Can Holistic Education Exist? (Part 1)

I don't believe in holistic education. It's a sham. Nobody can be educated as a whole while the model of education is still divided into individual processes and disciplines. And I'm not sure you can be said to be educated if the model of education were to be made so transdisciplinary that no individual processes and disciplines existed (except of course the one process called holistic education).

This is probably an unpopular stance. But it is probably a necessary one, given the odd climate of this age. Go to Google. Type define: holistic in the search box. You will quickly begin to grasp why I say an holistic education is not possible.

How can it be that we tout such a thing? To do so would require that our education take into account the whole system that is a human being; we would have to consider the academic, spiritual, social, mental, and emotional aspects of the hologram entity – as one being. And since we cannot even fully understand ONE of these aspects, how can we do this?

The answer: we cannot. We can only pretend to it.

That said, can we aspire to it? We can certainly try. Now that I have brought us all down to earth in this endeavour, let us try to think about what an holistic education could possibly be like.

Firstly, it isn't about mens sana in corpore sano, that old Latin mantra of the dualistic mind/body idea. If it is genuinely holistic, we have to treat the mind and body and spirit as one. Each student should have a special diet of food and drink and exercise that caters to the needs of intellectual and spiritual activity. Prayer and fasting, alternating and interwoven spiritual and mental exercises, these should be the framework of activity. Example: you eat chocolate, you should taste it and consider the spiritual consequences of the act, and how it raises your game and your understanding of economics – and then you dance, you sing, you exude the act which is chocolate-eating. And it is both worship and study, at once.

Secondly, it cannot be a school in which the disciplines are ring-fenced from each other. The subjects must be allowed to percolate, to merge, submerge, and re-emerge. And through it all, for each student, fluctuat nec mergitur – the changing tides do not drown the consciousness, but enhance it. Perception sharpens and zooms out to dimness; the universe is one, and yet the eye sees a particular detail. Learning meanders through the broad lands of the dominion of mind, and as the starter's gun fires, the athlete's spirit burns. This sprint could be metaphor, could be act, could be valour of mind and body and spirit all in one. And as the tape is breasted at the 100m mark, the physics tutorial is over.

Thirdly, the process must constantly seek to offer physical, social, spiritual, mental, and emotional growth to the student. This five-fold model was one the religious taught me fifteen years ago, when I was learning from them how to use my gifts. You cannot develop the mental without considering its impact on the spiritual, the light is casts on emotion and society and the habits of the body; and that is but one interpretation of how all five might work together.

And lastly, the teacher must constantly work at all five aspects too. The teacher mirrors the student, offers an ideal; the student shows the teacher that the teacher has more to learn. Two mirrors opposing each other into infinity, leading to greater and deeper reflections. At the end and at the beginning is God, who knows how much we do not see.

Can we try to make this happen? I fear it. I fear that the wisdom of man is not sufficient and that it leads to despair. And yet, I do not fear at all. We will never achieve holistic education in the world of men. But the Spirit enfolds us in bright wings, leading us to take on more of the image of Christ, to the glory of God the Father. And then, we shall be whole.

Antiholics Anonymous

I think it is amusing that one great source of hits upon this blog is the question, "What is the opposite of holistic education?" I don't think I quite intended that. The problem is that I did intend to point out the flaws in the concept, and perhaps I have done too well in that regard.

So here I must set the record somewhat straighter: I think that holistic education is a wonderful ideal; but, like the idea of the 'reasonable person' or the 'economically rational person', it is an impossibility which is to be hoped for but never realised. Nobody will ever receive an holistic education; nobody should (if they want to be honest) claim to deliver such a thing.

Furthermore, I will lay down a challenge: define 'holistic' and then prove that you have delivered an holistic education to any particular person using specifically described means and methods. If you can do so, I will recant and become a crusader for your brand of holistic education.

Please note that you should give a complete description of the process, including modules like 'standing in the rain to build character' if you have such advanced ideas in your armamentarium. I will gladly disabuse you of such fantasies if I can.

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Note: This seems to be the first use of 'antiholic' in the sense of 'opposed to the idea or acceptance of holism or things said to be holistic' anywhere on the web. It's a true neologism, and one that works. The word has been used before as a sort of contraction of 'anti-alcoholic', either as a substitute for 'teetotal'/'teetotaller' or for 'anti-alcohol crusader' — but that's not an obvious usage nor one that makes sense etymologically.

Departmentalism

It is a sad but enduring truth that sometimes some people think of a concept and then espouse it without considering the concomitant problems. One of those concepts is holism, or an holistic education (which is one of the many kinds of holism on sale these days).

In several of my previous posts, I have pointed out the shortcomings and difficulties of current 'holistic' thinking in education. Now, I am going to take a different tack. Let's consider things which are manifestly not holistic.

The first candidate is obvious. It is compartmentalism. If you can segregate or ring-fence anything within an educational system or programme, then by definition, the resultant structure is no longer holistic. For example, if you say that student discipline will be run independent of student academic achievement (whether explicitly or implicitly), then you are denying the holistic. Of course it is possible to claim till your face is purple that by putting discipline and achievement together – in the same forum, boat or igloo – that you are conducting holistic education. You would be wrong, since having two peas in a pod does not make a single bean out of them.

The second (and often more insidious, stubborn and recalcitrant) is not so obvious. It is departmentalism, that modern bureaucratic descendant of feudalism. In departmentalism, it is often assumed that a school needs to be separated into independent fiefdoms (oops, I mean departments) in order to function like a school. It is also assumed that if you get the department chairs in the same room for a few hours (in what is called a school steering committee meeting, or the equivalent), you will get a miraculously holistic transdisciplinary outcome.

Well, you won't. This would be like putting different flavours of jelly beans in one bag, shaking the lot up, wagging your finger at them and saying, "Play nice, now!" and then expecting them to become a single large lump of jelly which evokes all the possible separate flavours while not being completely indigestible.

