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PROFESSOR: OK, today, political barriers to
educational change.
"One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind, whether
one liked it or not.
This coercion had such a determined effect that after I
had passed the final examination I found the
consideration of any scientific problems
distasteful to me for an entire year." Who said that?
Einstein, so one of the greatest scientists in the
last 300 or 400 years.
So that was the effect of regular school and education
on Einstein.
And it's not just Einstein.
It's a general pattern.
So here, from Manchester, New Hampshire, in the 1930's is
how Bruce [? Betiset ?] superintendent describes the
children's approach to learning and to reading and
interest in knowledge.
"In the traditional fourth grades, when I asked children
to tell me what they'd been reading, they were hesitant,
embarrassed, and diffident.
In one fourth grade I cannot find a single child who would
admit that he had committed the sin of reading.
I did not have single volunteer and when I tried to
draft them, the children stood up, shook
their heads, sat down.
In the four experimental fourth grades the children
fairly fought to tell me what they had been reading.
The hour closed-- in each case-- with a dozen hands
waved in the and little faces crestfallen because we had not
got around to hear what they had to tell."
So the contrast is pretty strong.
And the question is why do experiments like what
[? Betiset ?] did not survive?
Whereas why does the education system tend to have an effect
such as Einstein described, where he found the
consideration of any scientific problems
distasteful an entire year?
So reading is a particular example-- which I'll give you
another one [INAUDIBLE]--
of the change and the effect of the
formal educational system.
So in revolutionary America--
so this is late 1770's--
Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold 120,000 copies.
And their population then was three million.
OK, so that's 1/100th of the population now.
So the equivalent of 120,000 copies then was about 10
million or 12 million copies today.
Now if you actually look at Thomas Paine's Common Sense,
it's written in a language, today, that we
would call very biblical.
When we read it you use English and we speak English
but you wouldn't expect 12 million people to buy a book
of that complexity and subtlety.
Now that expectation's is confirmed by many a study
about literacy and proficiency in analyzing documents
conducted across the United States.
So the latest one, it was in 2003, National Assessment of
Adult Literacy.
So this was published in 2005 by the US government.
So they America in 2003 and they tested three kinds of
proficiencies.
Prose proficiency, which is comparing viewpoints and two
editorials as an example of something where if you have
prose proficiency you have document proficiency, which is
interpreting a table about blood pressure and any
physical activity.
So taking information from doctors and [INAUDIBLE].
And quantitative proficiency, computing and comparing the
cost and analysis of food items.
But none of these are very advanced skills.
OK now, the percentage of adults who are proficient in
each of these categories?
13%.
OK, now, 13% is a very, very low number especially
considering the level of proficiency that's required,
the threshold is pretty low.
Whereas back in 1770's America 10 million, 12 million people
equivalent today bought Thomas Paine's Common Sense.
And probably many of them were not actually literate in the
sense that they couldn't read.
So that book was read to them.
So there was a great hunger for words and ideas and
learning, which in many ways we had not matched, despite or
because of the vast extent of the schooling system and
educational system.
So suppose you want to change this.
You want to improve the situation.
You'd like to make education better.
What are some of the obstacles?
So I'm going to discuss the obstacles in ascending order
of difficulty in overcoming.
So another way to phrase, ascending order of
how local they are.
So the first obstacle I'm going to discuss is one that's
local to personal psychology.
It's local to how people individually act.
And then I'll move to obstacles that
are broader in scope.
So the first obstacle is what I'll call cognitive
dissonance.
So the way to see this in action is suppose you go to
someone and you say, well you know, the way that that course
is done could really be improved if
you do it this way.
And you think you've made a perfectly reasonable point,
perfectly valid point.
But somehow your point isn't taken any notice of.
Or it's met with resistance and maybe even hostility.
Now, why might that be?
Well, there are many reasons.
But one of them is you might have phrased it badly.
You might have cursed out somebody's mother while you
were doing it.
There are all kinds of things that you have a lot of control
over and don't necessarily have to do.
But there are some reasons that are harder to control.
And that's in the psychology of the person who's hearing
what you're saying.
So one of the obstacles is this idea of cognitive
dissonance.
So let's see how that works.
So cognitive dissonance was a concept invented in the 1950's
by Festinger, Leon Festinger, psychology at Stanford.
And he did the following experiments.
The experiments were, he had people come and do this task
where they basically just put round pegs into round holes
and-- he's a college student-- put square pegs into square
holes and triangle pegs into triangle holes.
So after they did the experiment they were then
split into two groups.
Group A was just sent away.
You know, they did the experiment and they left and
nothing more was heard from them until a year later.
Now Group B was told, oh, we actually need people to help
us recruit more volunteers for this experiment.
And obviously they might have problems recruiting people to
do the experiment because it was so dull.
All you do is put square pegs into square holes.
So they said would you be willing to be--
in the experiment--
our assistant in helping recruit people?
So Group A, they just went away.
And Group B, they were offered a position as experimenter's
assistant and were paid $20 for that.
And Group C-- the same thing.
They were offered a position as experiment's assistant but
they were only paid $1.
This was in 1950-ish.
So roughly speaking in today's dollars, let me
just translate those.
So here's a way of estimating the equation.
So in 1950 we still have the gold standard.
And the gold standard was $35 an ounce.
So the world price of gold was fixed by Fiat from Bretton
Woods at $35 an ounce.
Now it's maybe $70 an ounce.
So inflation is about 25%.
So this is about 400 today.
And this is about $20.
So then what happened was these students then did their
work, nothing, this, or that, being an assistant.
And then they were tested a year later about their opinion
of the experiment.
So that was actually the real experiment.
So these students thought--
like all psychology experiments--
they were actually helping recruit people for an
experiment.
When actually, they were the experiment.
They were really the subject.
So a year later they were asked their opinion of the
experiment, did you think it was interesting?
So these people, they obviously thought it was
boring because it wasn't worth it.
So a year later these people were asked what they thought.
And these people said boring.
OK, now, what about Groups B and C?
What did they think?
So take a minute or two, try to predict what they were
opinions about the experiment were one year later.
Question, yes?
AUDIENCE: So did they have a choice to participate?
Were they forced to do this?
PROFESSOR: No, I don't think they were forced.
It was the Group B who agreed, or the Group
C people who agreed.
I'm pretty sure that's right.
And I'm sure they weren't forced.
So yeah, find a neighbor or two and see if you can
predict, what did Groups B and C think after a year or so?
OK, so, what do you think they thought?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Well, maybe Group C liked the experiment better
because they were only trying to recruit, I think they
wanted to but [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: OK, so Group C maybe liked it more.
So the question is, who liked it more?
So maybe Group C liked it more.
So they weren't getting enough incentive in cash and they
must have liked it.
Any other thoughts, comments?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Well, it's possible they didn't like it
originally, but they convinced themselves they liked it
because they were doing this work recruiting for not very
much money.
PROFESSOR: OK.
So they must have convinced themselves because they were
getting enough cash to be happy.
AUDIENCE: I actually have a question.
PROFESSOR: Yeah?
AUDIENCE: So did [? all of them ?] take over?
Or are we talking only about those who did it?
PROFESSOR: That I don't remember.
That's a good question.
I think we're just talking about the people
who took the offer.
AUDIENCE: OK, so it was self selection?
PROFESSOR: Yeah, there's some self selection.
