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.

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?

Systems of Government (Part 3)

Communism: See Christianity, early church, Acts of the Apostles II:xliv-xlv and IV:xxxii-xxxv... as Marx did.

Communalism: A kind of mutualism based on communes; that is, separate self-sufficient communities working tangentially together if at all. Hence commun-al-ism.

Communitarianism: A desperate attempt to continue complicating the issue by mashing communes into communities and asserting that this is not communism but libertarianism writ large. Or something like that. It reminds me of a moonbase in which everyone uses comm units to network.

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I suspect the problem is communication.

Systems of Government (Part 2)

Fascism: taking 'spare the rod, spoil the child' to its logical conclusion — a bundle of rods and no innocent children.

Plantar Fascitis: being caught flatfooted and looking vaguely fascistic.

Systems of Government (Part 1)

Democracy: a system of government in which the most convincing win, whether they are good or not, right or not, smart or not. Also, a meritocracy in which being convincing is meritorious.

Republic: a system of government in which the public elects representatives only to find that these best represent only themselves. Duh.

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.

Systemic or Societal?

Last night I was having one of those interesting Facebook intercommentarial episodes — things that aren't quite conversations or discussions but approximate them through roughly alternating comments on a post. The Thunderer's get was protagonist, so I suppose in a sense I was antagonist, although not in the modern sense.

The underlying issue was whether a certain system was crazy or not. Personally, I always go for etymology before thinking about significance. The word 'crazy' means 'fragmented', and it is in this sense that things are 'cracked', 'flawed' or otherwise 'broken'. It implies a lack of consistency at the very least and a lack of coherence or integrity at more subtle levels. Clearly, a system can be crazy.

But the overall issue seemed to be whether crazy people had made a crazy system or whether a crazy system had made crazy people. And here I paused to think.

The real conflict was that, in the kinds of systems we were discussing, people were integral components. If the people were nuts, the system (no matter how designed) would behave sub-optimally. But this, in the long term, is true of any system — it slides into increasing entropy. The Thunderer's get averred (perhaps with some sarcasm) that it was easy to say this, since the Second Law said as much.

My point was that empirically, systems collapse not in the very long heat-death-of-the-universe sense but in the much shorter span of generations. If a generation is 30 years, evolving systems like the American experiment in constitutional democracy have only lasted less than 10 generations. The first of my ancestors to leave eastern Eurasia and move to south-eastern Eurasia did so around that time; he lived from 1751 to 1801. The local mercantile/political experiment of my forefathers is thus an experiment just as old and I have empirical knowledge of it.

In the much smaller system of my clan, we have diversified pretty broadly (although not as much as the American system, with vastly greater numbers of inputs and functions). But I am absolutely certain that none of us hews closely to the attitude of our patriarch. If he had drafted a constitution, it might have slowed the entropy and diversification; if we had spent more time planning (as if we'd been a corporate institution) we might have kept the focus narrower. But neither of these possibilities is easy to evaluate.

The Thunderer's get also pointed out that certain systems obviously produced better (more rational, more useful etc) results than others. This is certainly true. But it is also about as useful as the finding that all systems fail because it is also a truism. No two systems can be alike, or they would not be two systems; they'd be one. If they were not alike, their outputs would be different either in terms of process or product, and hence different in impact on their implementors, environments and users.

Of course, in a purely mathematical system, this might not be true; you can indeed produce the same result by different process, and if a machine does it, there is little or no impact on human users. But that particular qualification — human — is the nub of the issue.

In any system, the tendency to entropy is greatest in the most complex element. The higher the level of development, the greater the distance from the baseline and the harder it is to sustain. This can be empirically and experimentally verified. In most of the systems under discussion, humans are involved, and they are the most complex elements of these systems.

This then was the process by which I reached the following point of contention: I said that all systems tend towards the mediocre and the Thunderer's get disagreed, citing the fact that some systems were better than others. I think that both of us were true in a very trivial sense (see above) but that taken together, these two truths give a higher truth: no matter how hard you strive to make something better, it will one day, in the not-so-distant future, be made less good by humans.

