3. Which leads to the next point: as the world becomes more complex, it is harder to make a clear change for the better that will affect the same proportion of the world. It will be even harder to determine if a putative change for the better is indeed a change for the better, and if so, what the cause of it was.

4. What seems to work better is not education but removal of poverty and penury. And yet again, that too has its limits—the nature of humanity is to always want to be competitive with the top 10%. Some will say that the more educated you are, the more well-off you'll be. Highly doubtful. There's a general correlation, often related to the way society (from a Marxist paradigm) values education as a way of either a) maintaining a class divide, or b) allowing people to breach the class divide.

5. The way education maintains a class divide is through labels and certifications. Some will have them, some won't. The way education allows breaches of such divisions is that most people have some chance, no matter how small, to earn such labels and certifications. But again, mass education can also be seen as a system that fosters the value (sometimes artificial and even misleading) of such things.

6. The best implementations of mass education are thus those that realise these problems and do a few things— a) set simple goals and force people to work hard and miserably to achieve them, which makes these things valuable yet attainable; b) review goals periodically and rigorously so that people don't fall too far behind a true education (i.e. world-functional) level; c) make use of turnkey systems so that even the worst teacher can deliver some crude and useful education; d) place faith in students to survive a robust delivery and teachers to provide at least some delivery; e) allow cynicism to temper the idealism so that people treat the system realistically.

Atlantean education works. It must work because it produces people able to pass every test and yet complain about everything. It produces passionate idiots and erudite genii. It is firmly normed, and normally firm. It is widely criticised and even bastinadoed (figuratively speaking) by some, but praised and emulated by others. It's a very mean system.

Potential

I keep wanting to tell parents this:

"Your child's potential is not a trained dog that it should be unleashed. It is the patient accumulation of skill and ability that can be made to do useful work over time. Children have no potential at birth; they have possible futures in which they accumulate potential."

It's the duty of parents and teachers to help them develop those futures so that they can build up the potential with which to do wonderful works — thaumaturgeia, as the Greeks might have said.

What I've been musing on is how the word 'potential', which used to mean 'power, authority or might' became twisted into 'possible use of power, authority or might' in the early 1800s, and now merely means 'possibility regardless of how silly it looks'. Everywhere, you read about 'unleashing potential' without really thinking about how this comes about.

It's more useful to look at the equally common 'developing potential', which actually has more meaning. You can't 'unleash potential' without accumulating some first. Anyway, 'unleashing' is more along the lines of Shakespeare's immortal line — "Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war!" It's as if you can train potential so that once you let its leash slip, it will automatically do what is right, useful, purposeful and wise.

Sorry, that's not how it works. Potential needs to be worked at, and then used wisely and carefully. And once it's gone actual or kinetic, it's gone.

The Words In Wolff's Head

And here is Wolff, once 'Sir Wolff', but now a leader of his own Order, the way the St John's Ambulance people are a pale shadow of the Hospitaller Knights of Malta, of the Sovereign Order of St John of Jerusalem. These days, he trains novices to be Wyverns, even if they are not of that Order. And his old Order appears to approve. Yet, there are still those who make him tetchy. Like the parents of some novices, who after having given them into his care, still make sideline noises.

By what right do you tell me how to handle my children?

The right of the novice master, thinks Wolff. His right, who wields the sword which cuts away all that will not endure. But all he says is the very simple and true:

I am the one who teaches them.

And this gives you the right to tell them I am wrong?

Yes, thinks Wolff. Because I was brought up to tell right from wrong, and teach others right from wrong. But all he says is the very simple and true:

What I have said, I have said.

Why do you confuse them by saying that their other teachers are wrong?

Because some of them are, thinks Wolff. And I would not give them a chance in a millstone, should the Highest wish to apply the law against leading children astray. But all he says is the very simple and true:

I speak things as I see them.

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And thus it is that the parent goes away confounded even though the truth has been spoken. All Wolff can think is this: forte dans mon devoir, simple dans ma vertu. It is perhaps one of the strongest principles he has obeyed in his long journey, and he has miles to go before he sleeps — miles to go, and promises to keep.