AUDIENCE: But if a group came from that, you probably should
ask the question immediately after the experiment before
asking them to help assist and then you set the control.
[INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: And they might have done that.
I don't remember all the details of it.
So they might have done that.
And [? some wonder ?] if the control was the Group A. But
you're right, that's another good control.
And they might have done that.
Other comments or questions?
Predictions?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Is this a flat rate or is this a per person?
PROFESSOR: Oh, per person they recruited?
No, this was their salary.
Yeah, that'd be pretty lucrative, $20 a pop.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: I was thinking B probably wouldn't have liked
it as much as C because they probably would have thought,
if they have to pay me $400 it's really, really boring.
PROFESSOR: OK, so B liked it less on the theory that they
were doing it just for the money.
They were thinking to themselves--
AUDIENCE: Or also if the reason they really have to pay
them this much to get the subjects it must really suck.
PROFESSOR: Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Well, and you can look at it another way.
You can say, they're paying me this much money.
There must be some intrinsic importance to the work.
So you could convince yourself--
PROFESSOR: it could go both ways.
AUDIENCE: Right, exactly.
PROFESSOR: They pay me a lot so it must be
really important work.
They must have tons of government funding for people.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
PROFESSOR: All right.
So it could be [INAUDIBLE].
Oh, comment?
AUDIENCE: Well, I have to say, I think the process of
recruiting people would get you to like it more.
Because you'd have to be selling it.
And then the question is whether you put more effort
into that if you're getting paid more money or not.
PROFESSOR: OK, but the common point is recruiting can help
you like it?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
PROFESSOR: OK, so I would say to me, actually, you were
right, actually, what happened is that these people still
found this boring.
And these people liked it.
And basically, at the time this was counter intuitive.
And the whole idea of cognitive dissonance was built
up to explain this counter-intuitive result,
which is why would you like it more when you're paid less?
It is sort of counter intuitive.
And it's exactly like you say, which is that you reason to
yourself well, if they're giving me 400, yeah, sure, I'd
sell my grandmother for 400.
You know, that doesn't mean that I don't like my
grandmother.
But $400 is $400.
But if they only give you $20--
that's option C--
no, of course you wouldn't do that.
There must be some reason that you're doing that.
So if you're participating in the activity we'll say by
doing but don't like it, or at least you try to
justify it to yourself.
You need some kind of justification.
And the justification of Group B is well, I'm doing it
because it pays a lot of money.
The justification of Group C can't be that because there
isn't enough money.
So it must be that it's an
intrinsically worthwhile activity.
So the opinion shifts.
Now if you remember, I mentioned cognitive dissonance
as one of reasons to have people vote when you're
originally doing multiple-choice questions.
Give a muiltiple-choice question to the students, say
A, B, C, or D. The importance of having them vote and make a
public stand is that it commits them to the question
and to the answer.
Now they have some public appearance in the one of the
A, B, C, D categories.
And they want to know, is this right?
So the political organizers know this.
And these kind of ideas are old hat now.
We've seen things that consciousness and psychology
in marketing.
So people will sometimes-- for example-- come around and ask
you well, would you mind putting a sign in your front
yard for this political campaign?
Well, at first they'll say, would you like to give $100 to
the campaign?
And you say, no.
I don't really know who XYZ is.
I sort of maybe support him $100.
[INAUDIBLE].
So you say no.
They say, OK, well, would you mind putting a sign in your
front yard?
So now, what have you done?
Made a public commitment.
All right, everybody who drives by or walks by sees
that sign for the candidate.
So now studies are completely consistent with this--
you now do it-- you now support that candidate more.
So turns out, what's the key thing in changing your view?
Is that you feel you had a choice.
So here, if you put a gun to someone's head and say, put a
sign in your front yard.
And they put a sign in their front yard, that doesn't
change their view of the candidate.
The person could refuse or not.
It was up to them.
If they chose to do it, well, that opens a door to further
commitment.
So here, this is sort of like putting a gun to their head.
This is sort of like putting a gun to their head.
You don't really feel like you have a choice.
You're like, OK, whether it was boring or not, who cares?
Whereas here, you took the choice.
And the ones that did it changed their view.
So cognitive dissonance is very, very powerful.
Now, how does that relate to peoples' response when you
say, you'd like to change the course?
OK, and we'll come to that.
Yes, question?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, so again, Group A then was
never offered a choice?
PROFESSOR: Yeah, they were sent away.
And they were asked a year later to see what
they thought of it.
And they said, yeah, it was boring.
They're sort of control.
I mean, you expect them to say, it's boring.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
boring?
PROFESSOR: Yeah, just to check so no one could say, well,
maybe people found it really fascinating.
You know, because they didn't.
So now what happens when you say to someone, oh, we really
should change the way this course is done.
So now suppose you're at some weak university like MIT or
Cambridge or something like that.
Now, where do a lot of the people who teach at these
universities come from?
Either that same university--
especially in England, that was really notorious in the
united justification [? for it ?], which was that our
system's so wacky and different, only people who've
been through that particular system can
possibly teach here.
So how are the justifications?
Either the people come from that same place or come from a
similar background, similar university background.
So now you're not criticizing a system that
they A, selected them.
Right?
The system selected them from a whole bunch of people.
And so by definition, it must be a good system.
Also, they've now had many opportunities to make public
commitments to the system of the way things are taught, the
way things are done.
They've taught them in classes, they've participated
in curriculum discussions.
They've selected the students that come, recommended the
students that would be better or worse
according to that system.
So the result is that because of years of cognitive
dissonance working on people, they are now very, very
convinced that the way things are done right now is great.
And although it's called cognitive dissonance, it's not
necessarily a cognitive belief.
If you ask them, can you explain why it's great they
wouldn't necessarily give you great reasons.
And this can be very misleading and can lead you
into hot water.
So for example, when you say, well, really we should teach
this course differently and put in interactive questions
so students learn them.
You'll get responses that are almost nonsense.
They'll be things like, for example, well, if we don't put
everything on the chalkboard how will students know what's
going to be on the exam?
And yeah, it's a valid English sentence.
But it's not a good argument because there are other ways
to communicate with students.
You can put stuff on notes.
You can say, read the book.
There's tons of answers to that problem.
But these kind of things can be offered as just a complete
trump card.
OK, these trumps have been played, because no one can do
anything interactive.
Now, that level of thought that's behind it, no way
people would put that level of thought into their research
and be successful with research.
And how come that's OK and can be sort of
convincing in this area?
Well, because it's really not a cognitive
response to be made.
It's a belief response.
You threaten and challenge a person's core beliefs and
they're going to come out and react very strongly.
And if you try to argue it just on the rational level
you'll, actually, pick up angry people.
And you won't anger yourself because you wonder why you
hate the progress.
So one way to think about those kinds of conversations
is A, if they're difficult conversations--
and actually, the reason I write that there is there's an
excellent book called Difficult Conversations.
written by--
I'm pretty sure-- it's from the
Harvard Negotiation Project.
And they said, look, every interaction-- and I
think this is right--
has three levels.
So that would be the factual level, which is just the ideas
being exchanged, of should we teach interactively or not?
Is there enough time?
There's the emotional level, which is how we feel about
these facts.
And then there's the meaning.
So what does this discussion mean for people?
So as an example, [INAUDIBLE], the problem with a student
who's worried about their grade.
