Clarity and Obfuscation.

It is easy to fall into the many cognitive biases and logical fallacies. I am basically accusing everyone of being human. That ape brain survived this long as it is that is not necessarily the way of success in the modern world or in relatively new situations (in human evolution). I am going to walk through two similar stories to set up an analogy. It is so easy to obfuscate on one’s own let alone when many cooks come together to make a broth. I am crying out of the basic step back and think approach as well as a general increase in thinking, hopefully prior to action.

So the first story is going for a long walk. A simple task really, but so easy to ruin. So the first idea is what is the walk for? Lets say to walk to the shops. Then you get a phone call can you go to the other shops instead. These shops are not in the same direction and you have all ready set off so you have to change direction and not by the path from where you started but you have to go a longer way round. This phone call intervention may happen more than once. We’ll keep it simple. So you were prepared for the first walk you wore your normal shoes rather than your walking shoes as it’s a short walk, you are wearing a light coat and have just enough cash for your small shop. Then with the change of shops and altered shopping list you just have enough money and have to walk further over rougher ground, I hope it doesn’t rain! Now it may be that the new route has a closed section that you have to go round or an obstacle you have to climb over, which if you were equipped better to start with would not be a problem at all but now is definitely more difficult. But you still need to get to the shops and back home for the work call later. You then get a call to pick up some things to take home which is basically on the way. Then you meet someone who likes to tell you stuff and how you could go to the shops better if you take another route. As you have an eye on the time you have to be a bit short so that you can get on with the walking and shopping and still get back. The passer by is a little upset with their treatment and goes to another person and tells them how rude you are and how you will not listen to them when it’s just common sense that you should walk differently and go to different shops. Now this person does not know your shopping list or about the phone calls that have changed your goal and route. Of course as you are now unprepared for the walk you have been pulled onto yes you get it it rains! You get wet, your list gets wet and your shopping gets wet. Several people drive pass but cannot stop to help some even your sure pretending not to see you. Finally you make it home tied, stressed and late. You miss the work call and a social call with later repercussions at work and no play. You did not get everything due to the ink running on your list and well you only have two arms. Your family complain you have forgotten things and that you have not made tea. Your boss rings and chastises you for making them look bad. You start to get a reputation for not being very good and having a poor attitude.

The next story is a teaching career. You want and are told that your job will be helping children learn and having a long career working with colleagues and helping children into the adult world. So you train learning about education, how to be effective and how the industry is organised including syllabuses. You get to a school and first you have to adjust to the way the school operates that is different from how your course said it will be. You have to get some children to certain places, grades etc. Then a new government plan is pushed down to the school and others to reorganise areas of school operation it includes changes to syllabuses. Don’t worry it will change again about every 4 or 5 years and other things will change in between. Later you find that there obstacles in your way. You do not have all the resources you should have in spite of your training and the school said would be different. You have to adapt even though you are not prepared for these changes. You are still expected to get the changed targets. You also need to do some extra meetings and duties to do increasing the time needed to get everything done. Then a colleague goes off sick and you keep getting interrupted with problems from the other class. You try to explain the difficulties to your boss and they make some suggestions about how you should be more prepared and have to catch up, in time for the targets that are needed to be met. In meetings you receive complaints that you are not doing things how you should and are not very helpful to others when they need help when they are behind in their work, we are a team after all.

Both stories show a simple task as going to the shops or teaching children can become caught up in a quagmire and the blame falls on the one who has been doing the work and trying under imposed difficulties. The goal posts are constantly moved. Resources are constantly absent, extra tasks are added by others. There are many interruptions and energy sapping situations, people being uncooperative and a lack of empathy to your situation. You get caught out in situations that you are not and cannot be prepared for. You will be criticised by others who overtly and covertly undermine your position.

The secret to achievement is clear goals and preparation. Then work towards the goals within a cooperative team. The good news is the shopping trip is not that realistic!

Too much at one go.