But the skeptical administrator will argue (and rightly so, in a sense) that there is no alternative to departmentalism. Fine. Then you can have two possible types of responses. The first response to this is, "Since there's no alternative to departmentalism, there is no possibility of holism." The second response to this is, "There are a few alternatives. Here are some."

Alternatives to departmentalism? Really? Well, yes. They might not be very good, but they are decent alternatives.

There's the concept of holistic units. In some large schools, small consortia are formed, comprising teachers who together offer all the necessary subjects for an all-round education. Each consortium holds to its own philosophy while seeking to fulfill the overall mission of the school. The idea is akin to that of combined-arms assault teams. A team that combines counselling, discipline, academic, service, sports and dietary elements (among others) in a single seamless programme would be delivering one variety of holistic education. In a small enough school, this approach would include all members of the school.

There's the concept of interdisciplinary units. Immediately, you might say that this is obviously not an holistic approach. Hmmm, maybe not. But it can be brought quite close. For example, consider a team of teachers, each offering a discrete area of interest, subject, approach or course. Then think of them working together flexibly to deliver a combined programme in which they actively worked to reinforce and support each other while retaining their own perspectives and biases. In a sports analogy, this would be a lot like basketball rather than American football – you don't have special teams, but you do have players with specific functions and you can rotate elements around for different team purposes.

There's the concept of knowledge webs. A clever 'spider' can spin connections between all the separate nodes in such a system. You could still have discrete areas, but the 'strand coordinator' is an agent who has enough of an holistic perspective that she (women tend to see more holistically) or he can tweak them until they appear to flow freely across the old functional boundaries.

Now here's a last point. 'Departmentalism' doesn't mean 'departments'. In reality, you might still need departments of some sort, just to reassure the masses and to handle some admin functions. The point is that you cannot make department chairs the cornerstones of the admin system. You need deputy principals or strand coordinators or programme coordinators with the genuine ability to think across disciplines and help weave them together into a functional whole.

Life is messy, sometimes miasmic. Nothing in reality can be easily shoved into a departmental box or a box labelled 'Discipline H'. At the very least we owe it to learners to give them an educational experience that, even if it does consist of discrete elements, includes pointers towards ways of combining them into holistic approaches for handling all their later life.

Can Holistic Education Exist? (Part 2)

I'm not a very theological person, or a very philosophical one. But I do believe in the relative sanctity of language - the idea that words are meant to describe and detail things to some degree of precision and accuracy. This means that while common usage can shift meaning over time, the time period is normally a fairly long one. Words in general keep their meanings within a time-scale sufficient for one generation to (just about) communicate with the previous or the next.

For technical language, this span has to be a little longer, so that the discourse can extend back and forth through time in such a way that the foundations of a discipline can still be seen (or at least, alluded to reasonably). In this context, 'span' refers not only to a range within time, but also to connectivity (as in a bridge or a tapestry).

And here is Exhibit One: the word 'holistic'. Holism is a property possessed by things which are complete in themselves, and which if decomposed to their elements, would be of less value than the sum of those elements. The kind of value is not the point, although it helps to know what it is. The point is that the whole before decomposition was more valuable to the person doing the evaluation.

Take, for example, a marble bust and the bucket of tiny marble pieces resulting from demolition of that marble bust. To an evaluator who uses an aesthetic baseline, the whole bust has incalculably more value than the marble gravel. To a chemist looking for a source of granular crystalline calcium carbonate, the marble pieces may have more value in a catalytic or kinetic sense (although the mass of substance is the same). The hologram version (i.e., the bust), however, can be thought of as having less entropy. It took effort to get the marble to look exactly like the man whose head it represented. That effort gave the bust a value which is now lost. The chemist can use any other marble source; he need not use the bust.

The same thing applies to a cake, a book, a car – any whole that is made from smaller components which do not spontaneously combine, and which requires an ordering anti-entropic process to produce. The problem lies in the reverse process, from the information-deficient raw materials (materials which do not themselves contain a plan for further development) to the information-rich product (a product which was made through a process that required information). The problem is that when we have unformed substance (or uninformed substance), we do not definitely know what the final form should be, can be, or ought to be.

This is true of people who are being educated. Educaré is Latin for 'drawing-out', as wire is drawn out (whence 'ductility') from raw metal. But what do we want to draw out? The raw material itself offers no clue, and wire without form is merely wire. Of course, wire can have uses in itself, but it can also be made into much more valuable products through progressively more complex processing sequences. An holistic education would be one which could take into account the end-product. And that is something the wire does not define.

So is it all lost? Is an holistic education genuinely beyond us? It all depends. As a Christian, I'd defer to something along these lines. If there is a divine purpose, then that must inform us as to what we must be 'drawn out' to be. An holistic education in a Christian mission school must therefore be based solidly on at least this much.

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.

Apocalypse When?

It's amazing what kind of documents I find cluttering my hard drive. I was searching for documents on education when I came across this stubby little piece which doesn't seem connected to anything else. I'm not even sure how complete it is, or what its provenance is. But some of the ideas in it are quite interesting.

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Apocalypse

Towards the end of the 20th, and in the early years of the 21st century, a confluence of mathematics, the natural sciences and the social sciences began streaming towards a post-modern form of apocalypse. Of course, being post-modern, the apocalypse (‘unveiling’ in classical Greek) took the form of a growing intimation that the end of history was at end, and that after this glorious moment of our times would come chaos and then the fall of night.

The architects of this world view were a curious mixture of mostly French and American intellectuals, who though hailing from related intellectual traditions, tended towards opposite trends in terms of optimism and pessimism – the French were typically negative about finding meaning in the various disciplines, while the Americans were typically positive about finding the ultimate underpinnings of the universe.