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If you wish to read more of the tales of the Wolff, look here.

Urgency is not Agency

I have a lot of students. For some reason, they wait until their assignments are almost due, and then they consult me. They seem to feel that unless there is urgency, there is no emergency. They forget that 'emerge' in its original sense implies the rise of that which is submerged, and the deeper it is submerged, the longer it takes to emerge.

It's for that reason that I must remind them that urgency is not agency. Just because the matter is of some urgency to a student doesn't mean that I must be spurred into action. Indeed, the closer it is to a deadline, the busier I seem to be. What used to be a same-day or eight-hour maximum turnaround time is now about 72 hours or three days simply because the queue for consultations is very long.

Advice for future students: get yours early to avoid disappointment — those who consult me now may be paying as much as a 100% premium over my usual rates. I can't help it; I want to help, but I won't die for my students, and the extra earnings go towards my medical insurance and maintaining the resources I use to help solve their problems.

Thirteen Theses

Somewhere else in the proximate blogosphere, thirteen points were raised about education in Atlantis.

For ease of reference, I list them below in modified form (italics) and add some comments. You can always refer to the original post for the unmodified form.

1. Examinations should exist primarily to test progress/knowledge and should not be used to impart value/rank.

That's a matter of opinion, really — and the kind of society that sees a need for examinations and is deploying them. In practice, passing any examination affirms 'progress/knowledge', thus raising the perceived value of the individual and hence imparting value/rank.

2. Our current system of exams plus streaming creates elitism, stratifies society and demoralises/devalues much of our human capital.

This is true of any human process that validates progress (how ever defined), except to the degree in which human capital is demoralised/devalued (another social construct).

3. Since only 1% of those who leave primary school do not progress to secondary school, we do not need a Primary School Leaving Examination for promotion purposes (we may still need it to fill places, but that is a different barrier to be broken). We can look at through-train programmes to Sec 2 / Grade 8 (for 14 year olds) or something.

At which point, you'd deploy another examination? If the assumption is that we still need promotions and still need to measure progress (implicit in thesestatements), then it's only a matter of shuffling the standardised tests around. I don't think this particular statement adds much to the discussion.

4. Teacher 'key performance indicators' (KPIs) should not be weighted significantly towards the exam results of their students.

One major school of thought has it that the success of a teacher is measured by student outcomes. It's the most reasonable school, in general. The key point here is that certainly we don't have to use standardised exam results as the only indicator of teacher performance, and the debate should be on what else to use, in that case.

Indeed, if KPIs are not significantly weighted towards student results at all, then there aren't any meaningful AND useful criteria by which to judge teacher performance. For example, a great teacher is often considered so by the quality of her/his students' lives later on, and their concomitant attribution of their quality of life and deeds to what that teacher taught them. But that often results only in long-delayed (or even posthumous) recognition of teacher performance.

The opposite problem is selecting KPIs that are too short-term. This tends to lead not to performance (i.e. a cohesive, coherent and concerted exhibition of professional skill) but to performativity (teaching to the test in order to extract bonuses etc).

5. We need to lower the stakes of major examinations by relaxing cut-off points for schools.

The thing about this is that the cut-off points for schools are a matter of market forces. That is, if 350 students apply for 120 places, the 120 with the 'best' (how ever determined) results get in. To relax cut-off points normally entails deliberate loosening of criteria and may lead to accusations of lack of consistency — because progressive loosening means that different people would be able to justify the entry of different students on different grounds. You could also apply random or semi-random selection or just use centralised planning approaches. Otherwise, the main point is that schools and ministries don't set cut-off points — the 'market' does; the more people want to apply to a school, the higher the cut-off tends to get.

6. Change philosophies about the value of non-academically inclined students.

Well, first you'd have do define 'non-academically inclined'. You might also want to consider changing the values of society, the values of the students, etc. And lastly, consider how 'non-academically inclined' students might not want to think about philosophy at all.

7. Since all schools are good schools, we should pro-actively begin to dismantle the concept and influence of “elite” schools, starting by bringing the SAP, GEP and IB (note: various Atlantean elite programmes — Speech Alternative Plan, Greatly Exaggerated Plan, Intentional Baccalaureate) programmes (or elements thereof) into all schools (or a very significant portion of schools).