Well, you can tell them, factually, look--
about 3% on that problem set is going to be 0.03% of your
grade's total points, don't even worry about it.
All right, so that's the factual level.
You may often find that just the factual discussion is just
the tip of the iceberg because there's all
this stuff going on.
So what could some of this stuff be?
Well, the emotional level is they just feel really anxious
about grades.
Now, why might that be?
Well, that's where the meaning comes in.
The meaning may be that they feel that the grade measures
how good they are.
And they've always thought they got into MIT by mistake.
And now people are going to find them out.
If they ever get a bad grade their cover will be blown.
And everyone will know that they don't belong.
So it may have a really strong meaning for them, which is
rather emotional.
Which means the fact [INAUDIBLE] discussion
[INAUDIBLE].
So it's a similar thing with the discussion of change in
education, is that people will have a factual discussion that
seems pointless and it's just frustrating to you.
Because actually there's emotional investment in the
way things are done.
And meaning, it means a lot to people.
This system, it chose them.
It's a system they're committed to.
And it's being criticized by you.
Therefore, you're going to get a whole bunch of unrealized
anger [INAUDIBLE].
Question?
AUDIENCE: So when it comes to changing a single class and
adding some interactivity, what are the downfalls
avoiding the difficult conversations by asking for
forgiveness rather than permission?
PROFESSOR: Nate, that's a good question.
So asking for forgiveness rather than permission, one of
the downsides is--
I think, in small and moderate doses that is a good idea.
Because first of all, no one's going to notice.
Because they're too busy with their own [INAUDIBLE] teaching
that that's rather busybody over what you're doing.
So you have, definitely, something right away that you
might as well use.
But if you want to make any larger changes, like for
example, take out something that you think isn't so
important in the curriculums-- and make room for doing this--
and somebody downstream really wants that.
Well, it's important to have done it beforehand, discuss it
beforehand.
Because otherwise, if there's emotional and meaning
investment in the way things are done, they won't be able
to listen and then you surprise them
with a factual change.
They won't be able to listen to your factual arguments
then, because you activated the
emotional and meaning responses.
So you want to try to arrange, [INAUDIBLE] those things
beforehand and get all those out in the open first.
So I would say, for smaller changes, yeah.
For larger changes, it's important to have people
jointly figure out what to do, which is true of
any political change.
And that's why when I deliberately chose the title
Political Barriers to Educational Change.
Because political barriers has the implication that it's a
political problem.
It's a social problem.
It's a collective problem.
And any collective problems has these issues of what you
do by yourself versus what we do in a group or [INAUDIBLE].
Question, yeah?
AUDIENCE: So I'm just a little bit confused about the idea of
cognitive dissonance.
So is that where the [INAUDIBLE] between the
responses of groups B and C?
PROFESSOR: Mm-hmm.
Yes, it's that.
Oh, so where does the dissonance come into it?
I should've explained that.
The dissonance is what you try to reduce by
changing your view.
So in Group B there's really no dissonance because the
experiment's boring.
And they did the recruiting because they were paid.
There's no dissonance.
Here, the experiment is boring, but they don't have
the resolution that oh, I'm being paid to do it.
So they have to have some way of reducing that dissonance.
And they're going out and recruiting people.
So the way they do it is they reduce the dissonance between
the internal view and external performance by changing their
internal view.
Thanks.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: So I'm wondering whether--
do you know how people talk about how sometimes if you're
trying to convince people to do something you try to get
them to feel like it was their idea?
And it seems like that would be the opposite approach to
what you were just saying, which was that you try to get
people on board in advance maybe even so subtly that they
don't even realize it.
Because I think if you make people feel like they're being
threatened and furthermore that like you're deceiving
them, but they'll claim to be always kind of on purpose
because you felt like you were backed into a corner.
And even if they're not committed to it, because it
produces them as [INAUDIBLE], or just because people don't
like to be fooled, that they don't like to feel like
they're taken advantage of.
PROFESSOR: Right.
So that's why I would say, yeah.
Take advantage of the freedom that you have that everyone
sort of [INAUDIBLE]
to make smaller changes just on your own.
AUDIENCE: Do you have ideas for how you might go about
[INAUDIBLE], if you see people with [INAUDIBLE]?
PROFESSOR: Yeah.
And not so much convincing things that
it's their idea it's--
yeah, I don't want to phrase it as people think this as a
dishonest [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: Yeah, yeah.
PROFESSOR: It's really you're trying to find collective
solutions to problems that you both think are happening, or
you all think are happening.
So one way to go about that is to say, well, look.
Here is a problem I see.
What do you think you could do about it?
They might agree with you on the problem.
By creating one problem, pretty much generally people
will say, yeah, the students are fine with problem set.
But when they have to go do something with it,
they can't do it.
So you'll get a much wider grievant on that statement
than on what to do about it.
But you can start there.
Say, OK, well, what do you think we should do about it?
They may have some ideas.
They may accept the idea that, well, this
is a serious problem.
And it's not clear what to do about it.
But that right away gives you some license to try to
[? external?]
[INAUDIBLE].
So you say, OK, well, here's one thing
I'm thinking of trying.
Let's see how it works.
So you're not saying, it must be done this way, and this is
the only way to do it, and you're bad to not do it.
Say, well I'm going to try this.
Let's see how it works.
And I'm happy to share the results with you.
And you can use that, too.
And so there's another related point to that, which is the--
I don't know what percentage to give it.
So let's call it a 10%, 10%, 8%.
So 10%, 10%, 8% equals this.
So 10% of people will be early adopters.
They're really curious about new things.
They want to try new things.
Let's call them [INAUDIBLE].
There will be, say, 10% who no matter what you do are just
going to say, this is terrible.
So, the never adopters.
And the 8% who are in the middle who will wait to see
and will sort of sit on the fence but
[INAUDIBLE], but open.
They have other priorities, but they're open to
these kind of things.
So my rough rule of thumb is, when you're talking to
someone, could be figure out which category they're in.
If they're in- this is true of political discussions, right?
You probably have some relatives in the family where
you just agree we're not going to talk about politics.
Right?
So, I have them.
I'm sure I'm in some people's category of that , too.
We just say, we're just not going to talk about that.
Because one or the two of us is not going to adopt the view
of the other no matter what is said because you just think
it's absurd.
So if someone's in that category, don't
even spend any time.
Just spend your time [INAUDIBLE]
category and say, OK, I'm going to move on.
If they're in this category, you usually can figure that
out pretty quickly, too.
Work with them.
And if they're in this category, that's the people
you can reach if you do things in a good way.
OK, now this is actually pretty large.
I think in the '70s this was called the silent majority,
was the code for this [? this word. ?]
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Are you ready to be done with this?
PROFESSOR: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Could you talk a little bit-- maybe a little
later-- about what sort of scale changes
you're talking about?
And also along with that, how much power each individual
professor has to design their own course.
If you figure out what the prerequisites are for the next
course, then I don't see exactly what the problem is
doing whatever you want in your course as long as you
meet those-- as long as you teach them.
PROFESSOR: So the question is what size scale change am I
talking about?
Well, it depends.
How much freedom you have depends on the
change you want to do.
For example, suppose you took to heart some of the readings
that were for today and you thought that grading was
really terrible and you want to just dispense with grading
completely.
Well, even if you're teaching all the right stuff, that will
raise a lot of of ire.
And people will come after you for that even if you're
teaching everything right and you're doing all the prereq.