These proponents of potential disaster and the end of things thus included thinkers such as the French topologist Rene Thom (catastrophe theory), American social philosopher Francis Fukuyama (‘the End of History’), [long list of contributors in fields as diverse as metaphysics, biology, semantics… ] Their conclusions included both the utopian idea that the world would slowly converge towards the adoption of universal standards of political and financial governance (thus putting an end to social change and hence ‘history’), and the dystopian idea that the exploding complexity of the human world would in the end make it impossible to stave off some form of anthropogenic calamity – microbiological, ecological, or radiological in nature.

The fact that two so very different ‘endings’ could be postulated, and yet still not exclude each other, was a pointer towards one main theme. The theme which heralded the start of the new millennium was ‘complexity’. From the newly rejuvenated biological disciplines came the realization that the mathematical concept of sudden escalation into chaos could be used to describe populations of living things. It was a short step to link this to the old maxim, “Change is the only constant.”

From catastrophe and cessation to chaos and complexity was perhaps a journey only the intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals could appreciate. But what did the rise of an increasingly global economy and the ascendance of multipolarity in all spheres of human achievement mean to the man in the street? It meant change, and with it, confusion.

While the intellectuals were having their fun and games, unlikely opposition arose in the form of Al-Qaeda and the 2002 airborne destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City. It became clear that Fukuyama’s romantic ‘end of history’ was to be delayed by the resurgence of tribal enmities, and that the new millennium would turn out to be more fractious than hitherto expected.

Even before this tragic incident, it was by no means certain that any form of global homogeneity would develop. The collapse of financial markets throughout booming Asia in 2001 sent a strong signal that too rapid a rush towards a truly global economy would require a lot more than unfettered multilateral trade.

Politics, economics… even the sciences were not immune. Luddites in Europe fought against genetically modified crops while Americans panicked over misplaced ex-Soviet nuclear devices. If anything, the new millennium looked set to be an even more bewildering kaleidoscope of viewpoints and ideas than the previous one.

Yet, there were voices of sanity. Managing change became a hot topic as the social sciences decided that the unpredictable and inevitable could be surmounted by cultural flexibility and organic structures. In the field of education, experts like Gardner, Fullan [another long list] pointed out that humans were adaptable creatures, and that given an appropriate education, would survive and thrive even in a world like this.

Asia found its voice in the most unlikely of places. Singapore’s then-Prime Minister Goh said at the 7th International Conference on Thinking: “We have to prepare ourselves for a bracing future - a future of intense competition and shifting competitive advantages, a future where technologies and concepts are replaced at an increasing pace, and a future of changing values. Education and training are central to how nations will fare in this future. Strong nations and strong communities will distinguish themselves from the rest by how well their people learn and adapt to change.”

Japan’s ex-Prime Minster Nakasone weighed in with, “The era will be a composite of globalism and nationalism. Our task at this turning point is, therefore, to think about education, culture and science with this future in mind." And in Singapore, long-used to being at the mercy of the larger world, people began to find answers to UN Ambassador Mahbubani’s question, “Can Asians think?”

It has always been a tenet of the Singapore Education System (SES) that human resources, being the only major resource of the country, should be developed to their highest economic potential. As the SES evolved, the measure of economic potential also changed – and this was reflected in the desired outcomes of education. In the initial years, national survival meant mass technical and scientific education, with an emphasis on literally nation-building skills such as engineering. As Singapore became a more established nation in the late 1970s and 1980s, special programmes to harness talent began to appear: junior colleges, humanities scholarships, a gifted education programme.

But this emphasis on hothousing the academic side of the intellect began to shift in the 1990s. The question of “Can Asians think?” was directed at functional thinking for the post-modern future – thinking which could chart a course through an age of complexity, or find new solutions to new problems. This kind of thinking was not exactly prevalent in the SES.

It had become apparent that the eight nominally-independent schools approved by Singapore’s Ministry of Education (MOE) were being innovative, but perhaps insufficiently so [several research references], with one or two leading the pack and some almost indistinguishable from the non-independent schools. Re-enter the Ministry with a brand new scheme. In December 2002, the MOE approved the setting up of Integrated Programmes in four schools: “The introduction of Integrated Programmes will increase diversity and add choice to Singapore's education system. The Integrated Programme, which allows secondary students to proceed to Junior College without taking the 'O' levels, caters to those who can benefit from a less structured Upper Secondary / Junior College programme. The hallmark of the Integrated Programmes should be innovation and the provision of a holistic education.”

It was as if innovation and a holistic education had never existed in Singapore. With one statement, the Emperor had been shown not to have any clothes. Or was this really the case? This study seeks to examine the background to, and the implementation of the Integrated Programmes in the context of their times. The following questions arise at this point:

1. Is the concept of Integrated Programmes an appropriate and well-conceived educational response to the global sociopolitical situation of the early 21st century?


2. How have these programmes been implemented in schools, and what distinct functional and philosophical differences are there in each implementation?


3. What modifications and innovations in school structural and organizational models have been necessitated by these implementations?


4. To what extent have these implementation models met with, or are likely to meet with, actual or predicted success?


5. What are the likely national outcomes of these programmes and their probable effect on the future of education in Singapore?

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Such interesting stuff. I have been unable to elicit further information about the piece, or to find any sequelae. What a pity.

The Core of Education

Over the last few years, I've been exposed to many education debates. These debates have been about whether 'holistic education' is a viable educational concept, what an education ought to consist of, how educational results should be interpreted, how educational reform should be carried out and what its objectives should be, and many other related matters.

I've mentioned a lot of these matters on this blog. Some of them have exercised me more than others, and some have infuriated me or amused me more than others. But I think that there are still some basic questions that all educators should think about before they debate the more specific issues.

For me, the basic questions are: "Who do we educate?", "To what end(s)?", "With what curriculum?" Questions that are also very important but not so basic are: "In what way?", "Developing what skills?", "How do we evaluate success?" and "Where are the material resources?"

