Last night I attended a talk given at the Evans household by Max Gammon, one of the regular Friday evening meetings that Tim Evans and I take it in turns to host (he on the second Friday of the month and me on the last). It eventually became an argument between Christians and Atheists, but before that, Gammon made many interesting points about the degeneration over the years of the National Health Service.
One point of relevance to this blog he made with particular force, which is how bad it was when nurses stopped being trained in wards, doing nursing, and instead did an "education" in classrooms and seminar rooms. In Gammon's mind there was clearly a direct relationship between what many people regard as "education" and that other, much more malign modern tendency, "bureaucracy".
"Education", in other words, came across as more like malignant disease than as a modern blessing.
As for the ruckus about Christianity, I felt, as the devout Atheist that I am, that if Gammon had confined himself to saying that Christians make better nurses, or that a revival of Christianity might make it easier to run hospitals, I might have gone along with him. But instead he went out of his way to present Christianity as the logical outcome of his analysis of the NHS. Paul Coulam, veteran of many Samizdata comment wars, was present, and he put the case against Christianity with his usual lack of equivocation, egged on by the likes of me growling from the floor, and by Patrick Crozier, who pointed out that an identical nationalised degeneration had occurred in the railways and nobody blamed that on the decline of religion.
Nevertheless, a most stimulating and enjoyable evening.
Why do I get the feeling that this may not be about, you know, education? Not about essays, homework, algebra, and such, anyway.
Learn more here. Actually, it seems to be rather more that kind of thing that I expected. I assumed it was older woman young guy "education". But no, it's priests and catholicism, etc.. Education, in other words.
I've already quoted here from How To Be A Star at Work by Robert E. Kelley on the subject of Dwight D. Eisenhower's mentor relationship with a superior which helped him learn the ropes of military bureaucracy. Here's another quote from that same book, which emphasises a regular theme here, which is the way that schools, by their nature, are not good at teaching you how to work cooperatively. The good news is that Kelley, unlike even most of his "Star" cooperators and initiative-takers, reckons that he can teach this.
When Lai and Henry were hired at Bell Labs, they had very similar credentials: 3.8 GPAs from top-ranked electrical engineering programs, summer internships at computer companies, and glowing recommendations from professors. Yet each took a very different approach to the assignment they were given for their first six months. In the morning, they took classes in telephone technology and in the methods Bell Labs uses to conduct its work. Afternoons were spent on break-in projects – work that needed to be done but would not jeopardize crudal projects if done badly.
Henry holed himself up in his office as if he were writing his dissertation or studying for a bar exam. He collected volumes of technical documents to acquaint himself with the latest ideas. He began learning how to use exotic software programs he thought might be helpful in his work. He would surface only for a bathroom break or a mandatory staff meeting. "What's going to count," he remembers thinking at the time, "is whether I can prove to my coworkers how technically smart I am."
Lai set aside three hours each afternoon to work on her assignment. In whatever time was left of her workday, she introduced herself to coworkers and asked questions about their projects. If one of them needed a hand or was facing schedule pressures, she volunteered to help. And even though Lai was new to the workplace culture, her colleagues appreciated her willingness to help them out, especially given that their problems were not hers.
One afternoon, a colleague couldn't get a program to work in a software project that was due the next week. Lai thought that a new programming tool that she had picked up in an advanced course could handle the problem. She offered to work on a solution while her colleague focused on the larger project. Her coworker was grateful to have help fixing the program so that he could keep to his schedule, and he also appreciated the information on the new tool.
When some sophisticated software tools needed to be installed in everyone's office PCs, the traditional but very unproductive company process forced each person to install it by trial and error. Lai had experienced the same cumbersome installation process during an internship and thought it made more sense for one person to do it for all the machines. Since no one was specifically responsible for the work, she stepped forward to take on the job. When it turned out to be tougher than she realized, requiring two weeks rather than the four days she had planned, Lai could have backed off, but she saw it through.
"Once I got up the learning curve, it seemed silly to make everyone else go through the pain I did," she says. Volunteering for the project forced her to come in early and stay late for several days so that neither her work assignment nor her class work would suffer.
