Fools

Today is the day we should celebrate the fool, not celebrate folly. A fool and his folly are not soon parted, but I do not speak of the fool who is of his own will unwise. I speak rather of the fools who either a) choose to confound the wisdom of the world, or b) choose to acknowledge that they will never be completely wise.

Discernment

In some texts, discernment and wisdom are given equivalent value. The reason for this is a simple one: discernment is the act of distinguishing by sifting; that is, given a number of entities, the man of discernment can separate what is desirable (wanted, useful, good etc) from what is not (unwanted, useless, bad etc).

However, these two things are etymologically unequal. Discernment is from the Latin discernere, which means 'to separate one from another, to distinguish and set apart'. Wisdom comes from the older wis (from which we also get 'wit' and 'vision') + -dom; it is about having the ability or capacity for knowing or seeing something.

The problem really is whether a person has the discernment to discern between discernment and wisdom. Or perhaps, the wisdom to see the difference between discernment and wisdom. Hmm...

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.

Annual Infarction (Part IV): Human Sciences

Not such a very long time ago, I was approached by an agent of the Imperium. On that occasion, I was asked if I would become an Imperial Assessor, essentially a person who would be tasked to enter institutions and compile a report on their fitness to continue administering funds from the Imperial fisc. Of course, I turned this opportunity down; having long been an independent agent, I was not one to return like a wolf to the Imperial fold.

It did occur to me though just how unique my perspective on such institutions was, and how valuable my experience could be to certain kinds of organisations. There aren't many Imperial Assessors with a doctorate in the specific and detailed assessment of the institutions they are supposed to assess. Apparently this occurred to somebody else as well, because a few months later, another agent of the Imperium asked if I could just assist in an advisory role, supplying recommendations on what should be looked at with respect to institutions undergoing the Quintessential Infarct.

"Hey," you might be saying now, "This post is straying from the straight and narrow and heading towards the sort of movie in which chainmail bikinis and barbarians clad in buffalo fur figure a lot!"

Oh, no it isn't. What's happening here is that I am trying to be educational without embarrassing specific people. The Quintessential Infarct is a form of Quality Assessment, in which the Imperium tasks a specific agency (hence all these agents in my tale) to look into an institution to see if it is worthy of wearing the Imperial Laurels and half-a-dozen legionary eagles on its brazen epaulettes. It is a step up from just wearing four legionary eagles on bronze-green epaulettes, trust me.

I turned both requests down for a simple reason. I am not one to be beholden to any side in a debate, no matter how collegial or professional. Either I am on one side as a champion for a cause, or I am not. I don't do hatchet jobs with the venerable axes bundled with my sticks. If I am to write anything, it will be fair, and if I am to float a recommendation, it is for re-commending something, and not secretly undermining anything.

The basis of all such assessments which call themselves 'quality assessments' is a mish-mash of what we conveniently and (unfortunately) accurately describe as the 'human sciences'. It is a kind of wisdom grounded in the eternally variable nature of humanity, and hence can be trusted on general human principles and not trusted at all in specific cases.

To my hypothetical young civil servant, I now offer some humble pieces of advice concerning the process of appraisal and the human sciences used in that process.

1. It is far better to give than to receive; better to appraise than to be appraised.
2. If you are to be appraised, best you do it to yourself first, exhaustively and exactly, hewing closely to the grain of your profession. By this, I mean that you should outline in very certain terms what it is that you are expected to do, appraise it thoroughly, and remind any external appraiser what is within his scope and what is not before he starts to do his job.
3. Do not trust qualitative data unless you can triangulate it from base points far outside the institution producing it; one corollary to this is that you should never believe your own institutional hype.
4. Realise that there is nothing to trust about quantitative data; it either comes from a reliable source or it doesn't, and so you must zero in on whether the source is trustworthy or not.
5. It's the interpretation of the data which you have to be wary about, especially when you see a drop in standards across the board but are assured that the average performance is better (or you see standards rise but higher levels do worse): this indicates a flattening of performance and a loss of excellence.
6. Be rigorous even when you are being treated to gratuitous ad hominem attacks. There is no such thing as being too thorough where money, power and/or reputation are at stake.
7. Ask the difficult questions: what is the logical chain connecting an institution's actual practices and its outcomes? How strong is that chain?
8. If you are going to apply something called 'human sciences', better for you to make it more scientific and less human.

