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.

The Toyota Parable

Bill Saporito at TIME.com (4 Feb 2010) provides the story from which this 'digest' version comes:

Toyota built its reputation and market share through its renowned "continuous improvement" method. The Toyota mantra was "Quality First" because it led to lower costs, and hence to higher market share.

But in the '90s, Toyota set out to become the world's top auto company. Being the best and being the biggest created a tension that Toyota couldn't resolve, says MIT operations expert Steven Spear: "If quality is first, it drives a certain set of behaviors. If market share is the goal, it drives a different set of behaviors."

Even as Toyota was catching up to the global No. 1, General Motors, the reputation of its cars was slipping. Spear, who has apprenticed in Toyota factories, says the problem was that the "Toyota way" — in which knowledge accumulated by élite cadres of engineers and assembly workers over many years is shared across the company — was diluted by the demands of production. "In the late '90s, people in Toyota would say, 'This is going to bite us in the ass,' " says Spear. "They just didn't know when."

Now they do. "We have to strengthen quality control," says Shinichi Sasaki, executive vice president for quality. It's a startling admission from a company that made reliability its quest. Toyota will fix its manufacturing problem. Restoring its reputation is going to take a lot longer.

This reminds me a lot of the Old Place. You can see how 'the demands of production' are leading to the dispersion of the knowledge assets of the corporate body, the loss of quality as quantity production is ramped up. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Quality

About a week ago, the Spectre told me that the old place would receive the nation's highest award. He was grimly ironic in his humour. He said, "Boyo, this is how it works. We create awards, so we have to give them to somebody. And even if we know what's missing, we can't reveal that we know, or the whole trick falls apart. But remember what the little Corsican said — 'On appelle ça des hochets, je sais, on l'a dit déjà. Et bien, j'ai répondu que c'est avec des hochets que l'on mène les hommes.' — it is with such baubles that men are led."

The investigations required for award of the Légion_d'Honneur are a lot more comprehensive than those for other awards. But the principle is the same. Sometimes, as the Spectre said, you have to give out these things. Some are given for honour, and that is good. Some are given for quality — for a generic array of qualia — and that is just vague.

As someone who used to stand behind the barbed wire and listen to odd and unsettling morning devotionals, I know exactly what qualia are looked for and what their substance is. I have manufactured enough of it before. The Spectre smiled and I smiled back. There was not enough for laughter, but certainly enough for humour.

The Unbearable Lightness of Quality Awards (Part I): Unwise and Misplaced

A lot of young people I've been meeting these days (and some older ones) seem totally confused by what one of them referred to as the 'SQuAre Award'. That's just the local manifestation of the typical business quality award conferred by some local agency on some local business which has shown a high level of self-defined excellence.

What? No! Really? What do I mean by 'self-defined excellence'?

What I mean is that the organisation to be assessed for such an award has to define what its key performance indicators (KPIs) are and show that its principles, planning and process (in that order) lead inexorably to high-level achievement. By 'high-level', we mean 'in comparison with competitors and also in an absolute sense' — but as asserted and defined by the organisation being appraised.

It's interesting, because as an insider I can testify as to the validity and reliability of such awards. Validity low, reliability high, would be a fair summary when applied to certain institutions. The problem is that such awards depend on three things, really. The three things are a) establishment of rules and compliance with those rules; b) establishment of incentives as a benchmark for approved excesses (or successes, or whatever is above the rule-established norm); and c) honesty in declaring the exact processes by which the rules are established, complied with, and related to incentives.

This was what was in my head when my Inbox beeped. I received an interesting and terribly relevant email from my friend the Exchemist. Exchemist and his wife are both high-class taxi-drivers (students of the roads) and brilliant at what they do. Exchemist hardly ever emails me; mostly it's a short message suggesting breakfast or lunch. The link that he sent to me was to a talk by Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom.

It boggled my mind to hear my ideas so much more clearly and cleanly presented. The studies I'd been looking at, the ways I'd tried to describe the College of Wyverns in sensible form, all this had been summarised in a short talk by this sharp and kindly old man. He says things like, "A wise person learns to... serve other people and not manipulate other people."

Essentially, his entire talk (in 20 minutes) condensed for me the idea of how wisdom is more important than quality awards when it comes to the provision of a proper education. It is the common storehouse of humanity, unlike the business/management paradigms which are essentially ways to pillage that common storehouse for short-term gains and long-term ills.

Knowing what I know (and which I'll discuss in a subsequent post), I wouldn't say a school with a fleet of quality awards was necessarily a better school. I have produced (and helped to produce) documents which allow a school to receive such awards, and I know how much of such stuff is real and how much is window-dressing. As Umberto Eco once described it in 1975, humans quite often have 'faith in fakes'. It makes them happy, if not wise; this misplaced faith creates mediocrity and leads to a loss of gifts through disuse and misuse.