Because it will trigger all kinds of factual, emotional,
meaning responses in other people.
And it'll go against many, many-- and that's what I'm
going to talk about next is--
features of American society to think we must
do things that way.
So you have less freedom to do something like that, even if
you're meeting all the prereqs.
Now, if you want to, for example, use different
examples to teach the same ideas, Everyone
wants complete freedom.
So it really depends what you want to do.
Then there's many scales where you can make change.
So you may find that there isn't any way to do what I
want to do and meet all the prereqs for the next course,
because it just means doing way too much stuff.
OK, well now you have a problem of a
bigger scale change.
How do you get the whole group of faculty or group of people
in charge of that area or course to change what was
going on and changes the prerequisites, change the
overall curriculum.
So now, you're definitely going to be working with lots
of other people.
There's another sort of dichotomy, which is is the
course required or not?
If the course isn't required, you have much more freedom.
[INAUDIBLE]
so your course.
If people don't like it, they don't have to take it.
And even if other people don't like your course or don't
think it's that important, they're perfectly happy,
generally, to let you teach the course that they don't
think is that important.
Because they want to teach their course, which you may
think is not that important.
But now the required courses that every single undergrad
that majors in the fields take, those generally are
guarded more with jealousy.
And so changes in those are harder and generally require
more consent from other people just because it's considered a
shared core of the field.
So that's the meaning.
And by changing that, you're complicitly perhaps
threatening to share core of the field.
Does that answer your question?
OK, so what I'm going to talk about after the break--
so this was the idea of cognitive
dissonance, and what role--
and maybe just a few, your local group, maybe your
department, maybe your school--
difficulties and obstacles and issues that come up when
you're trying to make some kind of educational change.
What I'm going to talk about after the break is
society-wide features.
All right.
So American society or say, European-American society in
general, that impose really large obstacles
in educational change.
In some ways, even bigger than this one.
And you definitely want to take your time with this one.
But it's also important to take your time with even
larger scale ones.
And those will be Behaviorism, Taylorism, and the history and
the purpose of those schools.
And we'll talk about those after the break.
It's 9:58 right now.
So we'll start at 10:08 according to that clock.
The first barrier, cognitive dissonancy is a--
to a personal psychology.
But now we're going to look at factors that span the
individual.
I mean, this spans the individual in the sense that
it's the common feature of our psychology, maybe of this
[INAUDIBLE] psychology.
But let's see it in individual people.
But they're are also features that are common across--
you could call them social psychology or social
tendencies.
The first one is Behaviorism.
Behaviorism is also a school of psychology, which,
basically in America, grew out of Pavlov's work on
conditioning dogs and working on teaching patience by reward
and punishment.
And in psychology, what it was is it was a focus on outputs.
So it basically denied the importance of studying what's
going on inside the human mind.
It was correlated with what was called the logical
positivism in the Vienna school.
So in Europe, around the same time and soon after, was the
rise of quantum mechanics.
So if you look at quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics
was created partly by the Vienna logical positivists in
math in [INAUDIBLE].
In quantum mechanics what's one of the fundamental ideas
is what's called an observer.
You know, where it says, look.
Don't talk about what's not observable.
The important thing is what's observable.
Everything is sort of rigid around observance.
All right, so behaviorist psychology was
almost in the same way.
It says, look, don't talk about the mind.
We don't know what the mind is.
It has no separate existence.
Let's just talk about behaviors.
How does what you do effect what the organism does?
It's a fine way of training pigeons, but it's not a great
way of understanding people.
But you can see that it's actually dominant in lots of
American education.
So Behaviorism was actually strongest in America, It was
eventually, I would say, demolished as an intellectual
movement basically in this space.
I guess the old linguistic department was here.
And Noam Chomsky in 1957, '59 wrote the review of Skinner's
book on Behaviorism.
And that's considered the coup de grace of Behaviorism.
But even then, the idea lives on.
And it underlies so much of what goes on in this school.
And you can see that with actually the lively examples
of that, given the core.
I'll give you one more of that [INAUDIBLE].
So this was a study.
This was fourth, fifth, and sixth grade.
And they were asked what's six times three.
Well, they weren't having a problem with that, It's 18.
They were asked to make a story problem for 6
times 3 equals 18.
80% of the students could not do it.
They couldn't make a valid story problem.
Now, what I mean by story problem is a word problem.
So they could actually do the multiplication.
That was no problem.
But to make a problem which used that multiplication, that
was difficult for them.
Most of the problems they came up with were along this line.
On Monday, Johnny buys six apples.
It's always Johnny, not John.
I don't know why.
On Tuesday, Johnny buys three apples.
So 6 times 3 equals 18.
There's was a fundamental lack of understanding of what's
going on here behind the equation.
So the performance was fine.
He said, what's 6 times 3?
18.
And so the observable was [INAUDIBLE].
So by the [INAUDIBLE] standards that was fine.
There was no problem.
And so much of it was on the school.
Bacon just looks at the outreach.
Whereas, if you actually look into the [INAUDIBLE], that
Behaviorists say you shouldn't really do, and ask the tougher
[? question, you'll ?] find it actually has no meat.
But it's just like tissue.
AUDIENCE: Is the problem here me, or is it we are looking
for the wrong outputs?
I don't see, per se, how asking students to make a word
problem is looking into the mind any deeper than asking
them 6 times 3 equals 18 because it's an output that's
closer to what we want students to
actually be able to do.
PROFESSOR: The thing is if they this, if they produce a
correct story as a formula too, then you wouldn't be
happy either.
So in some way you want to know does this
have meaning for them.
So you could then say, well, 6 times 3 is 18.
OK, they understood that.
Now, I want them to give me the right
output of a story problem.
Well, I have them memorize a correct story problem.
Whenever they see multiplication, do this kind
of story problem.
And then, if you ask them the question give me a story
problem, they would produce the right output.
But you'd still be unhappy.
You'd have to ask a different question to figure out if it
actually had any meat.
Maybe for example you'd say, well, multiplication's pretty
similar to division, so let me see if they could make a story
problem for division.
Or let me give them a different question,
which is this one.
Suppose they hadn't had this question before and hadn't
been pigeon trained with it.
So you could give them that question and see if they
understood what really multiplication means.
If they just write down 73, you would say, OK, they
understood that.
And it would be kind of pointless to try and have them
memorize all questions like this.
But after they've seen this kind of question, yeah, they
might produce the right output.
If you just tell them, OK, whenever you see this, one,
two, three, four guys here and four there, produce 73 here.
Well, that's different from really in understanding
multiplication.
So I would say output is not sufficient.
So you have to look behind the output.
Did that help answer your question?
AUDIENCE: Well, but I feel like you're still looking
[INAUDIBLE] but the difference is the process you used to get
the students to the point where they can generate that.
PROFESSOR: No.
Well, you're looking at the output, because that's all you
can look at.
But you're not saying if the output is fine, it's--
you're making inferences about what's going behind that.
And that's what behaviorists don't want.
You're saying, oh, there's understanding, there's
meaning, there's reasoning going on beyond the output.
And that's what the Behaviorists don't want to
talk about.
They just want to talk about just the outputs.
And that's a fundamental problem.
Because real understanding--
focus on just outputs leads to rote learning.
And I think that is one explanation for why there's so
much rote learning produced in the American education system.