We educate students. This means we need to know what the range of human ability is, and how such ability is developed. Lots of new disciplines have developed in the 1990s and 2000s. We now know more about how the brain works, and how flexible it is in achieving goals, for example. We know it adapts dynamically in many ways.

The ends of education are almost always rooted in usefulness to society. In a fishing village, catching fish for survival and trade is a main objective. For our society, we should think carefully about what ends serve it best. We can't just say, 'Everything!'

The curriculum must be carefully constructed. You can teach skills like chewing, but without food, this skill is a lot less useful. It follows that skills are less important than context, ability and content — because of the adaptability of the brain. Learning to read, for example, is different for many people; there is no one specific technique. What's important is that there is something to read, and that there is a lot of it. Preferably, what there is to read will be useful in attaining other objectives.

Once we know who we're educating, why we are doing it, and along what lines, then only should we think about whether we can evaluate success. Logically, given sufficient education, students should be able, at some point, to continue their own education on whatever foundations have been built. They should also be able to do the equivalent of catching fish in a fishing village context.

As for material resources, it's surprising how much you can do with limited resources. Isaac Newton's work on light, gravity and calculus (among many other things) did not have the benefit of the more than 300 years of technology accumulated since his time; yet, we still study a lot of it.

A few years back, I posted some thoughts on an ideal education. Since then, I've thought a lot more, but not deviated significantly from those ideas. (Well, actually there is one deviation: I no longer think that all educational outcomes necessarily imply the presence of an education that is designed to produce those specific outcomes. It's a bit like thinking about intelligent beings, realising that 'intelligent' is a self-bestowed term, and that it doesn't necessarily indicate an intelligent designer. Haha.)

The bottom-line has to be increased functionality. We teach reading because we converted spoken language to symbols millennia ago, and the main method of effective persistent communication between humans relies on decoding those symbols. It's dysfunctional to be illiterate or sub-literate in this human context. But teaching something like chemistry is a lot less generally applicable, although it may be a lot more powerful for those who will be using it for something specific.

What we need, therefore, is reading material that will challenge the student's ability to decode symbols and derive meaning in as lossless a way as possible. Finnegan's Wake might be too extreme, but a fairly high standard of competence in at least one language should be developed.

The next stage is the ability to compose using these symbols, in such a way that effective communication is achieved. This is attained when a majority of people reading your stuff can understand it or at least decode it enough to see what you intend to communicate. The closer they get to your intended message, the better you are. After that, of course, you can write for elegance and beauty and stuff like that; it's just like building a house — walls and roof first, other stuff later.

Looking back at 2007 and the young people I taught in that bygone era, I realise that they were already good. What on earth were we teaching them, then? If the bottom-line was increased functionality, did we give them that? Or were the examinations just a way to rubber-stamp existing proficiency? Questions, questions...

Subcompetence and Splinter Cultures

The last few days have been days in which I've managed to catch up with old friends as well as young friends. I've also managed to make ends meet by sitting around at the local Starbucks and dispensing advice for a fee. This has not been easy, since I am normally pretty serious about the advice I dispense, and I try my best to give useful material.

But in between sessions of advice-dispensing and consequent fee-taking, I found myself musing on two tangentially related themes. Subcompetence is one; the Dicksonian idea of 'splinter cultures' is the other.

Subcompetence is an interesting word; it is related to both 'competition' and 'competence' through the common Latin origin competere, which means 'to strive together (towards a common goal)'. When one says a person is 'competent', we mean that his faculties are coherently focussed when he undertakes a specific task. Nowadays, it also implies that he is able to carry out that task, whatever it is. The odd thing of course is that modern competition is far from a common striving; perhaps it is antagonistic striving towards the same prize, which only one competitor can win.

But what is subcompetence? It is the state of being just about unable to complete or excel in one's chosen task, or the task one has been given. I was thinking about it because there are a whole bunch of people out there who have seemingly been dragooned into teaching a subject that none of them is fit to teach (as far as the evidence seems to show). They all come from one discipline, in which it is possible to believe they are competent, and inflict themselves (or are inflicted) upon innocent students who find that they have not learnt very much from the experience.

How do I know this? I know this because whenever I ask the students why they don't seem to have learnt the right stuff, they keep referring to the same people. And these people all have at least one thing in common.

It put me in mind of the Splinter Cultures first described by Gordon Dickson in his Childe Cycle, beginning with 'The Tactics of Mistake'. In that sequence, humanity forms highly specialised cultures which farm out their skills with varying degrees of success. Since specialists are paid so much more than general 'baseline' humans, the market drives ever more specialised culturalisation. Eventually, the cycle shows that this results in peculiar dysfunctions, as the specialists prove incapable of holistic synthesis (or anything remotely similar).

When faced with a subject like 'Theory of Knowledge', which by its nature requires the ability to roam back and forth comfortably across the world of all the disciplines and areas of knowledge, people with a highly specialised training tend to fail. They can only see things from their specialist perspective, which makes their ability to educate others somewhat lacking.

The whole thing leads to one thought. If you claim you are going to try to provide (or worse, that you DO provide) an holistic education, you cannot afford to dispense with a) skilled generalists, b) structures that bring specialists together in common endeavours of cross-disciplinary learning. If you make such an error, you might possibly still claim multidisciplinarity, but you certainly will not be able to provide an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary education. And once you go there, there is no way you can even claim an holistic perspective or pretensions to providing an holistic education.

Holistic Delusion

All I can say about those holistic-education evangelists out there is that you must all be wrong in the head. There is no such thing. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. There is an ideal called 'holistic education', but the thing itself, in an actual and realised way, does not exist.

