I want to assert a principle that seems to govern education ‘reform.’ I will call it the General Incompleteness Theorem (GIT1). It says
Any organization’s proposal for education reform will tend to be incomplete, reductionist or tendentious—possibly all three.
This principle is meant to be not cynical but cautionary: people who keep it in mind when examining reform proposals should be asking themselves
• Where are the unexamined assumptions?
• Where are the untested claims?
• Where are the ignored counterarguments?
• Where are the reductionist ideas?
• Where is the realistic examination of who stands to gain?
• What is the (not-so-)hidden agenda?
• Where are the booby traps and land mines?
This principle sometimes works in destructive tandem with another, which we may call the General Infallibility Theorem (GIT2), which states that
An educational leader or organization never admits errors or mistakes.
Call this terrible tandem GIT2 or GIT Squared.
Some things are pure GIT2.The US Federal education policy is a good example. The US Congress foolishly passed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) by using wishful and magical thinking. When it proved unworkable, the Department of Education granted waivers with the onerous requirement attached that a second program, Race to the Top (RAT), should replace it. Now the mess is in the hands of the states under Every Child Succeeds (ESS) and a badly implemented Common Core. Nowhere in all this capricious presto change-o is any admission that any of it was badly conceived, badly executed, badly monitored, and badly measured. Only mediocre results persist.
Other things dabble a bit in GIT. A paper was published recently suggesting that behavioral science could lower the freshman-year dropout rate at four-year colleges. Now, when I hear behavioral science promoted, I think of a joke about two behaviorists having sexual intercourse. After they finish, one says to the other, ‘You enjoyed that a lot. How did I like it?’
The joke is on behaviorist reductionism, but more seriously, the problem the paper proposes solving[1] can be handled better using another approach, which I have written about. The problem is that doing so would conflict with easy assumptions about what high school and university entail on students and teachers alike.
Let me end with my possibly unique case of an education organization admitting error. It was the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors admitting that they had been wrong to fire the university president and reinstating her. The admission had the effect not just of restoring the president but also of ending an educationist wild goose chase at its outset before it could cause too much damage.
The remedies are humility, good sense, a keen eye for the whole, and a lively realization that education is by and for human beings.