AUDIENCE: Does anyone--
[INAUDIBLE]
[? location ?]
[INAUDIBLE]
making the contributions [INAUDIBLE] like understanding
a problem, [INAUDIBLE].
So what's the operation for that that's different from
making up problem.
Making up a problem requires more understanding, right?
PROFESSOR: Yeah.
Making up a problem does require a lot of
understanding.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
So society wise, you only need a person to solve the problem
not make up a problem, right?
PROFESSOR: Well, that's not the purpose of--
so do mean prompt people to just solve
problems or make up problems?
That can't be the premise on [INAUDIBLE]
democratic society.
AUDIENCE: Right.
OK.
I agree with that.
But why should [INAUDIBLE]?
PROFESSOR: Pardon?
AUDIENCE: Who's happy to choose the computation?
They know that 6 times 3 is 18.
[INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: Well, so it depends.
So on the [INAUDIBLE] in many schools there's tests that
just test things like that.
[INAUDIBLE] .
So the No Child Left Behind Act has pretty much mandated
that children be tested pretty regularly
on their basic skills.
And so there's a ton of questions and things like that
on these basic skills tests.
So some people care.
And these kind of tests are an impediment to making any kind
of educational change.
Because if you start spending time on things like that,
well, then you have less time to practice three-digit by
five-digit multiplication.
AUDIENCE: Now this [INAUDIBLE].
We should say [INAUDIBLE]
point first, and then from there break it down to the
[INAUDIBLE]
much more [INAUDIBLE] than [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: That may be true.
So the comment was that maybe it's better to try something
not so hard as making up a story problem.
Identify--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] the [INAUDIBLE] that we need.
PROFESSOR: It shouldn't be that hard.
AUDIENCE: I mean, we're on a skill, right?
PROFESSOR: It shouldn't be that hard, but it is hard if
you've just done drill.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
If you start so low--
PROFESSOR: Yeah.
I agree.
So it's not saying that all of a sudden now--
I'm not saying all of a sudden now you should ask what we're
doing with this question how to make a story problem.
But this is used as an example to show how far away we are
from where we'd like to be.
So Behaviorism is, I would say branded reward and punishment,
pretty much rampant in American society.
In discussions of merit pay for teachers, OK, should we
give teachers higher pay if their students do better on
tests from No Child Left Behind?
So that is the assumption that you want more output from the
teacher in that [INAUDIBLE].
You just pay more money.
You give them more pigeon food.
But there actually maybe other reasons going on, there may be
completely other factors besides input output.
For example, maybe teachers think we shouldn't be teaching
the test this way.
Maybe there's all kinds of social consideration which
aren't included in just paying people quote "meritly." So you
could see how rampant it is because when you say, oh no,
we shouldn't do that to teachers, people
think you're crazy.
They say, well, of course we should-- and then they make a
really, really long argument for why we shouldn't.
So the default is, yeah, everything should be paid
according to results and rewards, and rewarding
according to result.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I'm curious about what you think-- because I do
think that there is no question that in our society
things in which we give respect to and value as a
society do get paid more and [INAUDIBLE] to have more
perspective as we [INAUDIBLE] our educational system is that
we don't pay our teachers anything and
don't respect them.
And that's why very few people actually consider that as a
real career.
[INAUDIBLE]
you know, [INAUDIBLE] to actually consider
teaching at my school.
Very [INAUDIBLE] rate.
And that's because it's not respected.
It's not considered a challenging [INAUDIBLE].
But don't you think that the amount of money that people
get paid actually does in some sense request our respect for
them as a society?
PROFESSOR: That I agree with.
So there's the meaning [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah, there's meaning associated with the salary.
So the problem, what's wrong with merit pay is that the
meaning is that you're competing with other teachers.
I'll give some money to the schools and say, now dole it
out among your teachers.
And the one's who do best---
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
No, I think that's [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: But I agree with you about increasing the
overall salaries for teachers.
And it's exactly right what you say that it's not
respected as a profession in this country.
And as you say, people who get a Ph.D from MIT are not likely
to teach in high school, which is, I think, sad.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
So in Europe--
so George Collier, one of the greatest mathematicians of the
century, he taught at a Swiss high school.
It was a considered a very respectable position and
profession.
It's a serious profession.
It's really important.
Whereas, that's pretty much unheard of here.
And [INAUDIBLE].
So it's a combination of respect and salary.
And related to that, autonomy.
So teachers here in America generally have the least
autonomy compared to, say, Western European countries.
So one way of measuring that is just how much free time
teachers have to do curriculum [INAUDIBLE].
So think back to your own high school.
How many classes did your teacher teach?
Typically, six a day.
I mean, I'm exhausted if I teach two classes today.
Because it really takes energy to teach a class really well,
think about it, prepare, answer questions, follow up
with what happened, and make references.
Teaching six times a day is absurd.
And all you can do is just try to survive.
So that's, again, another barrier to educational change.
So that is barrier number two which is--
the second we'll call the [INAUDIBLE].
So it's the focus on outputs and reward and punishment.
And then the next barrier is another social wide factor
called Taylorism.
So Taylor--
it's related a bit to Behaviorism.
So Frederick Taylor was a mechanical engineer.
Let's see, when did he live?
About 1850ish to about 1915 or 1920.
1856 to 1915.
So what he did--
he's the originator of time and motion studies.
So time and motion studies watch how someone, for
example, is riveting bolts onto a car.
And you watch every single movement and you optimize it.
And you say, oh, actually if you have the screwdriver on
this side, well then when the car door comes down this way
you can do this with much shorter movement than trying
to do that.
So they said you can break every task down with a lots of
little little fragments you can optimize.
Now, this basically took the whole country by storm in the
1910s or so.
Now, how did that happen?
Well, this was a time of industrial unrest.
And unions were striking demanded higher wages.
And there was the Interstate Commerce Commission, which
regulated the railroad fares.
And so the railroad attorney, Louis Brandeis, later Supreme
Court Justice, argued the in front of the Interstate
Commerce Commission, well, actually we don't have to
raise fares.
And we can actually give the unions some of what they want
without doing any of that provided we
implement Taylor's system.
So the idea of Taylor's system was a way of basically trying
to prevent the unions from striking, but not distribute
any of the wealth for management, but just make
things more efficient.
So it was what we now call the Cult of Efficiency.
And this Cult of Efficiency I would say probably could only
happen in a frontier society, like America.
So there's a completely fascinating book, which I
highly recommend reading, The Great Frontier, by Walter
Prescott Webb.
So what he looks at is he looks at the effect on
European society of the European discovery of the
Americas, so around 1500 BC.
Columbus sailed and all the explorers were going a sail.
So what happened?
Well, before 1500 Europe was extremely crowded, lots of
people, very few resources, very little land, pretty much
deforested, not much fuel.
And so it was a hard place to live.
With the discovery of the new world, that switched.
There was now a ton of land and not enough people,
especially after the Indians all got small pox and died.
There was a ton of natural resources-- wood, minerals,
eventually oil.
So around 1500, so the world society changed.
At least the European society.
And with it, changed conceptions of how society
should work.
And in the frontier societies, basically everything was there
for the taking.
You just had to work to get it.
So in a frontier society, basically work was a religion.
That was the religion of a frontier society.
And you can still see that in America.
How many weeks of holidays do people have completely
guaranteed?
I think zero.