Background first. Yes, but some schools are good for other reasons. Especially those predating such programmes. They were therefore historically chosen to host such programmes.

The thing these programmes have in common is that they cost extra to run, which is why there are so few of them. They are sometimes culturally supported only in some kinds of schools (schools for the culturally well-defined, schools for the weird and peculiar, etc). And they aren't for everybody, so why deploy them everywhere?

8. There are alternative ways to fill posts in secondary schools.

Yes, there are. See point 5 above. We need to ask whether these alternative ways are acceptable to society. Otherwise, change society and/or admit you are trying to assert a perspective that society deems impractical. Good debate to have, though.

9. Restructure education so that the wealthy make only marginal/high risk gains from investing heavily in education.

Betrays a lack of historical perspective, or perhaps just an inexact formulation. In Atlantis, and many other parts of the world, the roots of mass education lie in the long-term vision of the wealthy who saw investing heavily in education as a route to great gain for society as a whole.

At present, let's consider what happens if the wealthy make NO (or insignificant) gain from investing heavily in education. Economic theory tells us that they will stop investing in education and invest elsewhere. Then you might get really uneducated and very rich young people out there, or you might end up with a society that sees no value in education relative to other pursuits, or any combination of similar deflationary possibilities with respect to the value of education.

And how would you restructure it anyway?

10. Fix teacher workloads, drastically increase supply of allied teaching professionals.

This is a great point, if by 'fix' we mean something concrete to reduce teacher workload to the point where it no longer compromises their professional duties. However, if by 'drastically increase supply' we mean pouring lots of money into recruiting teacher aides who would otherwise be running other essential parts of society, I would be rather concerned. Society needs allied teaching professionals like assistant teachers, administrators, special-needs educators, educational researchers, some kinds of counsellors, etc. But augmenting the supply shouldn't mean undermining the workforce in another key area.

11. Allow technical education to lead to degrees, or diplomas.

On the surface of it, excellent. But these routes already exist in Atlantis, so a bit of a non-point.

12. Skilled craftsmen and artists should have a separate basic qualification before moving on to tertiary.

This assumes that skilled craftsmen and artists NEED (presumably) paper qualifications at all. In many cases, the apprenticeship model and other models leave the creative production of the craftsman/artist as the only qualification needed. And why would they want to move on to tertiary education if they are already skilled? I hesitate to call this point wrong or irrelevant. It's just confusing.

13. Lower the cost of national university education further.

Well, see point 9 above. Also, consider the fact that Atlantean education is already very heavily subsidized. It's a matter of degree then, and whoever promotes this point must be set to propound a specific lowering. How much lower? And how justified?

The Educator's Dilemma

A pastor once told me that his job was to comfort the hurt and hurt the comfortable. To some extent, that fine balance is the basis of the teacher's dilemma.

You see, all teachers know that cognitive dissonance (i.e. the stuff you are learning is different from what you believe) is the beginning of learning. If you think the stuff you're learning is the same as the stuff you know, then you won't bother.

However, in these days of oh-so-softly customisation of education, sometimes people say we should fit our educational approaches to the strengths and weaknesses of the students. This is also true; making a screwdriver a better screwdriver is probably more useful than turning it into a hammer.

But there are a few problems. Here are some of them.

1) It's hard work to rewire someone's neural net so that new stuff is learnt.

2) If you don't need a screwdriver you might need to perform a tech conversion.

3) You might see a potentially excellent screwdriver, but realise that everyone out there for the next few years is using joint-and-nail.

And so on. The educator's dilemma is to decide whether...

a) to follow the route of hurting people (face it, even if you're very nice, there are issues about people in authority — perceived or positional — using it to brainwash or otherwise influence others), or

b) keeping them happy by helping them do what they do best (and who cares if they don't learn stuff that's useful but which they don't want to learn?).

The main solution is probably along the lines of being wise enough to know how to combine the two into some sort of synthesis, unique to each student and learning relationship. In human society, the older ones will always be the first teachers of the younger ones; we should invest the time we take to grow older in learning to be wiser and make wiser.