On another occasion, a colleague who had been scheduled for a dreaded all-night lab testing session had to attend an out-of-town funeral, and another staffer had to fill in. More physically than technically demanding, these sessions take place from midnight to 7:00 a.m., the only period when the computers can be freed up to accommodate large-scale testing. At a hastily called staff meeting, the veterans kidded one another about grabbing the "plum assignment." At the point where the staff expected the supervisor to assign someone arbitrarily, Lai volunteered.
"I figured that it was most important to get accepted into the team, and what better way than to help them out?" she said.
Even the drudge work of a midnight shift, she said, was like a mini-apprenticeship. "I got a quick peek into the work they were doing and what kind of things I would need to know. Sure, some of the work I did for them was grunt and gopher stuff, but ... to meet the schedules, they needed a hand. Since my schedule was more flexible than others', it made sense for me to help out. Plus, they got to know me and my capabilities."
After six months, both Henry and Lai had finished their technical classes and their first assignments. Both of their projects were successful and judged to be technically competent. Indeed, Henry's work may have been slightly more technically proficient than Lai's.
But when it came to workplace reputation, Henry came up short. While he was known as a nice guy, he also was pegged as a loner. Henry was seen as technically adept, but there were question marks about his ability to share his skills with coworkers. He carried on as if he were still in school, where individual performance is the rule, Lai was seen as an initiative taker, someone who saw a problem that was not her responsibility and stepped forward to solve it. Lai had been able to create the impression of being in the lab group for much longer than six months. Managers noticed this, of course, and already were looking at her as a candidate for fast-track assignments.
Our observations of Henry, Lai, and dozens of other Bell Labs engineers show that any newcomer in a unit of professionally skilled, competitive workers must demonstrate the initiative skill within the first six to twelve months. Otherwise, the new hire will be relegated to the pack – labeled, perhaps, like Henry, as competent but not productive in ways that benefit the group. In the late 1980s, when managers across the country were forced to cut staffs, the workers who hadn't shown initiative, like Henry, were often vulnerable.
Yet learning how to take initiative effectively is not taught in school or even in the workplaces that now demand it. Even where it is taught, learning on the job is not easy. Stars have the initiative moves down, but most can't teach them to others.
More news from the world of edbiz:
NEW YORK, May 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Berkery, Noyes & Co., the leading investment bank specializing in the information market, adds Christopher Curran, a veteran of the education industry, to its senior staff, the firm announced today.Mr. Curran is the latest addition to the senior staff at Berkery, Noyes, the longtime leader in investment banking for the education market. As Managing Director, Curran will provide mergers and acquisitions advice, financial consulting, and strategic research services in the K-12, college, corporate training and for-profit education markets.
Mr. Curran, most recently a Managing Director at Eduventures, Inc., brings a wide range of education, management, and consulting experience to Berkery, Noyes. At Eduventures, a global leader in education strategic research consultancy, Curran managed all business development functions, consulted on client growth strategies, and developed the company's consultative sales methodology.
I suppose this is the sort of verbiage that goes with free market education. I'm for it, I further suppose. But … yuck.
More British educational export business in China, this time by the London School of Economics. This from the BBC:
The London School of Economics is taking its summer schools to China this summer for the first time.
The courses will be run in partnership with Peking University.Dr John Board, head of the LSE Summer School programme, said: "We are delighted to be offering this selection of flagship courses from our London programme in Peking."
"It is a step into a new market but one we are confident will attract interest."
The bosses of British universities sound more and more like businessmen, which would be because, more and more, they are businessmen.
The weekend before last I went to a party at Sandhurst. I have already written here about British army education, so I made a point of asking around amongst the guests about educational matters. I struck gold. I had two conversations in particular which I have kept meaning to report on here. Sorry for the delay, but I know that I can remember all the bits that matter.
Sandhurst, for those who don't know, is the place out to the west of London where they incubate the new officers of the British Army, and conversation one was with a Sandhurst history lecturer. I asked him what he lectured about.
The most interesting bit of his answer concerned his choice of historical campaign to describe for his students. He deliberately chose a losing campaign, the invasion of Russia by Germany during the Second World War, as viewed from and experienced by the German army.