Actually, I was going to list even more points—then I realised that I could just take all this and write a book, with very detailed examples. Shouldn't do that here. My poor readers! Ah, the humanity!

I think I will just offer a couple more points. When looking for documentary evidence, you should realise how easy it is these days to forge these documents. Any document without an independent time-stamp should be considered provisionally tainted, which makes the assessor's task much harder. I know a former hierarch who used to tell subordinates to create documents which did not exist before and back-date them in order to present a better picture. I was told by impeccable sources that this individual also directed others to modify other documents in confidential files.

Remember, therefore, what I said about trusting the human sciences from a general viewpoint and not a specific one. If you look at EVERY document and they say the same thing... well, it's hard to forge a decade of material, and it's more likely to be a true picture. But if your conclusion depends on a handful of documents, then you need to look very very carefully. This is why a three-year or five-year baseline is inadequate for a really superior appraisal; it is worse when the institution has had the same helmsman for more than a decade, because your baseline cannot easily be extended outside his reach.

To end this series, I will say that I have a genuine desire to help those who will one day be called upon to be both civil and serving. There is a lot of advice out there that is far better than what I've given so far; very little of it, though, is better than these ancient lines, some of which I have quoted before:

He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
  and to walk humbly with your God.

Listen! The LORD is calling to the city—
  and to fear your name is wisdom—
"Heed the rod and the One who appointed it.
Am I still to forget, O wicked house,
  your ill-gotten treasures
  and the short measure, which is accursed?
Shall I acquit a man with dishonest scales,
  with a bag of false weights?"

Wise advice indeed. So, my hypothetical young civil servant, remember not to be swayed from the basic principles, no matter what your boss tells you are 'basic principles'. As Dunnett's patriarch says, the problem is often in your choice of master.

The Inconsistency of Growing Old

Recently, a raven told me that there would be an age requirement for principalities and powers. "Ark! If thou hast excess of two score years and but a little more, thou wilt not be granted ascension, and thou shalt perish as a small power unsated and beneath contempt."

Haha, it is one of those rare and silly things. If you are too old, you cannot ascend to the seat of the wise. It would be ludicrous to think of this except in an exceptionally foolish society. Especially when in the highest realms of the City, it is said that you must be at least of two score years and a little more in order to reach the seats of the great. In fact, it is said that the highest of the wise and great should be of four-score years, proven strength and indispensable wisdom all in one.

It beggars belief that the raven's croakings might be true, but sadly, it is not beyond my creative and imaginative powers to imagine how it might be true. I am quite sure that a society which thinks it is ossifying in the middle has got two main views: 1) that the oldest and wisest are legendary and hence beyond ossification; 2) that the youngest and most efficient have not ossified yet. Hence you must have young powers of their third decade and a bit, and old powers after their fifth decade. The rest need not apply.

Truly, I say, a case of scorer, ossifer, general-men.

I used to believe that a society that valued education should have values respecting the wisdom and effectiveness of the old, rather than the energetic efficiency of the young alone. Then I realised that seniority could also fall into the trap of selective banding. The really old are in power, ergo, that is a natural state to be continued. The middle-aged are not energetic enough; neither are they in power, ergo, anyone at that level who is not in power should never be. The young are a different generation and manipulatable, let us put them in power beneath the ones who are in power.