The Difference Cliché

"What a difference a week makes!" is one of those clichés that relies on truism. It's hard not to find a difference between snapshots of anything taken a week apart, especially the closer you look. But my life has changed a lot.

Some of you know about the Atlantean enterprise that has been launched. Is it possible to break the narrative of the burning books and launch a kraken into the gates of the Temples of Learning? We call on those who have such hopes to join with us — and it is a call we would not have dreamt of making a week ago.

Meanwhile, back at the Citadel, they've bid farewell to the busy one and will be bidding farewell to the business one. Will times change? Will the Pillars of Herakles still stand guard at the mouth of the 'Inmost Sea of all the Earth'? Only the long view will tell.

And we look further across the world, wondering how a contender for a throne of the world can fail to differentiate between 'wooden ships, iron men' and 'nuclear carrier battlegroup, Iron Man'. A week (as the other cliché goes) is also a long time in politics.

Findings

It's odd to have a post named after your blog. Yet, it's appropriate. Findings has been incorporated and now we are a proper cabal. You will find us opposite the New Clock Tower of the Hill of Dogs.

What is it that Findings will be doing now that it has become a very private and limited company? We'll be doing the same old things — doing research, making ourselves available for consultancy, teaching stuff in unusual ways. But having a proper home with tables and chairs and fellow-travellers — ah, that is nice.

And someday, when I have more time, I shall fill in the missing posts of the last few very busy days.

Streaming

The natural tendency of both geography and biography is to stream things, to let nature take its course as diverse forces and pressures (forces confined, or spread out over areas) act on fluids. And so it is with human education.

The most effective thing is to let fluids find their level, and then channel them accordingly. The least effective thing is to do co-current heat transfer or to force all fluids to spread evenly in a thin and unnatural film over a thin and unnatural landscape (like some movies I've seen).

When people are streamed (at airport gates, by means testing, or in education), it is always a nett gain to society in terms of resources saved, as long as the streaming medium is relatively responsive to changes in the environment. What we shouldn't do is abandon any idea of streaming in the name of that soul-deadening anti-scientific anti-human thing called 'artificial equality'.

And that leads me to banding in school systems. If we no longer have it, is that a good thing? The point is that it is bad to avoid banding. This is because people do it anyway. It is biologically impossible for humans to avoid comparisons.

The better solution is to make ALL the data available and let humans test themselves against the data, making their own sense. Is a school that claims 'green' efficiency really so if it spends $500/head on electricity and water? Is it better to send your children to a school that is religious and cheap or secular and expensive? And what if one masquerades as the other?

What I propose is that far from scrapping banding, ranking and streaming, we should make all the data publicly available while suppressing the names of individuals. Show at least the bulk population data. For every school, release their accounts to the public for reasons of accountability. Let everyone see what schools do, so that people can make conscious pseudo-rational decisions that they can no longer blame on anyone else.

How's that for a different take? *grin*

Chaogens, Pathogens

Children used to be sequestered, on the inside of stout defensive but selectively permeable walls made by women, to whom all humans owe life and fealty. And beyond the walls, the patrolling T-cell bands of men, not so useful in the home and at the hearth, but energetically and intellectually narrow-band enough to hunt and fight and kill random targets.

But these days, you see the children running wild. The curious psychopathology of our times is that the faster you give them adult freedoms, the better adults they will be. I think that's wrong. I think that the longer a sequestration you enforce, the more time you have to mould them and keep random influences out, the better adults you can make from children.

Yet there they are, running around, transmitting diseases to a vulnerable adult population. There they are, absorbing unuseful memetic material in exchange. And there they are, out of the control and/or responsibility of the adults who spawned them. Ugh. What a time we live in. What a time. What.

Educing the Young

The Latin word ducere is probably best translated as 'to lead'. In turn, it has spawned a large range of related words: most obviously 'duke' ('one who leads') and 'duct' ('a path that leads') — and then verbs like 'educe', 'seduce', 'traduce', 'induce' and 'deduce'. These are followed by associated adjectives and nouns, to a total somewhere around 200 different words.