You have only to look at simpler constructs like Howard Gardner's 'Multiple Intelligences' scam. First he says there are five. Then seven. Then eight and a half. And so on. Meanwhile, he sells millions of books, and people run around designing curriculum and games and toys based on 'multiple intelligences'. Well, it's not a position he found tenable, and anyone worth his salt should have seen it.

Each brain is unique. You can reify and classify, analyse and debate all the possible outcomes of what the brain does (whether it's cognition, ideation, imagination, whatever). All you get is convenient categories. Some are too broad to be of use; some are too narrow to be useful. And any kind of categorisation militates against the ideal of holism, since such things argue that the brain can be splintered into orthogonal fragments of function and behaviour.

Sooner or later, the marketization of education will result in all kinds of educational con-men running rampant while they consume the diminishing supply of taxpayers' money. It has happened before and will happen again. No one person will be able to say, "Après moi, le déluge," because le déluge has already descended.

Children's Day

You know, the problem with my research is that the more I dig, the more like a graveyard it looks. I feel that I'm some sort of archaeologist of the educational past – a palaeoeducationist (see note 2 below), if you like. But the evidence is all in the bones, buried long ago. Sometimes you dig into the ground and you think you've found a midden. But sometimes, you realise the bones don't indicate food or cooking or waste dumps. You realise it's a cemetery.

I'm beginning to think that in Singapore's necessary haste to get education up to a high standard quickly, the country has overprimed the shotgun. When the 'O'-Levels were selected to be Singapore's basic level of educational qualification, nobody told the people that this was an examination for the top 20% of the UK population (1). Nobody pointed out that this was designed for a five-year secondary education course. And since the general population didn't know this, everyone prepared to do it in four years and many did very well. The Primary School Leaving Examination, that other pillar of the system, was designed (and probably still is) to be tough enough to eliminate 20% of all students. It was set at a level known to allow only 80% to pass (2).

All this added up to educational pressure beyond conventional belief. But there was another consequence. Since Singapore now had near-universal high-stakes education, the situation became one in which everyone was competitive. Since everyone was a viable high-stakes competitor, and this was the basis of the meritocratic society, the only way to climb to the top was to be significantly more competitive. Which meant that the schools were not considered excellent unless they provided a lot of 'extras'.

That in turn set the school system up for serious re-engineering difficulties. Niche programmes, holistic education, multiple intelligences, ability-driven education – all of which contradict each other philosophically – were used to 'sell' schools to the masses. The shadow education sector bloomed, since private tuition was now the main area in which cash-rich families could stamp their superiority. And that is where we are today.

Happy Children's Day! And God bless each and every one of you!

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Notes:

1. Citations are all from Tan, Chow & Goh (2008), Examinations in Singapore – Change and Continuity (1891-2007), World Scientific Publishing (ISBN: 978-981-279-313-0). (1) is from page 66 and (2) is from page 75.

2. I suppose I should point out that 'palaeoeducationist' is a bastardised Graeco-Roman hybrid. My bad. It should be 'palaeopedagogist' in order to be properly Greek. 'Pedagogy' of course comes from the Greek words meaning 'leadership of children'. It is interesting to contrast that with 'education', which means 'drawing-out'.

Integrity

A careful look at the dominant education system shows that it lacks various kinds of integrity. By integrity, we mean a quality of consistency with a) qualified standards, b) rational thought, and c) overarching philosophy. Simply put, I am saying that the education system I am examining appears to contradict itself frequently, and fails to deploy consistent assumptions.

Let's take a simple pair of ideas. Firstly, consider the stated idea of an ability-driven education. This is taken to mean that education should be supplied based on the kind and amount of ability a student is somehow determined to have; i.e. the student's qualities determine the education given. Secondly, consider the stated idea of an holistic education. This is taken to mean that a student should be educated across a broad spectrum regardless of a student's preferences or abilities.

This pair of ideas is sold as a linked couplet. Do you think this shows a consistent philosophy?

Let's take another pair of ideas. Firstly, from observation, promotion to the post of principal must come before the age of about 45, or else I suppose that the so-called 'current estimated potential' (which is actually not current and badly estimated) is considered unfulfilled and the officer is a failure. Secondly, a man can be promoted to extremely high office at an age way beyond 60 and receive a huge salary increase, thus inviting speculation that a sudden store of potential has been unlocked.

Plato, of course, does say that philosopher-kings shouldn't begin to deploy their talents till 50, but what can you say about consistency? A famous local philosopher has a detailed exposé of this policy for those of you who still want to work here.

I could go on. I've seen people without proper qualifications for a post suddenly become heads of departments; I've seen people who would fail communications tests through irrelevance, inaccuracy or incompetence suddenly become senior management. The fact is that rapid expansion has one drawback, just as on the battlefield: a lack of qualified manpower that creates a vacuum and some serious vulnerabilities in the rear. This is what happens when 'estimated potential' is equated with 'relevant ability'.

As a whole, the system contains a mish-mash of conflicting, contradictory and sometimes antagonistic policies, papered over and blended with an emulsion of glossy rhetoric and extensive public communications. This is not to say that it is altogether bad; rather, it should be recognised that the compromises that have had to be made have given rise to philosophical and directional inconsistencies. Only when we decide to look at such problems will we begin to reduce the cognitive inefficiencies despite which we have come so far and so quickly.

The One-Bookie Leader (Part II): Timing the Tables

It is a fascinating thing to be watching the Monobibliarch (or 'One-Bookie Leader) in action. This is because most of us seldom see a reasonably bright person enslaved totally by dedication to slogans and quick-fix pseudointellectual writings. In my previous post, I mentioned some signs by which you can tell if you are watching an OBL in action.

Here is one obvious corollary sign: the Monobibliarch cannot see when his thoughts contradict other thoughts in his head, since he has by nature a one-track mind. Quite often, when presented with a multifaceted situation, he can only grasp it when it is reduced to a single idea (e.g. 'make more money', or 'assign more periods', or 'holistic education'). I present to you a couple of tableaux from my extensive past experience with such a person.