Two phrases come to mind. Firstly, that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds; secondly, that things should be done on a case-by-case basis. The two mean the same thing: that power and wisdom trump the rule of law and order. This would be perfectly acceptable, if you could ensure that power and wisdom together are indeed right. The problem in this world is that this is seldom true; instead, the flight from consistency towards individualism and flexibility can overshoot the mark and lead to chaos, favoritism, nepotism, and other corruptive ills of society.

Ah well, I always leave it to the wise and powerful who claim they know what they are doing. That is because, eventually, the All-Wise and All-Powerful will have His say in the End.

The Paradox Of Power

I've just finished studying a large chunk of the Pentateuch, also called the Torah. It has struck me (as it no doubt has struck millions before me) that these books of the early Old Testament say a lot more about power and humanity than many of the others do. They say it in a way that is more raw, more naked than commonly seen or perceived.

Almost always, it is a struggle between legitimate power which must not be overused and subversive power which pushes its limits. Sometimes, other kinds of power and shades of the three main kinds of power compete.

One of my juniors has it right about the circumscribing paradox of power. You can either use it or not; its misuse means loss of power, and so does its rightful use when perceived as unjust. Then again, can rightful use ever be unjust? It is hard to know. In the book of Job, it always appears unfair, that the deck is stacked against a humanity that can never find the right answer to the paradox. At the same time, acceptance of the conclusion found therein leads us to believe that there is a right answer—power can only be fully used where knowledge and wisdom are complete.

This is where we humans muck things up. We have a love of ultimate power that is unrivalled by any love of ultimate knowledge or ultimate wisdom in its ubiquity. We will never attain any of these ultimates, but the quest for the first has been the source of corruption and the undoing of many since the very beginning. What a burden, this paradox of power is for a fallen humanity!

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Note: No, I am not the senior that my junior is blogging about. And yes, I am slowly becoming a source of knowledge about the legitimate and illegitimate uses of power within complex organisations. Not that it will ever be enough.

Fifty-Six Laws Of Good Teaching

The following is reproduced from Provocative Opinion, J.Chem.Ed.(67-5), 1990; pp.413-4. I couldn't find a link to it, so it is here in its entirety for educational purposes. Should the copyright holder wish, I will remove it.

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Fifty-Six Laws of Good Teaching

Herbert C Friedmann
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Chicago, Illinois, USA.

1. Choose a good textbook, but do not follow it in lectures.

2. Organise your lecture, but do not be a slave to your organisation.

3. Always re-experience your subject; this way it will remain forever fresh, lively and spontaneous.

4. Let your lecture be spontaneous, but do not improvise upon your knowledge.

5. Always start on time and stop on time.

6. Begin each lecture with an outline; a lack of vocabulary confuses a student less than a lack of expectation.

7. Never expect your students to learn or to understand anything that you cannot or did not learn or understand yourself.

8. Never give a lecture unless your knowledge far exceeds the content of the lecture.

9. Never feel that attention to detail will compensate for lack of perspective.

10. Never snow a student under with an exhibition of your erudition; a student is far less interested in what you know than in what he or she can learn.

11. Do not be proud of knowing more than your students; they did not choose to be born after you.

12. Admit your ignorance, but know enough to tell whether your ignorance is just your own or everyone else’s as well.

13. Never equate ignorance or lack of knowledge on the part of your students with stupidity.

14. Do not memorise your lecture, just understand your material.

15. Do not lecture from notes, except for numbers that you cannot remember.

16. Never never read out your handouts; if the students were illiterate, they would not take your course.

17. Have notes or outline handy, but do not use them: a good actor needs no prompter.

18. Avoid overheads: rather than have one error and be spontaneous, than have no error and be dull. A lecture is not a research seminar.

19. Avoid monotonous delivery: the student’s interest should be directed to your subject, not your voice.

20. Give your lecture at a deliberate speed: patter results in confusion while oracular pronouncements lead to boredom.

21. Do not assume that mere one-time use of a word or an idea ‘exposes’ students to it: appeals to thought and understanding require substantiation, not intimation.