He mentioned the way that the German army is renowned for the initiative and independence entrusted to and shown by its junior officers, but, he pointed out, all that changes when things go seriously wrong. Then, the people at the top exercise tight control, which all adds to the grief.
I like the idea that young officers are asked to think about what army life is like when things go badly wrong. This is, if you think about it, an indoor, classroom, version of what those sergeants shout at their charges out in the open air. Are you tough enough for all this misery?!? Because it is misery, you little …!!!
For some reason I found myself asking if he could always spot the future high fliers. He said he could spot them, but that he could never tell if they would fly high in the Army, or in Civvy Street. This strongly suggests that the education of British army officers is relevant to life generally, and not just to army life, right? Yes he said, that is so.
This latter proposition was spookily confirmed for me by conversation number two, which was with a guy who had worked for most of his adult life and still worked for Motorola, the US based (but worldwide in operations) portable radio company. The man I talked with, whose expertise seemed to be government regulation (a very big deal in the teleommunications trade, alas) explained that, just like the German army, Motorola's people are famous for the amount of creative freedom they're allowed. The atmosphere, he said, was "collegiate", rather than based on command and control. You could work for years with Motorola people, he said, and develop a profound sense of just how good they were, but still not know what their official position was in the official pecking order.
Until things go wrong, as they famously did when the tech-boom went bust just a few years ago. Suddenly – and the guy described it all very eloquently – the survival of the company involved making brutally harsh decisions in the space of a few hours, so fast did the orders collapse and the money start haemorrhaging out . Command was abruptly centralised. Hideously expensive outsiders, who knew how to do command and control, were hastily brought in. About half the worldwide work force of nearly two hundred thousand were fired, pretty much overnight. Bloody hell.
Since that traumatic time, forms of business expertise that Motorola had tended to neglect in the good old days, most notably marketing, were bought in, at further vast expense, but in ways that are, I am told, showing results. A friend in her early twenties with whom I attended the party later told me that whereas not so long ago Motorola portable phones were rather passé now they are "cool".
Payment by results in Denver:
DENVER — As a teacher of emotionally disturbed children, Jeremy Abshire sets goals for each of his students. Geronimo, 14, an American Indian who knew only the letters for "Jerry," will read and write, and sign his true name. Shaneesa, a meek 12-year-old reading at a first-grade level, will catch up to her middle-school peers and attend regular classes in the fall.Under a proposal approved by teachers here and to be considered by voters next year, if Mr. Abshire's students reach the goals he sets, his salary will grow. But if his classroom becomes a mere holding tank, his salary, too, will stagnate.
"The bottom line is, do you reward teachers for just sitting here and sticking it out, or for doing something?" said Mr. Abshire, who has been teaching for four years. "The free market doesn't handle things that way, so why should it be any different here?"
Yes and no. The hard bit with schemes like this is setting the goals fairly. Ambition, if you think about it, is liable to be penalised. Canny manipulation of the targets so that they are easily reachable is liable to be rewarded. Yet reaching for the stars has definite merit as a teaching attitude, doesn't it?
What really happens in that "free market" that public sector people talk about so much these days is not just that they set targets and reward you for reaching them. The other way they check up if you are working well is: they watch you to see if you are working well. Your boss works next door, and he can tell. He did your job, and he can tell if you are doing it well or not, even if the "results" now say different.
One of the most depressing things about the public sector is when it mimics the "free market" inaccurately, generally by putting lots of bureaucratic procedures in place, to measure "achievement" which end up getting in the way of achievement. In the real free market there is a constant tension between measuring work accurately, and the threat that such systems pose to the actual doing of the work enthusiastically.
So, I wish this Denver scheme well, but say of it: watch out. There will be problems as well as miracles, although probably in the opposite order to that order. The miracles will come first, when the scheme starts out working pretty much as it is intended to. But then will come the problems, made all the worse by the now immense prestige and hence political untouchability of the new regime, when canny operators learn to manipulate it into a regular reward system for everyone, even though most of them are just running the same old holding operation that the scheme was supposed to get rid of.
Sorry, but when it comes to the public sector I am a pessimist, and never more so than when they are faking up a market, but without actual consumers, waving money, allowed to bugger off if they don't like the product, etc., etc..