The challenge therefore is to overdesign systems so that humans can't mess them up. And of course, the more you overdesign a system, the more potential for entropy you create and the more effort you spend. You are taking away resources from somewhere else to do that work. You are fighting the inevitable, perhaps in a very laudable way, but mediocrity lurks nearby, always at your shoulder. It is the dark twin.

It is right to resist mediocrity. But this can only be done by changing the system every now and then. The other challenge is to know when to expend that effort and suffer that pain.

In all, one should conclude that the main point of human striving, systemically speaking, is to expend effort in setting up systems that resist entropy to some continuing and useful end. Society, on the other hand, cannot be that end in itself. So what is?

Measures of School System Success

Over the last few weeks, an interesting debate about the success of the Atlantean educational system has sprung up. So far, people have weighed in with various ways of measuring that success: some have mentioned behavioral qualities such as filial piety, some have mentioned awards such as Nobel prizes. Some have said the system is unsuccessful since it has produced neither.

It is with amusement that I note that a national system of education normally has only two real criteria for success: 1) that it produces the kind of people the state wants, and 2) that it produces the kind of people the state needs. You can divide this another way: schools must produce the people needed to run the country from within (at all levels) and the people needed to preserve and defend the state's interests against the interests of other states.

That means that by any measure, social cohesion is a more useful 'product' of a school system than are Nobel prizes. Most students have some sort of bond to their classmates, to their schoolmates. This is natural, and it is useful. Then again, social cohesion within a group or institution is not necessarily harnessed to the needs of the state — gangs and multinational companies come to mind, as examples that are not necessarily positive with regard to the states they operate in.

Useful skills help too. A system that produces lots of lawyers and doctors in a state that fancies itself a legal and medical hub is a system that is doing its job. However, a system that is producing hundreds of mediocre teachers in a state that fancies itself an educational hub is a system that is dysfunctional in at least one aspect — especially since breeding bad teachers leads to breeding worse teachers down the road.

So how does one measure the success of a system such as the Atlantean School System? Perhaps the most fun way of doing it is to see how others think of the system. It has become legendary in many other 'advanced' nations that the Atlantean system is horrifyingly great (or greatly horrifying, depending on what your political tendencies are).

So yes, it must be pretty successful. But perhaps not successfully pretty.

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Note: actually, Nobel Prize winning is most strongly correlated to a) the power and influence of a state in the worldwide community (see here), and b) whether you are Jewish (Jews account for about 25-30% of the prizes).

One Best Education System

After a lot of research and a lot of analysis, it seems quite obvious that everyone would love to have an education system that would miraculously produce the best education for each individual child. Well, it's not going to happen.

Why? Because we have no way to determine the optimal contribution of each child, since that in turn is determined by the context that child will be in. In fact, each time we educate a child, we create a different universe for all that child's peers.

Imagine if we had Lego seeds, little plastic widgets that could be educated to become any particular building block. The catch is that you would have to start the process 12 years in advance, making cumulative adjustments along the way but with some potential irreversible steps.

At the end of that time, if all the blocks were the same (worst case), you'd be in trouble. On the other hand, if all the blocks were different, you might also be in trouble. And to find out if all the blocks were in optimal proportion for each kind, you'd have to know what you were building.

That's the problem with ALL educational systems. It would mean that in theory, the One Best System would be one which could make any person be anything at anytime with no lag. It also happens to be the one advantage that amoebas have over more organised life-forms — they can take up any shape they like and live forever.

There's a lesson to be learnt there. Ahem.

Rebirth (or 'What Rough Beast')

I spent a couple of days reading Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. It's a very interesting book, written by a solid academic who actually used to be pro-testing and pro-choice. I'm going to be mentioning a few of her points. (It's also an interesting kind of book to read on the Easter weekend.)