And whereas in-- for example, England, I think it was four
weeks, maybe statutory minimum.
In Germany, it's five or six weeks.
So in the frontier society, work will be your religion.
And it's likely to be placed where ideas such as Taylorism
will grow, and sprout, and thrive.
So Taylorism spread throughout the entire country, including
to the schools.
And you can still see it in school.
School is considered a factory.
And the inputs are the students.
And we want to do that as efficiently as possible.
Think class size, giant buildings to [INAUDIBLE]
to produce more product at the end.
So this is one of the early examples of a Taylor school.
The Platoon School.
So this was an elementary school.
What they did was they--
this is absurd.
They enrolled 10% to 70% more children than there were seats
for in the classrooms.
So [INAUDIBLE]
efficiency.
This is done by dumping the 10% to 70% on the playground,
into the auditorium or basement.
So by keeping all the children rotating from room to room,
teacher to teacher, so that the same 10% to 70%
[INAUDIBLE] way longer than 30 consecutive minutes to get
into classrooms.
So even the 6-year-old children have 6 or 7 teachers
a day and as many as 12 or 13 in some cities.
And teachers handle as many as 400 people through the day and
1,000 a week.
So the terrorists came to the school and said, hey, look,
these schools-- it's all very relevant to have small schools
for people, but really, it's not efficient.
Look, there's all this inefficiency you could squeeze
out of the system.
And so you can see probably MIT's going to be going
through something like that with the budget cuts, all the
[INAUDIBLE].
And trying to squeeze the life--
I mean, the inefficiencies out of the place.
So what they said was they said, oh, look, there are all
these rooms that aren't being used.
You have the gym that's not used all the time.
There's the lunch room that's only used at lunch time.
That's crazy.
There's an empty room there.
There's the playground that's only used at recess.
What we should do is we should rotate the
kids all the way through.
And you'll actually see that in schools now.
Many of them have lunch period that starts at 10:00 AM, and
the lunch period goes till almost 2:00, because it's a
much more efficient use of the lunch room.
But ironically, they had to cancel recess, because recess
is inefficient.
Recess is not efficient for doing standardized test
problems, so you guys will see that as well.
So again, they called it efficiency.
That was back in the '20s [INAUDIBLE].
It's from Raymond Callahan's book called Education and the
Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces that have
Shaped the Administration of Public School.
It's about Taylorism in the public schools.
But it continues to today.
In No Child Left Behind, you can see is a
perfect example of it.
[INAUDIBLE]
wrote, he said, "The long lines of marching children
that look to be like nothing so much as the lines of
uncompleted Ford cars in the factory, moving always on with
a screw put on or a [INAUDIBLE] tighten as they
passed-- standardized, mechanical, pitiful.
When the factory system carried into the public
school, which needs only the closing time whistle to make
complete [INAUDIBLE] with giant, great industrial
plants."
So there you have another fundamentally
important social factor.
[INAUDIBLE].
So behaviorism and Taylorism are sort of lumped together.
Which is the joining of the school and the factory and the
educational system and the social order.
So that I'll call the social history of education.
So education-- and America was one of the leading countries
in this, in making schools free and required--
compulsory free education.
[INAUDIBLE] public school.
So this-- in Massachusetts, actually-- our state was the
leading state in American [INAUDIBLE].
And so Horace Mann in the 1840s--
he was one of the leading educational reformers.
And he was arguing to businessmen.
OK, you really should be willing to have higher taxes
to make schools free and required.
Now, why would businesses want to part with their profits to
pay for schools?
But he says, look, there's all these benefits from schools.
The schooled workers are more docile and quick in applying
themselves to work.
They had better domestic and social habits, you know,
punctuality and fidelity.
They have higher punctuality and fidelity in the
performance of their duties.
So basically, he was arguing for school as a method of
social control.
Now, there was a strange feature in my high school,
which I never understood till I actually read about this.
History of Horace Mann called the School of America, which
was that-- so I experienced this first-hand.
One day in my high school, this racist student attacked
me and called me nasty names.
And so when I fought back--
and we sort of fought to a draw, which was good because
he was trying to do serious damage.
As a result, the school policy was that whoever was in the
fight was suspended for three days.
So we were both automatically suspended, and then had to go
to court to figure out who was really at fault.
But by then, of course, I'd already been
suspended for two days.
So I was suspended for three days and I got to find out,
what are the policies when you miss school?
So it was very interesting.
So first of all, if you're late to school three times in
a quarter, then you fail for that quarter.
If you fail in the second quarter of a semester, you
fail the semester.
If you fail in the second semester of a course, you fail
the entire year.
And if you failed a required course, like English--
math or English required-- then you failed the entire
year and had to repeat the whole grade.
OK, so they were very, very, very sticklers about
punctuality.
But they didn't really care what your
grades were that much.
You could get C's and D's on tests and you'd do much better
than if you missed four days of school.
Now, my teachers were nice in this case.
Said, no, don't worry about it.
Good thing you fought and stood up for yourself.
We won't do any of that stuff.
So it was always puzzling to me why punctuality was so much
more important in this public school, which was supposed to
be one of the leading public schools [INAUDIBLE], than the
actual grades you got and how much you learned.
When I read the history of Horace Mann, I
thought, oh, yeah.
That actually made perfect sense.
The purpose of the school wasn't necessarily to teach
people to think and really understand.
The social history behind it was to produce people who are
basically docile workers for the factory system, which was
just coming around in the 1840s.
So there were many comments along those lines.
One of the arguments also for the school was similar.
It was a resolution that the best police for our cities,
the lowest insurance of our houses, the permanent security
for our banks, the most effective means of preventing
pauperism, vice, and crime, and the only sure defense of
our country are our common schools.
They mean the public, free schools that are required.
So again, it's seen as a defense
of property, basically.
This was true-- so when I say America, it's not just
America, actually.
England in 1870 passed an education act that required
public schooling.
[INAUDIBLE].
And the arguments in England were almost exactly the same.
"Would not the policemen be better employed in assisting
the work of the school master by collecting [INAUDIBLE] for
school attendance the willfully neglected children
who are [INAUDIBLE] recruits for the great army of crime."
We wanted to prevent the working classes from engaging
in those vain strikes which end in 99 out of 100 leaving
them in worse condition than before.
We wanted to keep them from habits of waste and
improvidence that some knowledge of the succession of
events in life, such as education could supply.
So in other words, education has a class role.
So that history of education, it still permeates it.
And people were very open about this.
These weren't secret documents that people wrote in their
conspiratory council.
These were openly discussed, saying this is why you should
pay for schools.
I would say it was even quite a soph-- reached quite a
sophisticated level.
So William Whewell, he was master of Trinity College,
Cambridge, in the 1860s, I think.
So when he was a university professor, before becoming
master at Trinity, he was commenting on the difference
between the European and the, say, English and American
educational system.
And he said, well, actually, they had [INAUDIBLE]
problem in Europe.
And the problem [INAUDIBLE].
So he was recommending the teaching of mathematics.
He said, "The mathematical doctrines
were fixed and permanent.
No new system of geometry can supersede the old.
Not only so, but even the old books remain in use."
So now contrasting that, "The fixed and constant nature of
mathematics was not likely to promote the critical spirit
[INAUDIBLE]
France and Germany, where too much attention to the more
provisional and contentious observational sciences had
been partly responsible for the imminent general hostility
to the existing institutions in their country."