Most people are aware of the clumsiness of large numbers for the human brain. Some people with practice become human calculators, but the demand for the skill is not high. Because hay! I’ve got a calculator for the once a year large calculation I need to do. Some languages have the numbers 1, 2 and many and do not get confused even with many kids. A balance needs to be struck between enough and too many. The human brain starts struggling before double figures picturing amounts by dividing into smaller numbers. The balance also is related to focus. How many things can you focus on at any one time. 3s appear in many cultures and so on up to 10 but the larger, the rarer without writing them down. When you try to think or do too many things the variety is too much to focus on. They then interfere with each other and lower attainment overall.

In physical development endurance training interferes with power development, with the different twitch muscle cells. Sprinting is the opposite to endurance and are mutually exclusive to get both to high levels (so don’t try it). Some tasks require a balance of these and some one or the other extreme. To safely develop balances, a training programme needs to be designed and followed. The big trap when this is not done well is over-training. Trying to develop both at the same time intensely can lead to breakdown and underachievement. Many promising sports people have fallen late on as their bodies pack in just before the goal line. Too much training also eats into rest, where the body recovers and develops. The brain also uses sleep to develop. Some skills also interfere with each other where they are very similar so the body does the wrong skill sometimes. Trying to get the body to do too many different things

To get to higher goals there needs to be times where each element is prioritised at any one time with others in consolidation. Schools need to have this pattern too. Eight subjects at once all needing to peak at the same exam time is too wide for many. Underachievement will occur in students strengths with energy going into the weaker areas. Some subjects are opposite too each other requiring different approaches and others are close together and can interfere with each other. I have noticed whenever I try to learn a new language I can suddenly remember a previous language surprisingly clearly. Focus is important and having to refocus eight different ways every week is another skill, but a challenge to focus only. The long hours cut into sleep along with school times leading to lower brain and body functioning. As the subjects are separate they are disjointed and unconnected. At University we did 4 modules at once and they all had the assignment hand in dates in the same week each time, requiring management of work on assignments. Often the class on the day the assignment was handed in was on the topic of the assignment. If schools do not plan the courses to work together then students will suffer especially for the lesser prepared. These dates are artificial not really important in themselves. When I teach first aid I get to connect the whole syllabus and flow through the topics in a followable order.

The actual achievements in education do reflect work situations where you have to please your superiors when there has been poor preparation and lots of distractions. That is not though how to learn or perform best or highly. It is coping under difficult circumstances. In school if you come from a more stable, focused and supportive home and school environment that is more common with more wealth, then you have advantages of more practice of school required skills and less distractions. In work if you have prepared excuses, someone else to blame, kissed the arse of the boss and flogged a junior to death you also have the advantage. Again this is not high performance it is to learn the lesson of survival in the work environment. Different actual achievements.

In sport it is a different task to get to the top than to stay at the top. Getting through school is different to after school. After school is the real world and preparation for this is a goal of education. Some people are much better prepared than others. This is for school and then real life such as work and financial, but also health and socially. Steadily building foundations for those without home support and private schooling. Where they actually achieve some things well rather than a little bit across the board.

It is again a case of two different classes treated as the same when they are different. Trying to put the different shaped blocks into one hole. Some shapes fit better. Forcing one shape into the wrong shaped hole will damage the shape and the hole. Of course the shape or class of object are the children from poorer disadvantaged lives who are not helped to achieve or to adapt to the unfair advantage of the lucky ones. They do though learn, it’s what they learn is not always what the advantaged want them to learn they learn to survive. This creates problems later with lack or under achievement. The learners are labelled and pigeon holed for the rest of their life. It is a negative experience and interferes with development later limiting possibilities

Fewer but focused, supported and maybe deeper areas would be fairer to the learners and easier to teach and organise. Rugby has a large team of 15 or 13 depending on code, but most coaches and teachers will divide them up into forwards and backs and then again into specific roles. Teaching the whole team is done but most of the time the specific needs of players (and children) require breaking into smaller groups even to pairs and individuals. Schools often have 30+ in a class. Simply the teacher and children are all trying to do the same thing ignoring actual needs and possibilities.