Situation 1: OBL says, "I want you to make sure that there is a gap of at least two days between PE lessons for each class. Should be no problem, since we have five days to work with, right?" Of course there was no problem, so a beautiful timetable was created. Then I get summoned downstairs. "Why are all PE teachers free on Wednesday?" Well, I must admit I was totally flabbergasted by that question. So flabbergasted that I actually replied (probably a mistake), "Errm, if you have PE lessons on Wednesday, then you can't have any more PE lessons for those classes except on Sunday and/or Saturday." Dead silence. You could see the gears whirring and getting stuck.

Situation 2: OBL says, "Make sure that every department gets as many lessons as they want. Every student should have one break a day, normally recess is at 10 am." Some computational exertion later, every student group has a break. The problem is that some groups have days that start at 7.30 am and go on to 4.40 pm. And they only have ONE break around 10 am... OBL's solution is, "Make the day longer so we can squeeze in another break somewhere." Haha, I remember increasing the length of the day several times. I still have the statistics and data to prove it. I am pretty sure nobody needed so many hours of lessons (and sometimes, non-lessons).

The problem of course is that things like integrated programmes (and real attempts at holistic education) cannot be simplified to a single line without looking rather threadbare and awkward. It's like those people who say, "God is love," and stop there without anything else. The worst part is that things like OBLs can't see it and get rather upset if you imply they are not seeing something. That does lead to the idea that you can detect an OBL by his aversion to chess (or his inability to play it). He will stick to one line regardless of consequences, then switch to another and forget the first altogether.

Responses 010 (2010-2011)

Making ten long responses to ten shorter stems is not a new thing; Moses did it by putting ten commandments in Exodus 20 and then explicating them in Exodus 21-23. (Yes, you can't understand the Ten Commandments unless you realise that they're the executive summary of the next three chapters.)

Well, this is the tenth response to a list of ten questions that I first posted on 17 October. (I'll give a link-list at the end just to be helpful.) Question 10 in the list says, "A model is a simplified representation of some aspect of the world. In what ways may models help or hinder the search for knowledge?"

This is in many ways my favourite question. It's quite clear that by 'simplified' and 'representation', you should already know where the question might lead. There are two main points: a model is designed to simplify things, therefore making it easier to grasp the main points and understand something; a model is a representation, a sort of working miniature of something.

What then are the ways that a model can help or hinder the search for knowledge? (I'll note here that the phrase 'search for knowledge' also occurs in Questions 2 and 7, which is an unusual repetition and can be useful.)

You can analyse this in terms of a) simplicity and its pros and cons, and b) representations and their pros and cons. Let's look at simplicity first, and then representations.

Simplicity is of course a great tool for analysis; the reductio arguments are almost always helpful in cutting away the deadwood. However, oversimplification is a problem. This can occur in two ways: a) elimination of too much, thus making the model lose its power as a representation; and b) reification (or conflation), in which we take many elements of a model and reduce them to one. Examples: a) modeling the human brain as a digital computer of great complexity — which won't capture the various gradient effects of the human nervous system and its chemical environment; b) the infamous IQ model which reduces human intelligence to a single score, despite the fact that intelligence varies by environmental context, can be defined in many ways, and has never been proven to be a survival trait (haha, let us pause here in memory of Arthur C Clarke).

Representations range, of course, from symbols to icons to pictures and so on, scaling upwards. Representations are useful the way that substituting a simpler term for a more complex one can be useful; they are more portable and easier to manipulate. But in this case, we're talking about representations of aspects of the world. The problem in any discipline is whether the representation is valid; that is, does this scaled-down description of the world behave the way the real world should? You may also have the problems of transferability (can you use the model to represent other, similar things?) or reproducibility (can you transplant the model and have it work somewhere else). Representations are also problematic in that when you work with a representation, you may come to believe that it is the real thing; it's like mistaking a glossy brochure about holistic education for the actual attempt to provide an holistic education.

Obviously, there are many more problems and advantages to talk about, but this should provide a good start. Just remember that in science, for example, Ockham's Razor is often taken to be a necessity (the 'principle of parsimony') but there is no logical reason to think that this is true. Justifiable reduction and unjustifiable simplification are very, very close neighbours.

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Here's a list of links:

Question List for 2010-2011

Response to Question 1
Response to Question 2
Response to Question 3
Response to Question 4
Response to Question 5
Response to Question 6
Response to Question 7
Response to Question 8
Response to Question 9

You might also want to check the tags below, and any other tags which the linked posts might have in addition to these.

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Note: To all IBDP students who wish to borrow any text from my blog, do make appropriate citations in your essays. People keep Googling lines that are obviously taken from this blog and that might mean some of you are already getting into trouble. I had a few Turnitin hits too!

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.

Sooo... What Makes a Good School?

Let's just look at the question in terms of how a school is run, and not in the complex cultural terms that would entail a look at the roles of tradition, alumni, mission, philosophy, and other social dynamics that are often linked with a long history.

David Tyack in his landmark work The One Best System (Harvard University, 1974) cautioned us against looking for a magic formula that would apply to all schools. His survey covered the entire history of urban education in the US, and showed both the successes and failures of the various systems that the 'US education system' really was.

Much more recently, a consortium (Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu & Easton) has come out with Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons From Chicago (University of Chicago, 2010), an interesting look at the Chicagoan educational landscape of about 500 schools from 1990 to 2005. They've identified five main points which lead to the success of urban schools (at least in Chicago):

1. Strong leadership, in the sense that principals are “strategic, focused on instruction, and inclusive of others in their work”;
2. A welcoming attitude toward parents, and formation of connections with the community;
3. Development of professional capacity, which refers to the quality of the teaching staff, teachers’ belief that schools can change, and participation in good professional development and collaborative work;
4. A learning climate that is safe, welcoming, stimulating, and nurturing to all students; and
5. Strong instructional guidance and materials.

