This extended commentary is relevant to the topic of integrating the MMT "currency operations" community, the Deming Foundation "statistical process control" community, and the military Boyd-&-Beyond "OODA-loop" community - to name just a few - with other, like-minded communities inherently interested in systemic tuning. The integration options are not just geographic.
The original version of this particular comment was posted at an investors board regarding student loans. It's an extended topic, and starts with the observation that students are now taking out non-recusable loans to subject themselves to extensions of an already badly broken process.
Original comment left here: Are Student Loans Destroying Consumption?
The roots of this go deep but can be tracked. While working at the NIH campus in Maryland, I joined for 3 years [circa 1993-1996] a volunteer group of PhD scientists who would visit local elementary school districts when requested.
1) It all started when one county school board approached the NIH, wanting to "reinvent" how they taught science education.
2) Out of ~5500 PhD scientists, they were only able to drum up ~50 volunteers. (Even with formal endorsement by the NIH Director! NIH lab chiefs & bureaucrats ridiculed the idea, and made it known that it would NOT help tenure prospects.)
3) None of the other 25 county school boards in Maryland followed suit! (Go figure.)
4) It was an education for most of the scientists, who hadn't been back to an elementary school in ~30 years. WE learned more from the kids & teachers than they learned from us (can tell those stories another time).
5) The most telling response from teachers was "please don't ask us to do one thing MORE!" [They had their curriculum micro-managed down to 15 minute intervals, and were monitored as to whether they were spending all the appropriate minutes on each mandated subject! Consequently, most of it was all theory, and actual "practice" at handling surprises wasn't in the cards (i.e., in the old system, students were actively prevented from ever having to actually THINK! At least one county school system SEEMED to recognize the folly of this approach - but read on.)]
6) 2nd most telling response from experienced teachers was "whenever I want to explain some difficult topic, I dig out one of my hoarded old textbooks from the 1950s - they're way more useful than today's textbooks"
7) The drop out rate for new teachers was abysmal, & getting worse! If I recall correctly, the majority quit after their 1st year! Older teachers were mostly appalled at what was happening to curriculum, but felt outvoted & overwhelmed. Like with other policy processes, the whole process had become dominated by the vendor industry (textbooks, supplies, teaching aids, facilities, etc, etc - not so different from the mil-industrial complex; just swap edu contractors for mil contractors).
8) Our group of NIH scientists was recruited by the one school district to help them "reinvent" science education for elementary school curriculum. Yet after ~6 months, most of us in private agreed that they needed to reorganize their entire approach to education & training, from ground zero. When we tried to bring that up with a few teachers, they begged us not to mention their names, and in private said nothing would change unless someone took the battle directly to the teacher-training colleges and especially the CURRICULUM PLANNING departments and "specialists" [who had built academic careers publishing & getting tenure in those departments]. The"curriculum specialists" had become entrenched in all school boards and in "accreditation" services & state education depts. Finally, all county-based school boards had become bureaucracies of their own. [The whole edu logistics chain is rather reminiscent of orthodox economics, S&P et al rating agencies, and politicization of the Fed/Treasury - i.e., purely academic theory increasingly separated from practice, operations & REAL outcomes.]
9) In the process of all this, we became aware of literally thousands of similar TOKEN efforts coast to coast, all sponsored by either universities, associations (chem assoc, math assoc, engineering assoc, etc, etc) or corporations .... ALL blissfully unaware of one another, all totally uncoordinated, and hence nearly all a vast waste of everyone's time. In discussing this last topic, one principal burst out laughing & showed me a huge cabinet (~4'x5'x2'deep). Every fall it would start out empty, and slowly fill up with all the proselytizing material sent by various "education improvement groups" whom he said were all nice people, hard working, well-meaning & totally lacking in any understanding of how an elementary school is actually operated. Hence - it was all totally useless to him. Every spring he would call in a truck, and have all the crap hauled off to a dump. It was an eye-opener to me. [ps: I've more recently heard a remarkably similar story from a Congressional staffer, except that each Congressperson supposedly has to truck out a semi-truck of unutilizable "reading material" EVERY MONTH!]
10) This whole experience drove home the realization that researchers at public agencies like the NIH were stockpiling more & more information, while in parallel we produce citizens less & less aware of how to actually achieve "recombinant" integration of unpredictably diverse options! (My own son was attending these schools just described, and it was obvious that he wasn't gonna absorb at school the impetus to invent novel "snowmobiles" out of random parts. If anything, the local school curriculum staff were doing their best to drain kids of any remaining imagination. Today, the term INNOCENT FRAUDS comes to mind. Our visiting teams of scientists actually ended up discussing how to protect kids from their school experiences. It became depressing if you dwelled on the statistics instead of focussing on the personal interactions.)
11) What to do about this whole, uncoordinated mess? It would literally take a Constitutional Assembly to quickly reorganize US education top down, so it ain't gonna happen any time soon. Rather, the best hope is far more bottom-up audacity that focuses on protecting students from micro-managers [enforcing arbitrary standards]. The most impressive school principal I met confided that if the school board knew how he ran his (rural, edge of county) school, they'd try to put a stop to his methods (which locals absolutely loved). My conclusion is that Iceland or some other tiny country could again overrun the world someday, simply by producing a small crop of people with a culture10x more innovative than the entire rest of the planet combined. It could easily happen. While all other "interest groups" are perfecting persistence of obsolete methods, some group that embraces change will, by accident, fall into a faster ... ADAPTIVE RATE? Just saying.
12) Conclusion to the NIH experience?
a) A new NIH director took over who immediately closed down the program's NIH endorsement. He wanted researchers to focus on getting tenure, and leave science education to "professional" educators. [Again. Go figure!]
b) The local school board already had what they thought they wanted anyway [a "science-in-a-box" menu list, that allowed any teacher, regardless of experience, to literally open a box of prepared materials & "teach science" in the allotted 15 min time slot :( ] Subsequently, they wanted the visiting scientists out of the schools, due to the "disruption" they caused to students, teachers & the school board. The county school administrator was actually a fan of WalMart logistics, and wanted his county school system to be run the same way! Hence, the commoditized "science-in-a-box" concept. I think they capped all of "science" at 7 standard box versions. [Weepin' Buddha on an incline!]
Outcome? The most notable outcome was that more than one previously dedicated scientist permanently lost interest in research as an industry, and became more interested in "nation-tuning" as an inevitable consequence of full SituationalAwareness.
How to make a difference? You can't tune a system if you don't at least map the moving, interacting parts and produce a rough semblance of a real-time decision-support interface. If that interface is too big & distributed for Central Control, then you have to do what the USMC says - focus on instilling methods that improve the QUALITY [including tempo] OF DISTRIBUTED DECISION-MAKING.
Are we doing that anywhere in our country? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ... [stop it, you're killing us]. Sorry, gotta catch my breath.
The right will tell you that the government makes nothing and is not a corporation.
ReplyDeleteSo why do we need to impose real economy terms like balancing budgets for something that is not a coporation.
The issue is that they think that govt "needs money," even though they rail at the same time against "printing" that will lead to inflation. Total confusion in their minds.
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