22. Never give the same lecture twice. Look at the students to know whether they follow.

23. The difference between lecturing and acting is that in the former the subject comes first and the lines follow; in the latter the lines come first and the subject follows.

24. Answer all questions from students the best that you can, since a given question rarely troubles only one person; a question is not an interruption but a challenge to funnel the answer into the rest of the lecture.

25. Always lecture with the assumption that your students wish to learn, not just to pass examinations.

26. Use examinations as a vital part of teaching; the student’s approach to learning in a particular course is set quite fundamentally by the type of questions that are anticipated.

27. Never ask examination questions on topics that you did not ask your students to learn.

28. Never tell students to ‘be responsible’ for learning a topic; responsibility regards learning as a duty owed to others, rather than a duty owed to oneself. The line between obedience and self-esteem is thin, but it is clear.

29. Competence should always take precedence over popularity.

30. Always praise your students for their accomplishments. Never damn them for their failings.

31. Never tell a joke for its own sake, but only in the service of what you teach.

32. Never laugh at your students, but laugh with them.

33. Never make fun of your students, unless you wish them to make fun of you.

34. Always take your students as seriously as they take you.

35. Do not take your teaching too seriously; think how utterly funny it is that students are interested in what you are saying.

36. Never lose your temper in front of your class. Students are not interested in your private emotions.

37. Treat your students with respect, and they will respect you, and with politeness, for they will not confuse it with softness.

38. Do not confuse familiarity in the part of the student with lack of respect, or intellectual disagreement with personal antipathy.

39. Look at the students when you lecture; the ceiling and the floor are not interested, and neither is the blackboard.

40. Never assume that yours is the only course the students take.

41. Never assume that if a student sleeps he or she is bored or uninterested. He or she may have been up all night preparing a paper for another course.

42. Never assume that students’ silence means understanding on their part: they may be confused.

43. Never start fast and end slowly: this shows that you have exhausted your material.

44. Never start slowly and end fast: this way you will have exhausted your students.

45. Every discipline speaks its own language: good teaching teaches language, not just words.

46. Never forget to reinforce a new term or a new concept by writing it on the board and by repeating it in such a fashion that the student has a chance to write it down, but never, never repeat every sentence: the result of verbatim repetition is simply half a lecture in a given time.

47. Do not confuse lecturing with dictation: the former is a creative process, actively received and worked on by the student; the latter is a mechanical exercise, passively recorded for later understanding.

48. Never be so simple as to be trivial, or so complicated as to be obscure: a clear lecture need not be simple, and a profound one need not be obscure.

49. Act out of the conviction that your teaching matters, even though you may not be able to prove this.

50. Do not leave a lecture without a feeling of exhilaration and exhaustion; without these the lecture was probably not superb.

51. Intelligence is measured more by the quality than by the quantity of learning.

52. Do not expect that your students have an infinite capacity for learning: the limits of saturation of the mind are set more by physiology than by intelligence. (Intelligence is the capacity of maximising achievement within the physiological constraints of your mind.)

53. Do not deride originality born out of ignorance.

54. The prime challenge of teaching is to retain the students’ enthusiasm in spite of their growing knowledge; a good teacher fosters creativity in the face of information.

55. Instructors do not ever give grades. Students earn them.

56. Do not confuse good teaching with good examining, or good examining with good grading. (To lecture is one thing, to examine another, to grade and evaluate yet another; a good teacher must master all three.)

This Is Education, Nor Are We Out Of It

I look back on a mere fifteen years as a professional educator. I look forward, God willing, to many more. But in a historical context, I look back on four generations of professional educators – eight of my direct ancestors in those four generations bearing that gift and the associated calling.

Among them are the turbulent forces that in an ignorant time might have been called the human equivalent of 'principalities and powers'. Mere mortals, of course, all - just as I am, and without one plea - but mortals touched with a spirit of fire. As I reflect upon my ancestors and that lineage which alone in itself ought to humble me, I realise we are humbled by a common master. And that master is not Education, a process anthropomorphised.