I think my immediate response (quite apart from the 'ah, another elite US university study that the innocent will think applies to urban centres worldwide' response) was that I didn't see anything new in this piece of work. Indeed, Education Week seems to say (subscription required) that what makes this book different is the level of detail and the amount of data collected.

How disappointing. But then again, what else could be expected?

There are several things that are missing from this list. Here's an example: controlling your intake. In these days of political correctness, the idea of elitism is a no-no. But let's face it, if you had some sort of meritocratic basis for selection, you could have nothing but students who are above-average in producing results. Then you would have a successful urban school. And if you have students who are good at it, a principal can pay less attention to those aspects they are good at and develop other aspects, thus enabling his school to tack on the 'holistic education' label which I find so reprehensible.

But just like any other post-colonial output (by which I mean that which is put out after the colon does its job), your intake is the key to the fragrance of success. Control that, and you will be able to produce good regular output. It will be a programme that is breath-taking in its simplicity, smooth in its processes, consistent (also coherent and cohesive) in its product quality. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Well, that was the gratuitous post-colonial joke out of the way. But seriously, there is nothing new at all in this latest book. It's probably an excellent piece of research that tells us a lot about Chicagoan elementary schools, but it tells us nothing that we have not already learnt about schools in general. And as usual, it leaves the special development of lead teaching staff who are also administrators to the realm of the implicit.

Almost every piece on school success talks about principals and teachers. The point is that in most schools, there are at least two extra layers: between the principal and the teachers, the senior teaching staff who are also educational leaders and who actually are directly responsible for large chunks of the five factors mentioned; and the service staff who support the physical endeavour — janitors, custodians, IT support professionals, the secretariat, PR, HR, finance staff, and so on.

As far as I know, the only paper that talks about the neglected first extra layer is here and I haven't actually found one on the neglected second extra layer. Anybody know where such things might be found?

Public Housing in Atlantis

In Atlantis, there are all kinds of pyramid games. These aren't your usual distributed sales or Ponzi scheme pyramid games, but games that have to do with the distribution of wealth.

I'm a poor boy, and my little apartment in the outskirts of the Swamp was cheap. In fact, I paid for it entirely with the government-backed savings plan. I never touched any of my own liquidity. The price of that apartment has gone up about 70% recently.

Does it mean that people are getting wealthier? No, I'm afraid to think what I think, but I think that it's because the upper middle class are thinking twice about expensive property and are starting to encroach on the cheaper stuff. This is raising the price of the cheaper stuff.

It's the same with education. Education ought to be a public good. But it's become stratified by class to a very measurable extent, both in terms of money as well as in attitudes. It has led to an odd equilibrium similar to that found in schools founded some time in the 19th and early 20th centuries all over the world.

The equilibrium is multipolar. It goes like this. Consider an hypothetical school A.

School A has average teachers but the scions of rich families go there. The senior members of those families sit on the board. They give the school a sense of importance, of national-level destiny. They allow the school to create expensive programmes with (as is the case with many social phenomena) difficult-to-measure outcomes. We don't know if these programmes would work for everyone, or only for the scions of rich families who have too much spare time and energy on their hands.

The 'scion' students in this school would not dream of going to 'real' publicly-funded schools, as you won't find such networks there, or such a brand name. In fact, they look down on other students who do, although they will not admit it (and indeed, it might be subconscious). These scions even look down on students in their own school who haven't the multiple swimming pools, horse-riding lessons, or holiday ranches. However, there is some grudging admiration for brains, since after all this is supposed to be a school.

Actually, most of these scions have been hothoused, so they themselves are pretty smart compared to the national average. And if not. there's always private tuition, paid for at about $150 per hour or more, which is a pittance to their parents (or even, to them). Eventually, none of them actually needs good teachers, and for the price of one good teacher, you can hire maybe two not-so-good teachers. What do you think happens?

Well, as some people once told me, you can get about three new recruits for one 15-year teacher. Quality can be developed and your ROI is better if you invest in new recruits. After all, a good teacher can only be improved a tiny bit, while a new one can be improved by adding rims, spoilers, and a flashy paint job training and development. The absolute quality does not matter. And you can plough the extra cash into aesthetics like pagan statuary.

Eventually, the school is taking in 'students with lives' (as in 'come on, get a life'), who have some brains. You might call their philosophy of education, 'brands and brains'. The school will then label this 'holistic education', since it's quite obvious that these students 'have a life' and 'live it to the full'.

But this is an unfair caricature. Most of the students aren't really like that (although they would be if they could). The school isn't really like that (it could be worse). And the teachers aren't really like that (actually, it's hard to tell what the teachers are like).

And so, the cost of public schooling goes up on the side. Fortunately, public housing and schooling are both reasonably good in Atlantis. But sometimes I think they're a bit too expensive for what they're supposed to deliver.

This thought is a Bad One. It is an Ungrateful Thought. The correct response to such a thought is, "Why are you complaining, after all, your nett value goes up because of all these things, since you are from School A and you also have an apartment that has gone up 70% in value?"

Well, I just hope that people will be able to afford more of the good stuff and that there are more good years ahead for everyone. It's kind of hard to see how this can be when money is buying less and less in terms of real value.

Can Holistic Education Exist? (Part 3)

In my last disquisition on this topic, my conclusion was that perhaps, if you were running a Christian mission school, you would have to look at the Christian doctrine regarding the chief end of man; i.e. what kind of holism man was supposedly created for.

This is probably a rather contentious situation when it comes to the details. I am pretty certain that while Judaeo-Christian institutions have many points of agreement, the points of difference exercise them more. And so, I'm just going to float an hypothetical Christian school's educational credo (yeah, the usual philosophy, vision, mission sequence) and see what people say (if anything).