But here we are today thinking about 'educing the young'. This is actually what 'education' is about — the Greeks called it 'pedagogy' in a more youth-focussed way. To educe is to lead out or draw out towards something, and from the mid-19th century or so, it meant 'to draw a conclusion from data'. In other words, education is a process which leads people to draw conclusions from whatever data they are given.

The young are particularly in need of such a process. The old have already drawn their conclusions, whether good, bad or ugly. But the young can still be saved enough for them to in turn become the old, at least.

The main problem of the age is that time is passing so fast, and change even faster, relative to what any of the old(er) know. What I mean is that the passage of time is a known change, but the things that come with it — technology, social upheaval — have never changed as quickly in the history of humanity.

This means that trying to lead people towards making conclusions (what you might call 'education towards eduction') is a thankless task. If you teach them through inductive logic, the risk of failure is high because the past is no longer an accurate guide to the future. If you teach them through deductive logic, the risk of failure is high because the rules are being remade everyday, and axioms are no longer the worthy authorities (Gk. axiomata) around which the universe rotates.

So how then should we educate the young? Two ideas appear to dominate.

First, some suggest that the accumulated weight of past learning will suffice. Some branches of learning have a very long shelf-life, so to speak — things like arithmetic and the core natural sciences come to mind. Some branches of learning constantly reinvent themselves, and are studied with that in mind — the arts and humanities come to mind. But that is almost everything, and so past methodologies will do, if not past knowledge.

Second, some suggest that the young should be taught to teach themselves. That is, the reinvention of self and of humanity should be the main methodology taught. This is rather Darwinian; those who can reinvent themselves well enough to survive and prosper in the next age of humanity will replicate their eductive memes and educative processes through appeal to the first idea.

You will note that I've not said WHAT the young ought to learn. To those who would like to think about it, I direct you towards a search of the venerable history of human education — specifically with the key phrase 'saber-tooth curriculum'. Enjoy.

Educational Pressure

In Atlantis, coeval with the complaint about immigration and demographics, comes forth also a barrage of complaints about the education system. But they are facets of the same jewel — if you want an independent city-state, you will end up in the same place.

(Here I shall just interject that there are now only three such states in the real world, and one of them is full of the men and women of religious orders.)

What do I mean?

Well, if you want economic self-sufficiency, you need a huge piece of land with natural resources. But no such piece can accommodate populations as dense as 7500 people/sq km or higher. So 'independent' city-states are politically independent and practically (i.e. economically in the main) interdependent. That is, they need to trade in order to sustain their independent highly-dense population.

This again means that you need to make people economically useful quickly. Hence, mass education at compressed time and resource rates. There is really not much choice unless you wish to spend more money (positively or in terms of marginal costs to the system).

Enter the armchair analysts of Atlantis. They say, "Make the class sizes smaller and all will be well; we need a better teacher:student ratio!"

Well, that simply means you spend more per class and have more classes. More classes = more classrooms and less open space, even if the classrooms are smaller. Labs, lecture theaters, research spaces of all kinds, art rooms — all these will need to be re-planned, if not rebuilt. The total cost of making all classes smaller is too high unless the remaining people decide to work a lot harder for less pay.

Simple, no?

Not quite. More armchair analysis later, and it is spoken, "Then our value system is horrible and people should work less hard for more pay!"

This, from the intelligentsia. The solution is really simple: all these people should just emigrate to a bigger country, not a city-state. Some place like Finland is good; it's 75% forest and has the cheapest electricity in Europe simply because it has four nuclear reactors and some uranium mines. Also more fresh water per capita than anyone can drink.

Mein...

Hitler would have said 'Kampf' and meant it in a completely different way. I'm a researcher in the sociological 'sciences' and I have a problem, if not a struggle. The thing is that education, now globalizing like everything else these days, has got to think about what to do with itself.

As many people have commented, 'education' is from Latin educaré — a 'drawing out' or 'drawing forth' of something. That is why it's important to think about what rabbits you are planning to pull out of what hats. Stalin is reputed to have said, "Education is like a weapon; its effects depend on who holds it and at whom it is aimed."