So in other words, we should teach mathematics because it
has one answer.
[INAUDIBLE]
conclude about society, too.
It has the one answer, which is the society we have.
Whereas, if you teach observational sciences, social
sciences, people might start questioning way too much.
So there was not just schools, but what should we teach in
our schools?
So that history is very, very hard to overcome because it's
so deeply embedded into the foundation of a school.
We will find its purpose is like that.
Such purposes keep creeping up whenever you
try to change things.
So there are all kinds of things that are crazy in the
schools that we do that you don't necessarily need to do
in the school.
For example, grading.
Why do schools have to grade?
People think, oh, well, how will other people know?
If other people want to know what students can do, let them
worry about it.
Why does the school have to do that?
Sure, it's school.
It could tell students, look you're not learning this idea
very well, you could spend more time on that.
You're learning this idea really good.
You don't need to spend any more time on that.
That kind of evaluation, for the student's benefit, is
quite useful.
But why should that be publicized to other people?
Well, those are two separate questions, but they're
automatically conflated because-- partly, the purpose
of the school is to get people to accept their
place in the society.
There was a very interesting experiment along those lines.
I don't know if you know it.
It was blues eyes, brown eyes.
So this is related to tracking and grading.
So I don't think you could do this experiment today.
But what they was they took--
I think it was third graders.
And they came into the class and they said,
OK, you third graders.
We've just found out that the blue-eyed children are more
intelligent than brown-eyed children.
And so we're going to have to teach them separately.
So they then separated into two classrooms and they taught
them exactly the same stuff.
And then they tested them a while later and they found the
blue-eyed children did much, much better than the
brown-eyed children.
So sure, the test results must have been correct.
Actually what they did is afterwards they said,
actually, no we fucked up--
sorry.
[LAUGHTER]
We screwed up.
And actually, we got it backwards.
It was the brown-eyed children who were more intelligent than
the blue-eyed children.
So we had to switch the classrooms.
So they switched the classrooms.
And of course, they taught them exactly the same stuff.
And what do you think happened [INAUDIBLE]?
They flipped.
That's an example of the effect of
tracking and grading.
So what's the result of that is that, well, students then
accept their place.
They think, oh, yeah.
I am the dumb student.
I am the bad reader.
Oh, I'm just not so good at math.
It's my fault.
Rather than-- well, it's the way it's taught.
It's that I came from a family where we just didn't have much
money, even for food.
And the society just didn't provide that, so I was
hungry every day.
So there's all kinds of social explanations which you're
taught not to look at.
And even the very problems that are done in school tend
to reinforce the social order that we have.
So an example of that, to really show how strong that
tendency is, is look at the problems that are done about
percentages.
The percentage problems are always of the following form.
Johnny has $1,000 which he lends to Jane at 6% interest.
How much interest does Jane pay after two years?
Well, there's many interesting features about that.
First of all, Johnny makes the money.
The guy has the money and not the woman.
The woman is the borrower.
So now, with feminism, we've made it so that Jane
can have the money.
But you haven't changed the fundamental problem, which is
that the problem is reinforcing the
idea of money lending.
[INAUDIBLE].
What about the following problem, which you never see,
which is also [INAUDIBLE]
interesting percentage problem?
The hourly minimum wage is $7 an hour.
If somebody works 40 hours a week, what's their salary?
OK, it's this much.
It's roughly $14,000 a year.
What percentage of the federal poverty line
is $14,000 a year?
That's an equally interesting percentage problem, but it has
a different social message.
So the schools have chosen, basically [INAUDIBLE] social
pressures that push towards one kind of problem, one kind
of grading, one kind of system.
And this is despite what people
know about these things.
So blue eyes, brown eyes experiment shows what's the
detrimental effect [INAUDIBLE].
Many people say, well, actually, [INAUDIBLE].
Another example is tracking.
So tracking where people know that it's harmful.
So a friend of mine in New York, he went to an elite
private school.
It's a small, elite private school.
And one year they decided to introduce tracking.
So tracking is advanced math, median math, OK math, and
remedial math.
And after a year, there was a parental revolt and they
abolished it.
The parents said, this is outrageous.
We're not paying $25,000 a year for you to tell our kid
that our kid is not intelligent.
Get rid of it.
Whereas, it's considered perfectly acceptable to do
that to kids in public schools.
So people know, yet the thing goes on.
So whenever you see something like that happening, you can
bet there's some really deeply embedded social history--
the purposes of the schools.
And related to the social history is the social history
of our society.
So these tendencies, they're not immutable.
All social factors have changed in the past and all of
them can change again.
But in order to change them, It's important to be aware.
You have a question?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
I just had a question with the whole concepts of getting the
grades, which I can see is a benefit in some ways.
But I feel like [INAUDIBLE]
to just stop grading children, I feel like at least at the
level of college acceptance, there's still going to be some
level of evaluating the children.
And eventually, it's just going to be that some other
form of evaluation is leading to this separation, even if
it's not just by numbers.
Saying [INAUDIBLE].
And is there any way you could really deal with it without
having grades?
PROFESSOR: Well, I think you've identified the
fundamental problem, which is the competition.
So it's sort of like the water bed.
If you sit on one side of the water bed, the
other side goes up.
So if you reduce the competition in one place, it
might increase in other ways.
So for example, you have no grades in high schools, but
then you have a really, really high stakes university
entrance exam, which is not
necessarily the ideal solution.
I think the ideal solution is that you make good
universities accessible to all people.
Or, for example, if you make it so that you don't need a
university degree to earn a decent salary.
AUDIENCE: But is that ever going to be possible?
PROFESSOR: Well, I always quote Margaret Mead on that,
"Never underestimate the power of a small number of people
[INAUDIBLE]
to make social change." And not just a small number, but
people in general.
So all things that we now think are absurd and just
horrible were once normal.
Slavery was considered absolutely normal.
And in fact, the view of the inferior races [INAUDIBLE].
But all these things that we think are horrible now--
torture--
are now considered just beyond the pale because of social
[INAUDIBLE].
So my main point here is that these are structural,
fundamental, large issues.
And they require structural and large society-wide changes
to fundamentally change them.
But it goes both ways.
The schools themselves produce people who reinforce the
social structures.
So if people had come through the blue eyes, brown eyes
experiment and they feel themselves that they are not
worthy, they're less likely to try and make a social change
to make a just society.
So it goes both ways.
Improving the schools and the educational system improves
the society.
Improving the society improves the schools.
AUDIENCE: I was wondering if you could take advantage of
that blue-eyed, brown-eyed thing, like to say--
one could say something like, oh, people in that class
always did really well in their future physics classes.
And then everyone could just be like, oh, great.
[INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: It's a great point.
So the point was, could you take advantage of the blue
eyes, brown eyes experiment to just tell people, look,
everyone in my physics class does great.
And so just, actually, make people do well?
There is actually a fair amount of data that does work.
So [INAUDIBLE] wasn't phrased in exactly that way, but the
example I'm thinking of is women's colleges.
So a large portion of women in science Ph.D's come from
all-women's colleges.
And I think that's partly that effect.
In the regular society, women are generally told, look,
[INAUDIBLE] the Barbie doll that was taken off,
[INAUDIBLE]
Barbie doll that for a while said, oh, math.
Math is hard.
I don't do math, or something like that.
That's what it taught.
It's really amazing that they thought they could do that.