The Truth about Grammar Schools.

The truth is even the right thing can be done so bad it becomes the wrong thing. This is both sides of the argument. Both the for’s and the against’s do their option badly. This comes from making logical fallacies in their reasoning. On the BBC’s More or Less (Radio 4) they did manage to have the statement that Grammar schools get better results for those that attend them. They did manage to hide this point with lots of other failure stats, without reaching the other conclusions (selective) that the stats also suggest. So Grammar schools academically serve those that attend better than a comprehensive system. So an opposite approach to dogma is that comprehensive schools are prejudicial against the better academic students (and also those with better off parents). So for the individual child who qualifies for grammar school they are better off if selection exists. The school would still have to be organised and provide a good environment for the students not just separate them from those with lower academic ability.

The measurements of success and failure are often poor indicators of any substance rather they state the status quo. Exam results are often chosen. Outside education GCSEs and A levels are used because they are what exists not because they say anything substantial. What they say predominantly is the a child with higher results came from a higher socio-economic background. So the big failure of selective education is it selects mostly at 10 years of age where the effects of socio-economic factors have already hidden any potential of those from lower socio-economic backgrounds. So Grammar schools do not provide for academically intelligent children from poorer backgrounds all that well. Another error is to over emphasise GCSE’s and A levels. These quals. are irrelevant apart from gaining entrance into a better College/University, and once they have the degree the previous exam results are irrelevant. The fixed schedule of GCSEs at 16 years is a system need not a child’s educational need. Sticking to the system is because another use of GCSE results is a weapon for others to use as they see fit to keep the schools to account (whose?). The exam results are also quite narrow considering ideas such as multiple intelligences and later life requirements. They measure what can be measured and what some people want measuring. They are an approximation which must be used with care.

The biggest failure of selective education is not the academic high achievers it’s the rest who do not attend. The real failure of the selective system is for those who are not academically gifted and/or those from poorer backgrounds. The weakness of the measure of academic qualifications is the unsuitability outside of the education system and misuse by those who do not understand what they approximate. Using the multiple intelligence's model is correlated with real world tasks and employment. Identifying strengths that are not academic needs to be recognised and understood. Education (monopoly?) serves itself with the pressures upon it. Children with great musical skill (and others) from poorer backgrounds are not served and many poorer background children are disenfranchised where their strengths are not recognised and served. Wider society also (historically (qui bono?)) values academic over other intelligences in spite of needing the different intelligences in different times and places. Measuring people only through academic qualifications and teaching to those qualifications is a false simplification.

The good news for the pro selective education argument is that comprehensive education fails on the same issues and performs lower for those academically able. A pragmatic argument is also who pays the most tax and it’s the higher performing academically who study STEM subjects. These pay the most tax and pay for the rest. By not providing well for these mostly private schools and driven by parents children perhaps it effects the tax receipts in future? The economic principle of feed success and starve failure. Suggests that these people need to be supported for the greater good.

Regardless of selective or not the rest are who are really poorly served by an education system within its society. The bigger question is how to aid children from poorer background especially where parents cannot give the children the support they need for whatever reason. This issue is apparent much earlier than 10 years of age so is irrelevant to the selection argument. Another issue is an education system for the future where it must be better at preparing children for adult life and better at helping children develop personally realising their potential and reducing weaker areas that can cause harm by learning methods that cope with needs or leaving it to people more qualified (that might be a lesson for politicians).

He’s Got Bad Habits He Forgot to Clean His Rabbits.

A recent best seller in ‘The Power of Habit’ Charles Duhigg discusses the power of habits and how to get good habits to help your life. The habits formed and reinforced through education are not particularly covert, abstract or complicated, and yet many bad habits are formed and reinforced mostly by default. To be excellent at anything requires doing important things habitually. Doing things everyday or one particular day a week or month etc. is easier than every 2 or 3 days or when needed. One quote from a top wrestling coach was ‘if it is important do it every day’. If excellence or any high standard is the aim then it is essential to do certain things everyday (good habits) and some things (bad habits) hardly ever if at all. Top level sports people have to work their muscles with good technique of the essential skills practically daily. They also have to develop fitness and mental aspects similarly daily or habitually. Avoiding bad diet, bad technique and distractions is also part of the mix. For a musician the daily practice or any job is the same pattern. Also being a competent, healthy person needs the same pattern if not at the same level as the top performers.