Well, in that case, we need to think seriously about what to teach and how to educate — that is, what rabbits are to be pulled forth and how. How is the world to survive and make good the potential of billions? One kind of eschatology would say that it won't matter in 'the end' — but even that kind must admit that from now to the end, we owe it to the educable to educate them or at least offer them a good chance of a good education.

But what is a good education in this age? Is it different from that in any other age? And what do we educate ABOUT?

An example: in the sciences, we sometimes take for granted that objectivity levels the playing field for all subjects — if a subjective viewpoint cannot be dominant, then all of us are equal; therefore, teach more science and convert the humanities and aesthetics through postmodern strippery.

I don't subscribe to this at all. Science is supposedly neutral, but it comes easier to those reading a dominant corpus in a dominant language. Like money, it is a neutral tool. But like money, it also heavily favours the possessors, holders and users of such tools; it 'privileges' them, to use a popular discourse-perverted term — it makes them privy to secrets and powers and 'specials' which nobody else has.

So you can have a financial priesthood and a technological priesthood, and inequality will grow. But the other arguments all lead to inequality as well, it appears. Perhaps one should just adopt a Sam Harris style 'major in empathy and common sense without religious irrationality and you'll be fine' approach.

It looks good. But again, 'empathy' would require trying to think in the black cave of ignorance and 'irrational' belief and intuition without actually being in there. All scientists are human. They admit to leading irrational lives, but they try to rationalize them in a way that... makes them happy. And having the power to do so, they are good at effective trying sometimes.

But still, it doesn't answer the question of what to teach and how to teach it. It's not that I don't already have many answers. I have to question all the answers if we're going to do anything useful with the trillions of silver pieces yet to be spent on an education-hungry world.

Watching from the Shadows

In Atlantis, more and more people are complaining about shadow education. They claim the system is screwed up, or that the curriculum is. Most of these complainants know nothing about systems, nor about curricula.

Indeed, almost all of them know nothing about the rest of the world, and how the inequities and abuses are even worse elsewhere. Hint: it is not Atlantis which has the highest per capita use of shadow education.

The answer to how it all got this way is obvious. Given the suspicion that a game is being played for high stakes and that not playing gives a negative reward, all potential players are likely to go for it if they can.

That's what's happening in Atlantis. Everyone thinks the game is rigged, or that only the rich can play and win. But despite this, they play anyway, causing hyperinflation and expansion of the shadow market, the grey area, the twilight zone. Once they push the remuneration for shadow operators higher than that for teachers, teachers will defect to the shadows.

And here we are now.

Shadow Education

I am a shadow educator now. What does it mean, to be one? It means that you are not in the business of direct illumination, not a priest of the Ministry of Enlightenment. It means that you dig where the light doesn't go, and you save the ones that they can't save. Or it means that you go where the shadow people hide, and you sell them a drug they can't resist. Or it means that you pander, as Pandarus did, to the illicit desires of the mugger barons. And so forth. And so, forth.

Finlandization

In a sunny little island somewhere between the Indian and the Pacific Oceans, there is unrest at the sad state of an education system that is really only trying to do its best (although some chunks of the middle class there would seriously disagree). This post is about why extreme, radical disagreements are ultimately futile, even though the system can still be improved and I'm not against that.

All political and social systems are constrained in what they can achieve by the resources available to achieve them. Short of acquisition of more resources through ever more inefficient means, it is a fairly tough constraint.

Nevertheless, let's enumerate and consider the possible resources, while thinking about the 'Finland Solution' to Sunny Island's problems (i.e., make it like Finland and everything's good.)

1) People: With five million people, surely you can improve the education system, and if not, we can import more teachers and professors, no? Well, not quite. You need to spend resources to import and look after these people, get them acclimatized, house them, feed them... And you also have to assume that the people you're importing represent a nett gain in quality for the outlay you're making. Sunny Island has a population density of about 7500 people/sq km, while Finland is at about 16 people/sq.km. Heck, Finland is three-quarters forest; but even if you assume that nobody lives in the forest, they still have less than 1% the population density of Sunny Island.

