Maintaining Traditions of Practical Wisdom: Not Becoming a "Fool."

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Practical wisdom is not musing about how someone else in a hypothetical situation ought to act. It's about "What am I to do?" -- right here and right now, with this person. A practically wise person doesn't merely speculate about what's proper; she does it.
-- Schwartz, B & Sharpe, K Practical Wisdom. The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. (2010) New York: (Penguin) Riverhead. p.7.

Ever noticed how many of the things we purchase come with assurances of "foolproof" usage? Why is that? Probably because, in order to save money, we purchase things that need assembly, or finishing of one kind or another, yet we are unlikely to have the familiarity with the objects involved to know how to avoid technical problems with them.

Those of us with a lot of schooling like to believe that having read abstruse texts and done difficult mathematics has somehow made us clever and handy when dealing with physical objects in the real world. Why waste money on completed items, or hire presumed "experts" -- likely a person with a few days instruction -- to assemble them for us, when we can do the job ourselves?

But just try, for the first time, to do any of the following:

a. digging a round hole one foot deep;
b. baking a soufflé ;
c. hammering a nail into a board;
d. assembling a small multicomputer network with peripherals.

We would do well to start off with some ancient wisdom: nothing is as easy as it looks. The few days' instruction that the kid at the hardware or electronics store gets is a few days more than we have. But, rather than take a few days to consider and prepare for what has to be done, we -- not wishing to "waste time" -- rush ahead and, if we are lucky, do a barely passable job.

If we break something, we put it back into the box and take it back to the store, telling them that "it came that way." The merchant, without objection, takes it back -- he has insurance (or warranty sales) covering such losses; and, a sale is a sale, the profit being substantial enough to cover several replacements -- for which they get credit from the manufacturer anyway. "Practical wisdom" often trumps even "honesty."

Social obligation can suppress personal virtue. Ruth Benedict in The Sword and the Chrysanthemum. (1946) Boston: Houghton, gives an example in the Japanese complaint, "I lost my virtue by fulfilling my obligations." This is offered as explaining why, in a "normal" movie plot shown to Japanese subjects of Benedict's research, a teacher shields his wealthy yet thieving mother from opprobrium, accepting the blame for the theft of school funds. This, in turn drives the teacher's wife, taking their young child with her, to commit suicide (and murder) rather than live with the familial shame. Filial piety, in some cultures, trumps many a personal consideration. (Consider the fatal feuding between the Hatfields and the McCoys. See also Honor Killing. Serving the Idols of the Tribe.)

"Modern" cycles of short-term use and replacement, "planned obsolescence," keep much of the economy going. But if fashion, alone, can't make you "upgrade," foolishness, e.g. mechanical ignorance, or deliberate planning, even, will. (Just think of mobile phones, "finished" and sold encased in slippery glass.)

But planned obsolescence or planned fragility works not only for mobile phones, DVD players, IKEA furniture, or automobiles or houses -- "fixer-uppers" -- , but also, increasingly, for medical care, law, scientific research and education. (See Schwartz & Sharpe, cited above, throughout.) Political and market, rather than disciplinary, considerations are at work to "fool-proof" the professions.

In education, unlike in other public service professions who know better than to wash their dirty laundry in public, there are always crusading "reformers" who are quite willing to point out who the fools are: thus we have recurrent attempts at "teacher-proofing" the curriculum. (See see On The Viability Of A Curriculum Leadership Role )

The success of this approach can be judged, for example, by the fact that, despite great hoopla and hype, Teach for America has yet to take over even small minority of public schools. It is the rare dilettante who has the patience, the dedication, to pursue expertise.

Even more painful for the greater majority of Americans to contemplate is, in these early days of the 21st Century, how dilettantism, not to mention rank incompetence has undermined vital functions of our national government.

But public service professionals, themselves, tend to shy away from rigorous resistance to the inroads made by those who would dilute professional norms and judgment for the sake of easy political and economic gain.

For references and to examine these issues further, see Minimizing Politicization in Public Service Decision-Making


Cordially
--- EGR

Control in the School: illusions and realities

edited 102719

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom. -- Stephen Vincent Benet (1935)

Back in those many years when I was teaching public school and studying nights to get a doctorate -- I was investigating procedures for predicting human behavior -- an old college chum of mine, an up-and-coming Philadelphia lawyer, asked me why I didn’t go into school administration.

I asked him why he thought I should do that. He replied, “So you can have more power, more control and influence.”

He was almost insulted when I replied that power, control and influence -- in public education, at least -- were only likely randomly related to administrative position.

One of the most boring jobs I ever had was as the headmaster of a putatively academically focused, private school. The most important thing I had to do -- which ate up time, futilely -- was to “lunch” with rarely interesting people whose only claim on my attention was their potential for donorship.

I was supposed to be agreeable to each individual member of a governing board who, in depth, differed greatly among themselves what the school was about. (It was all “hale, fellow, well met” at the slogan level, e.g. “Excellence in All Undertakings.”) Each individual board member tried to enlist me as an agent working for him against his less-insightful fellow board members.

Power, control, influence? Not much of that when the friends of board members could act as solicitors for special interests to have my quite ordinary decisions subjected to time-consuming review and reversal.

Teachers who have difficulty with difficult students are often criticized as “lacking control” or other presumably “normal” teacher skills. This criticism comes not infrequently from administrators who escaped the classroom so their own “lack of control” would not be subject to easy criticism.

Teachers who do have control, on the other hand, have to listen to administrators and fellow teachers tell them how “fortunate” they are to have “such good students.” No doubt such statements are intended to help skilled teachers to maintain a proper humility.

For references and to examine these issues further, see My First Classroom Teaching Experience


Cordially
--- EGR