In order to appreciate what Ravitch is saying, one has to have had a quick run-through on the subject of US education systems. Traditionally, each political sub-unit of the USA has had a lot of latitude in deciding what should be taught, how, and to whom. David Tyack's The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (1974) is a good study of the drive towards mega-systems at a state and national level, as people moved from the agricultural hinterland to the cities. Subsequently, Tyack and Larry Cuban's Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (1995) is an excellent crash-course that brings the account up to date towards the end of the last millennium. At that point, things looked pretty optimistic.

The millennial presidency, of course, went to George W Bush. In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, President Bush managed to come up with the 'No Child Left Behind' reforms. The intent was laudable, but the details were appalling. NCLB left it to states to set tests and then mandated action based on the percentage of students doing well in those tests. Not surprisingly, the temptation to lower test standards hit almost all the states, as subsequent research showed.

Students did better, test-wise, and proficiency levels fell. Mandatory tests covered reading and mathematics, and nothing else. In the famed New York 'Regents' exams, it was found that you could score 65 by obtaining 34.5% of the possible points. The graduation rate soared. This happened in Chicago as well; pass rates doubled and performance levels remained horribly flat from 2001 to 2008.

Meanwhile, tuition centres (test-preparation farms and suchlike) flourished. Students learned to game the steadily less rigorous tests at state level. Essentially, students were cheated of a good education while the administrators took credit for better results.

Thus Campbell's Law kicked in. In 1975, Donald T Campbell formulated this social science principle: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decison-making, the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." In this case, teachers and administrators were held accountable for better results, so they learned how to produce better results without producing better education — 'by coaching, cheating, or manipulating the pool of test-takers' as Ravitch puts it.

She continues, 'As long as the state or district superintendent continues to report good news about student performance, the public seems satisfied, and the media usually sees no reason to investigate whether the gains are real. State and local leaders want to claim credit for improvement, rather than determine whether the improvement was meaningful.'

It is instructive to read all those books and then compare and contrast the unfolding of such events with the considerably more controlled and politically well-directed development of the Atlantean education system. The Atlantean system makes no bones about its origin as a way to boost economic growth. The Gnome, who masterminded the economic expansion of modern Atlantis, was very clear about that.

The Gnome also said many things about the non-material aspects of education. They are very altruistic, very laudable things, these other things are. Unfortunately, these non-material ideals proved less robust than the drive for quantitative measures. It was as if the Gnome's architectural and cultural heirs lost to the Gnome's engineering and accounting heirs.

The resultant education system is fantastic. Local test scores are as high as the highest American test scores (normally from the state of Massachusetts). Actually, local test scores are often the highest in the world. This is a good thing, with the only caveat being that these performances are mostly in the quantitative disciplines — mathematics and science. I say 'mostly' because many detractors somehow fail to remember that local students also top the Commonwealth in English Literature and win numerous international debating and legal awards.

But that one caveat is a pretty serious one. It is a symptom that mechanistic learning is the main operating mode in Atlantean society. The country is riddled with the equivalent of American test-preparation centres. The situation has reached the point at which people are giving private tuition to university undergraduates. Most of these centres are cramming stations for the sciences, mathematics and economics, with basic language skills thrown in. Students are also taught mechanical ways of framing and writing essays.

All this means that Atlantean basic education is extremely solid. But it is also resistant to creativity. Since performance is primarily evaluated by test scores, most people get good at producing test scores in the most efficient possible way, not the most interesting, flexible, or adventurous possible way.

Nevertheless, the Atlantean system hasn't had the same kind of problems with testing or choice that the American system has. In the case of testing, this has been because the Atlantean test regime has a strongly centralised and rigorous testing bureau which tries very hard to measure process skills as well as product. It has its weaknesses, but not so many, overall.

But what about 'choice'? In the American system, this refers to students being able to change schools and courses at will. Private education service providers can compete with public schools in a free-market system. At this point in time, the jury is still out; no statistically-solid gains can be seen as an overall trend — although some of these providers have posted sterling results, some have crashed and burned with alarming alacrity.