2) Physical Venues: Build more schools, more stadia, more art galleries! Yeah, you could try that. But Sunny Island is a very small island (tight water resources in 710 sq km of space) and it's trying desperately to keep its green lungs while the citizens a) complain there are too many such spaces, b) complain there are too few. Finland, on the other hand has 60,000 freshwater lakes and 340,000 sq km of space. That's a factor of x500 in size, right there.

3) Material Resources: Sunny Island is resource poor, as all its citizens know. Even the guano on the other island that used to belong to us would have been a poor substitute for Finland's mineral wealth (uranium, silver, zinc, rare earths... the list goes on) and consequent potential for development. Finland has four nuclear reactors and the Eurozone's cheapest electricity. Also, capacity for renewable resources and other environmentally-friendly things. Water costs almost nothing.

4) Financial Resources: Sunny Island is very rich. Sadly, everything costs a lot, because... sigh, see the previous three paragraphs for a clue. So there's not much point in deciding to pay the teachers as much as doctors or lawyers, since that will just alienate everyone except the teachers. You should get what you pay for, and the tendencies of a normal distribution ensure that if you employ more local teachers AND pay them more, you get drastically less effectiveness and efficiency for your expenditure.

5) System Processes: Yes! But we can still make our system like Finland's, right? Adult education for everyone, more job-related training, egalitarian schools? Haha, bad news. The population on Sunny Island is 75% Chinese. I shall say no more. I will only note that the population of Finland is 96% Finnish, and that if all adults are highly trained, then you would have problems paying them.

The same kinds of arguments apply for "Canada!" and "Australia!" and most other places. Fact is, Sunny Island is the most densely populated fully-independent non-client state in the world. Having compulsory mass education is a good thing, most people would say. But in such a state, it has a cost which is painful and yet still must be paid. That cost is unending competition and standards-based testing. Live with it, or move elsewhere.

In closing, to the people who go 'why can't we be more like the Finns', I would like to add that we don't have a history which includes fighting both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (and winning). Neither do we live in an area where everyone has a similar culture and whose ancestors have been living there for millennia. Tough, eh?

Reluctant Learners

I once heard a senior educator say, "You can teach all you like, but if the student hasn't learnt, you haven't really taught."

The problem I have with this is that it is akin to saying, "You can hit the wall all you like, but if the wall hasn't crumbled, you haven't really hit it."

There should always be some degree of collaboration involved. The student has a duty to try to learn. It is not a scenario in which the teacher is an entertainer to be appraised by the skeptical crowd at 'Education Idol' or some such — it is one in which the teacher is a conductor (at the very least) expecting some degree of compliance from an orchestra.

There are many other metaphors that will serves us well, but the 'go ahead, impress me, and if I haven't learnt — it's because you haven't taught' concept is rubbish.

Which brings me to the title of this post. The word 'reluctant' is not a passive one; the Latin reluctari means 'to struggle against'. A reluctant learner, like some I have encountered, is not a passive lump, but one who struggles against the teacher and the teaching process.

Nowadays, that unteachability is seen as a sign of 'independent thinking' and indeed seems to be considered a virtue. And so, we have reluctant teachers — teachers who must struggle against such silly ideas as accepting such thinking without critical evaluation.

Complaining about Systems of Education (Redux)

Some days ago, I posted this. It was a basic analysis of why systems of mass education always lead to mass complaints. John Gatto calls such systems 'weapons of mass instruction'.

The point is not that such systems are bad, but that even if the system is good, the components that execute it can't all be good — and the larger the system the more likely that critical components will be bad or go bad. That's because no matter how selective you make the choosing and accumulation of teachers, principals, and experts, the curse of the normal distribution will always win.

There just aren't enough good components for a good system of mass instruction to work well. In any school, the percentage of good teachers hovers around 5% at most. Really good teachers, that is. Even if you started out with 10% good teachers, or 20%, regression towards a normal distribution would begin to occur without a perceptive, dynamic leader who managed to escape his own egocentricity and keep the teachers from the normal regression.