Please note that what follows is a kind of description of the ethical underpinnings of such an hypothetical community. At some point I suppose I will address the UN Declaration of Human Rights, but not here. And this is certainly not a strategic plan or a detailed workplan. It is only a preamble, if you like, for such things.

Here goes. And I do sincerely hope that readers will comment on how this can be improved, given the premises on which it has been constructed.

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We believe in one God, eternal and almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. We believe that He created the world and its people and cares for them. We believe that the best foundation for a fruitful and satisfying life in human society is having a right relationship with Him. This relationship is exemplified and justified by the life, atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It demands a lifestyle and a value system which is consonant with that demonstrated and elucidated by the Word of God.

In line with our beliefs and values, we see our students as young people who can be developed by inculcating a desire to seek out what is true, right and beautiful, primarily in a Christian sense; and by providing them with an education aimed at this, so that they may serve society well in the latter part of their lives. Our vision therefore is that every one of them will come to show excellence in learning, in leading, and in living.

This vision is empowered by a school philosophy which maintains that it is desirable and possible to develop and implement a programme of education which will meet the needs and interests of every student. Every one of these young people has a God-given potential which can be fulfilled — and everyone who enters the school can manifest success and high achievement in different areas through hard work and a positive attitude.

Our mission must therefore be to...

1. create conditions where all students can exercise their initiative and responsibility to attain excellence;
2. establish an environment where students can hope to develop their potential into concrete achievements, irrespective of their backgrounds and abilities;
3. foster a safe, caring and orderly community for spiritual, intellectual, social, emotional and physical growth;
4. prepare young people to meet the challenge of rapid change in society, in a way that is pleasing to God.

Trenchant

Over the last few months, I've discovered an answer to an interesting question which I first posed in my Master's thesis. When I first posed this question, it was something along the lines of, 'Why do teachers quit?' I was advised that this was not a good title for political reasons, so I changed it to 'Why do teachers stay?' and was told that I was a sarcastic person.

But my findings in that area have not changed significantly since 1997. They still stay or quit for the same reasons. Of all the teachers I interviewed back then, none are the same. They've adopted the various staying strategies I discussed, some to the great detriment of their constituencies, or they've left the trenches for greener pastures.

I was chatting with Gnomus the other night. The man is fulfilled now, kept alive and prospering in a healthy nutrient-stream of talent development and new inputs. He works with colleagues who are professionals, who don't do ethically dubious things, and who are serious about applying research findings to the education of the young. There is no chicanery, there is no deceit justified by some warped idea of religion, no retroactive forgery of documents, no disguising of banal and irrelevant (or crass and commercial) interests under 'staff welfare' or 'holistic education'.

Well, that's one thing that might make a good teacher stay in the system. It almost makes me want to do another tour in the trenches. Heh.

Mission: Implausible

I grew up, as did my ancestors and much of my family, in what some would call a 'mission' school and others might call a 'parochial' school. I used to think (or was brought up to believe) that the 'mission' of such a school would look something like this: "To provide young men an education that will suffice for all their later life, to the glory of God the Father."

I don't mean to say that another mission statement might not serve better, nor that other words might not sound better or be more apt. However, I do think that the kinds of mission statement which educational institutions serve up nowadays are a little flat. They sound more like engineering mottos ('Vorsprung durch technik' comes to mind, from my favourite car marque) or like some secular smorgasbord (see this for an example).

The problem might not be one purely of aesthetics or style or even of content, but of plausibility. Consider this: "Our mission is to provide excellent holistic education through quality human technology in an innovative working environment." It is as if they held a competition to see how many buzzwords they could cram into a single line; you couldn't remove a single phrase without feeling a little less than perfect, it seems to say. But is it a do-able mission? Can it be done?

To assess that, you'd have to define the terms first. And as with so many other buzzword-laden statements, the meaning of the line melts into nothingness when brought under rigorous scrutiny. I thought I might start out by attempting to parse that line, but I find myself bereft of the necessary stamina at this point. Oh well.

At least it is not a motto like that of an ambitious secondary school I once saw. That school had placed on all available surfaces the portentous words 'Who Dares Wins'. That is, of course, the motto of the SAS, those excellent and truly world-class British commandoes. I shudder to think what goes on behind the pristine chain-link fence of that quiet neighbourhood school.

Looking Backwards

Wolff, once a Knight Commander of the Citadel, is looking at a heavy grey book. It is like an iron-bound grimoire of the corrupt; it is a compilation of voices speaking strangely about things humans were never meant to know, a xenoglossic enchiridion.

In that book, the voice of the Grand Inquisitor speaks loudly, through his own mouthings and the words of others suborned to his cause. And he saith, regarding the Citadel of the old days, "Affective education and holistic education were not emphasized in those years."

What a lie, Wolff thinks. The years after the sad departure of the Lord High Chancellor in 1984 were equally sad years, but the spirit of the Citadel never flagged. Indeed, a continuous thread of great truths and grand endeavours runs like a stream of holy fire in a river of multicoloured flame.

Wolff remembers the words of the man who succeeded the Dauntless Hero himself. Those words show the truth:

Some will naturally enquire if our only business is to gain percentages and promote boys in their standards. As well might we say that the erecting of a place of worship and collecting people in it are the chief aim of the Church, yet the building is needful, and the people are essential to the very existence of the Church. We have the boys, and we are attempting to teach them, but we do not forget for a moment that our great object is directly and indirectly to mould their characters and shape their destinies for eternity.

The transition from the office of Lord High Chancellor — a person running the Citadel for the sake of his own divine master, to that of a Grand Inquisitor — a person running the Citadel for other reasons, is clearly an awkward one. It is also not a good one, in the long term — especially if the task at hand is to 'shape their destinies for eternity.' Wolff ponders, as he pondered before he was cast out: Have we lost sight of the goal?