The easiest habits to keep are the ones you start young. This is where education can contribute (but positively please). Getting the learning and the health habits are key. Here a key factor is motivation. The old model comes from the ancient battlefield and royal palaces. Here for an army (could be servants) need to work together doing the right thing at the same time and coordinated between all areas. No army has ever done it perfectly, but like the best music conductors with the best musicians amazing results can be created with this coordinated effort. The famous battles and generals are studied and restudied and occasionally actually learnt from by the later generations of generals. Education is not usually (but there is room for) putting together a group (team or group) for high performance. The first stages are to help the development of good and excellent practitioners. The autocratic approach requires the performers or learners to be motivated mainly by obedience acting on cue or expectation. The traditional method of getting obedience of course was the death of those that failed to conform and perform. This may have been toned down within schools (but yes that’s where the model came from) to increasingly lesser punishments, but without this disciplined action of learners performance suffers. In war the army without discipline often died in or around battle. In the classroom if an autocratic approach is to succeed discipline with fear is essential. Take away the fear of punishment and the performance is reduced.

So the habit of motivated learning and practice is needed where discipline comes internally. This has to be encouraged and nurtured (with progression and development). Many education environments simply ignore and prevent internal motivation. Once these people are not punished at every turn, progress is prevented. Early teaching (and parenting) needs to discover the internal motivation and help with provision and guidance to develop. When a child trusts the abilities and intention of the guider they will listen, cooperate and practice. Guiding the learner to question effectively on learning and competence rather than question authority and disrupting (having seen adults make mistakes and fall back on their status to keep the power position). It is looking back at where behaviours come from. Why are learners in large numbers often distracted, unmotivated, uncooperative and generally non progressive. Here is where ignorance of the learner in large groups magnifies the later difficulties. Early de-motivation has to be recognised and turned round. Developing the good habits is the key. Later it may be one habit at a time but early on it must be just good habits all the time.

The first skill is to risk assess the important things. In life the skills of communication and numbers form the basis of academic learning. Movement, nutrition and sleep form the basis of health. These of course need to be started prior to school age. For instance your taste buds develop before school age and your tastes for either healthy or unhealthy are massively affected before 3 years of age. Choosing good habits in what a learner is motivated in is more important than drilling badly and incompletely a prescribed skill or knowledge. These build up resistance to teachers and parents (who have credibility issues) and create a competitive situation against progress. Now trying to be a perfect parent is a pipe dream (rather a Sisyphus like task) The causes of resistance to progress need to be addressed for a non autocratic approach. Allowing people to profit from resistance building where unhealthy (physical and mental) products and services distract from children’s development. Just as Tobacco companies have been restricted and made to pay (ish) for the damage their products do. Other industries need to pay the price of making their profit (not just financial!) These promote bad habits.

Where some people form groups as the larger community alienates them in a self protection pattern. The same is done for other unhealthy habits that compensate for the lack of provision and acceptance. The ‘bad’ behaviour is a symptom of other behaviour. When you have the power of a king you can use fear to motivate. To encourage rather than force requires early ‘good’ habits. It is always funny when the oldies blame the youth, who do they think the ‘youth’ learnt from?

All the way through education but also the rest of life the good habits need to be encouraged and made easy. Very few work places make healthy habits easy often preventing them and not paying the price of the consequences of bad habits of their workers that they contribute to. Maintaining as well as developing good habits go together.

This is not a new idea religions have been enforcing ritual for thousands of years. Demanding obedience and conformity. Rather than superstition perhaps health and learning could be encouraged as a positive alternative to superstition and bad habits.