This is another reason why one should appraise the system first, and then its effects. Most systems actually would work reasonably well without the problem of bad teachers, stakeholders who see things in terms of economic criteria, indifferent boards of management, and parents who suffer the same '10% maximum' problem in an educational context.

The best thing for any system's fair appraisal is for its goals to be set out in full and then its performance checked as objectively as possible against these goals. Such appraisal works better without pointless statements like 'we need better teachers' (yes, but you won't get them), 'we must prepare students for the world of work' (yes, but only working life really teaches this), 'grades are inflated' (or 'grades are unimportant' or anything else about grades — all pointless without a good research base, which is lacking), or 'my kids get less of a life than I used to have' (do they think so too, or are you doing it to them?).

In particular, the curse in high-density, high-competitivity urban locations is that parents (the clients of the system) compete too much. It becomes a game of snakes and ladders (or any number of MMORPGs which I can't mention here) where children are virtual proxies for personal gladiatorial contests. There is no way to avoid this, because it is human nature — the only way out is not to have anything to do with the system in the first place.

But remember — the system is only as bad as the society that allows it. If you can change it for something clearly better, do so. Else stop complaining that it doesn't work. I sincerely wish you all the best, if you can indeed make positive change happen.

Complaining about Systems of Education

As the population density rises, the habit of complaining about the system of education also rises. This is silly, but also unavoidable given the essential silliness of human nature. Let me explain.

In ancient Greece, the concept of paideia was used to indicate 'the art of bringing up children' (from paidion, 'a child', genderless noun). We get words like 'paediatrics' and 'paedagogy' from this. However, paideuo, 'to teach' or 'to train children' (literally, 'to child'), was mainly used in the sense of rigorous teaching accompanied by force or chastening if necessary; it is sometimes translated '(to) discipline' or '(to) rebuke'. Modern scholars like to imagine that the Greeks meant something holistic and beautiful by this, but in reality they just meant the art of bringing up children who were fit to join adult society, much as bonsai is the art of making beautiful little trees by application of force and discipline.

Such training requires much attention to detail if it is to be done properly. Each child and plant is a different entity, and while general principles can apply, the 'right' outcome varies from era to era and thus so does the 'right' method. Whatever it is, it has to be customised on an individual basis.

Enter the problem of mass education. This was not so bad when the population density was low. Then the number of people who wanted and needed a lot of formal education was a small number relative to the population. But once you combine high population density with mass education, you get greater competitivity and higher pressure on the individual to 'succeed' (in any way this can be defined). Clearly, it can only get worse because of this.

The only way to provide mass education is to systematize it. A large, thick layer of mediocre (by definition) basic education must be provided to everybody, like providing flour and water and asking them to make dough. This means everyone has 'bread'. Those who are more talented or gifted, better resourced, more ingenious and more determined (among other possible advantageous characteristics) will make better bread (tastier, fluffier, whatever).

But nobody should complain about having bread in the first place, stodgy and boring though most of it will be. You can always add fruit, nuts, whatever. Even this will end up 'the new boring' as people share recipes and compete with each other. The problem in mass education is that you can't make interesting bread for everyone without pricing it out of everyone's range — insufficient teaching staff, time, and so on.

The exceptions will be those who can spare enough resources for homeschooling or private tuition. These will have extraordinary bread which is either heavily customised or heavily spiked with booster additives. Whether such bread is also good depends on whether society will eat it, but those who make such bread always maintain it is better. It might be. Or not. As always, it depends on the quality of the baker.

Education in the Shadows

Arbitrage, the exploitation of the clever middle to transform the banal into the sublime, or the other way round — whichever gains the arbitrageur the most. Sigh. With blinding sight, I have come to realise that this is what shadow educators do.

The problem is one of the scarcity tail, the education of the top 5%, which is not to say they are any good, but that they are the top 5% of any given distribution, the outliers in a pile of whatever you have a pile of. It is like looking at a sack of weasels or ferrets as they writhe around seeking to gain advantage.

And it is terribly disheartening. I have become a a companion to weasels, a brother to ferrets. King Rat, but hopefully not Grand Duke Rabbit.