Here for example is a fairly normal exegesis of Education in a small and infamous south-east Asian nation-state. The title of this post relates to that through the simple tactic of misquoting from this, or at least from Marlowe's Faustus if you want to read the whole thing.

For what we blithely call 'Education', that Roman ideal so anathematic to the Greeks before them and to generations thereafter, is actually one or the other of these: it makes a hell of the world, or a hell of a world. The Good Book never said, "Go and educate the masses." The word educaré means 'to draw out' in Latin; the word didaskein means 'to instil wisdom' in Greek. The directions of Roman and Greek philosophy are hence opposite in direction! The former sought to draw out from humanity, much as that educational heretic Socrates did; the latter sought to instil within humanity something greater.

But what does the Good Book say about the two directions of learning? Well, it says this about the Roman view and this about the Greek view. I leave you to judge. Think hard upon it; is it better to draw out from the instinctive and natural, or to drink in from the evidence of the eternal around us? Not an easy thing to ask, or to answer.

And yet, until it is answered, this is Education, nor are we out of it.

Understanding

It's a bit like being outstanding. When you're out standing, you're over-exposed and vulnerable. When you're under standing, you must check to see what you're standing under. And as my father always says, when someone uses 'therefore', you should ask yourself what it is there for. Simple bits of wisdom.

And this is why strategic planning doesn't work so well at times. It's probably because people aren't thinking about what a strategic plan is. A year isn't long enough for a strategy to work out. A simple exercise to think about: What are the possible reasons why not having mid-year exams in Year 3 translates to better grades at the end of Year 4? A tough exercise to think about: What are the possible reasons why mid-year exams return despite the aforementioned good consequences? Further reading for the second question can be found here.

Now you know why I get to do history, economics, literature and natural sciences. I'm crazy. Haha.

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Edit: my students of political science, business and other sociological disciplines could take a look at this blog for some interesting and useful posts.

I'm A Jinn Nation

The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it is even stranger than we CAN imagine.

The Economist is a pretty serious and intelligent magazine, though permeated with dry wit and thus possibly combustible. However, the article linked to above is really one of those 'secret conspiracy', 'X-Files', kind of stories. Yet, who has read Neil Gaiman and not believed? You might find the jinn even in London, for the older cities are filled with genius loci of all kinds.

Ah, the power of it all. Imagination.

The Greater Trumps: (29) The Savant

Here is a person hard at work, surrounded by astrolabe and alembic, canopic jar and retort, text and picture; the central figure is surrounded by all manner of instrument, artifact and item. Sometimes, there are peripheral figures, bearing even more things. What is the Savant to do? The world of the Savant is full, busy, and most important of all - occupied by the act of understanding. In the background, the stars shine in a dark sky; in the foreground is a book that might be the Book of Books.

The Savant image is that which evokes Wisdom. It is not merely knowledge that is represented here; it is the attempt to tease out from it that which is useful, that which can be understood and applied. For this image represents Wisdom, that hard-earned coin of enlightenment. It is not mere reflection either, or imagination. The central figure, often shown as old, either female or male, and with shrewd perspicacity shining in the eyes, actually has come to understand the nature of things, and to do the best with that understanding.

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Of course, I understood early that the Savant doesn't know everything. But the Savant is wise, and has learnt how to understand, how to pursue knowledge, how to use that knowledge - and how not to do (or how to not do) any of these. Sometimes, the relative measures of pursuit of knowledge are interesting to contemplate - in the sciences, knowledge doubles every 4-5 years as measured by publications. But is this any measure of wisdom?

Learn from Kipling, and become wiser...

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.

The rest of the poem is even more instructive in its own way. It's also instructive that the second word of this poem is often misquoted as 'have' or 'know'. It isn't what (or who) you have or know, it's what (or which company) you keep that counts.