In Atlantis, choice depends on your academic prowess (test-taking skill?) at the age of 12 or so. This allows you to pick a secondary school, which mostly admits on the basis of that score. The fundamental flaw in the system is of course that in the last 30 years, the best secondary schools have built their reputations on having had the best students and hence having posted the best results.

The market has failed because we can't determine how effective these schools really are except by a spurious measure known as 'rolling value-added score', which measures efficiency as a function of test scores (again). The market has failed even more drastically because the better schools are now allowed to admit talent even without looking at the test scores — and there is no public disclosure as to how this talent is selected or how much is thus absorbed.

Even worse, since test scores correlate well to socioeconomic status (SES), the better schools have developed an elite demographic character in which top earners predominate. The schools can of course disguise this by taking in foreign students without declared antecedents, or by reclassification (or secure classification) of parental SES. But it is pretty clear that the per capita cost of education in the elite schools is much higher than that in the neighbourhood schools.

Principals of such schools are now major fund-raisers and scourers of the hinterland for academic talent. They administer a test designed to discover proficiency in mathematics and language, skim off the cream from nearby countries and big states like China and India, and bring them to Atlantis for conversion education. Then they bask in the academic successes which such talented young people will inevitably produce.

In a sense, the Atlantean system has already had the rebirth that the American system needs. However, what has been birthed is not necessarily a paragon of educational virtue. Whatever it is, though, is pretty efficient at producing test scores. Scorers, not scholars, are the output of the system. Aficionados of W B Yeats might be right to wonder what rough beast slouches towards Atlantis to be born.

Justifiable Assumptions and their Consequences

I'm still ploughing through the hefty tomes that constitute the Gnome's wise sayings from his apical position at the top of the Atlantean hierarchy from 1959 to at least 1984. He makes an awful lot of assumptions, and sometimes, you have to take into account his weaknesses as well as his colossal strengths.

For example, the Thunderer once said that the Gnome was a bad judge of character, able to spot talent but not able to sense the constitutional underpinnings of it within each individual. From various readings, you can probably guess that the Gnome assumed something like a 1 in 3000 success rate at finding world-class candidates for the Atlantean High Command. The Thunderer's pragmatic assessment would reduce that to perhaps 1 in 10,000.

The Atlantean education system currently contains a shade under 30,000 educators up to the high school level. Of these, about 800 are principalities or deputy principalities. This means that if we are to take the founding fathers of modern Atlantis seriously as to the level of available talent, there are not likely to be more than three world-class educators in the whole lot.

The commonly-held assumption is that the best talent is actually sucked into the Administrative Service, the priesthood which controls all the highest functions of Atlantean society. Approximately 300 officers occupy about 600 posts; a large number of these officers run the commercial arm of Atlantean government.

The current Atlantean population is about 5,000,000 souls. If 1 in 10,000 is a candidate for the high Command, then there are only 500 people who can run the show. 300 of them are in the Administrative Service; that leaves 200 for everyone else.

Of these 200, we assume that 3 are somewhere in the education service, swamped by about 29,000 other officers of variable but lesser abilities. Yet somehow, we have managed to cultivate a 'world-class education system'.

My conclusion at this point is that if this education system is 'world-class' (whatever that means), it's a triumph of systems engineering over human leadership. It must be a system that works regardless of the manpower available. In fact, as I've published elsewhere, it is a system which has extremely fluid manpower characteristics but extremely rigid structural characteristics.

It is like a system of concrete channels within which seawater and all kinds of marine life circulate. The channels are fixed, but what kind of 'catch of the day' you get depends a lot on luck — the quality of your fish is not guaranteed, except that it is the kind which will thrive in such a system.

If I were less charitable, or willfully cynical, I'd call it a goldfish bowl system. But there is one key difference: with a goldfish bowl, the fish see each other and the observer can see them all — but in this system, the fish do not all see each other, and the observer can't see them all either. It's concrete and steel, not glass and light.

I can't wait to get to my final conclusion.