So there was huge outcry and they had to take it-- some
people did spoofs.
They put that as a Ken doll and they put a big, deep voice
in the Barbie doll just to play on that.
But that social attitude does permeate the society.
And it's much less in the all-women's colleges.
So places like Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Smith where
women are-- it's just expected.
Of course you're going to do well in science.
Everyone around here does well in science.
It's not considered anything special.
It's considered a good thing, but it's not [INAUDIBLE]
to women.
So they already took away the blue eyes or the brown eyes
and just put everyone [INAUDIBLE].
So I think that is a reason for not criticizing kids.
When you're raising young children or teaching them
things, don't criticize them.
And same with grades at a university.
Grades should be so the students can figure out what
they need to learn more of, but not as a way of making
them feel bad.
That's so hard to do when people have been graded or
degraded for so long.
Question, yeah.
AUDIENCE: So I wanted to go back to your earlier point
about competition, how it takes it away from one place
and it ends up another place.
PROFESSOR: I don't say it's conserved.
But you have to think about the whole system.
Yeah, so I agree with the question.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
Not only it doesn't scale because of limited resources.
You can't keep everybody in teacher one on one.
It would be great if it took, but the system
won't work that way.
We won't have enough teachers.
So there's always going to be competition for resources.
I just want to--
PROFESSOR: Well, OK, so the question of competition.
So let me close with one quote, and then I'll come to
your question.
OK, so it's a good question.
So to continue the rest of what Einstein said.
So remember, before Einstein said that one had to cram all
this stuff into one's mind, whether one liked it or not.
"This [INAUDIBLE]
effect that after I passed the final exam, I found the
consideration of any scientific problems
distasteful to me for the entire year.
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern
methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the
[? whole new ?]
curiosity required.
For this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation,
stands mainly in need of freedom.
Without this, it goes to wrack and ruin without fail."
So I hope that when you're out in the world, when you're
teaching and raising your children, that you find ways
to make more freedom in education.
So that when the students actually that you produce
improve the society, and they then, can help you improve the
schools and the rest of the education system.
OK, your question about competition.
It is a fundamental one.
And about competition for
resources, you have to really--
so make a radical analysis.
So radical in Latin means to the root.
So you have to get to the root of the problem.
So the root of the problem, you can see it in the extreme
case of India where there are so many people and so few
comfortable jobs, and the route to the comfortable job
is in education.
That's there's intense competition for
tutors and all this.
Not because people want to learn, but because that's the
means to actually not starve on the street.
So what that shows is that not everyone wants to learn with a
tutor differential equations.
But a lot of people are learning differential
equations with a tutor because that means they'll get a
degree, which means they can work in investment bank, which
means-- well, it used to mean that they would be
comfortable.
So part of the issue is of redistributing the wealth in
the society, so that you're comfortable whether or not you
had a tutorial in differential equations
or one-on-one tutorial.
Then, when the fears are taken away, people are much more
likely to do things for intrinsic reasons.
So the people who really are interested in
that, then do that.
The people who are really interested in teaching that
will teach that.
And you'll have a redirection of social resources in much
more productive way.
But that requires, for example, the value of, say,
guaranteed income, guaranteed health care.
Maybe even guaranteed basic schooling for everyone, so
that those things are features of competition.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: But the system based on competition is quite
self-regulating, right?
PROFESSOR: I don't know about that.
So a good example-- is the system based on competition
self-regulating?
I'm not sure about that.
I mean, the mortgage derivative market is a great
example that-- actually, what happened was-- you can think
of it in electrical engineering terms.
You had--
let's do it under continuous time.
So you had some sort of slow, pokey banking system with
feedback loops and the poles were [INAUDIBLE].
[INAUDIBLE], nice decay constant.
And then, the competition to make more money quickly--
well, one way to make more money was to trade
[INAUDIBLE].
What did that do?
It increased the gaming of feedback loops and [INAUDIBLE]
the poles this way.
And eventually, some of the poles crossed the axis and you
got huge nonlinear oscillations, which grew to--
huge oscillations grew to nonlinear [INAUDIBLE] and
broke a whole bunch of the world banking system.
So it's actually not necessarily true that
competition is self-regulating, because there
are all these nonlinearities and feedbacks and delays in
the system, there's no guarantee of that.
And one of the harms of the competition is it puts people
against each other.
And what'd you much rather have is people working
together and helping each other.
Because as studies quoted by [INAUDIBLE] showed, that
actually-- if you want it to go a high level, [INAUDIBLE].
That's how it happens.
Not through competition and dog-eat-dog, but people
cooperating and sharing knowledge.
And what we wanted to do, I would say in our educational
system, is shift it more towards there and free people
[INAUDIBLE] for creating the [INAUDIBLE].
Instead of [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: So we don't determine the pay of different
people in the society based on the
competition, what do you propose?
Do you propose that somebody else decides [INAUDIBLE]?
PROFESSOR: Well, we already have all kinds of ways.
I mean, you can have regulations.
You could, for example.
Say, I mean, income tax is a social way of deciding what's
worthwhile and what's not.
You could say, OK, we're going to tax peoples' income the
99%, beyond 200,000.
[INAUDIBLE].
And we're going to use that money to pay teachers more.
That's a social choice because saying the teachers'
salaries are this.
If you think it's a worthwhile thing to do we could say look,
we think bridge building is really important it
revitalizes the [INAUDIBLE].
We're going to pay people to do that.
Those are social choices, just like anything.
It doesn't have to be permissive.
All right?
So we can change our educational system that way.
The barrier to it is that our thoughts are limited by the
educational system that we went through.
So in one way that's bad news, because there was this giant
feedback loop keeping things the way they are.
On the other hand, because there's a feedback loop, the
educational system affects the society and vice versa.
Well, it means you can work anywhere on the feedback loop
you want that you think is interesting.
You could try to improve the society directly.
You could try to improve the educational system in
[INAUDIBLE].
You can try to skip the feedback wherever you see it.
Insert something good in here.
And you improve things for everybody that way.
OK, so if you could fill out the question sheet.
[INAUDIBLE]
put on the website who [INAUDIBLE]
as well as referenced [INAUDIBLE].
And next time we'll have a summary of all of the second
[INAUDIBLE]
as well as questions from you.
Because I know I have a few questions that I have to
answer plus [INAUDIBLE].
So we'll try to answer all your questions [INAUDIBLE].
Answers from lecture 10 to questions
generated in lecture 9.
PROFESSOR: OK, lots of questions from last time.
So I won't answer all of them because otherwise we'll
probably spend the entire time just on the
questions from last time.
Which maybe I should have anticipated since it's a
central topic and one that connects to not just
education, but directly to society, the topic on
political barriers to educational change.
So I'll answer some of those.
But then I wanted to also give you a chance to ask any
questions that have been unresolved that have come up
in your teaching or that you think might
come up in your teaching.
One of my old teachers, Don [? Knuth, ?] always reserved
the last session for student questions.
And I think it's a really good philosophy to tie everything
together, tie all the loose ends up.
So I call it your turn.
OK, but part of your turn was answering some of your
questions from before.
Is social education a bad thing?
And so the comment was, I'm still not convinced social
education is a bad thing.
Obviously it gives a lot of control to whoever gets to
make the decision of what constitutes a good citizen.
But some of the social agendas in public schooling were good.
For example, diversity, recycling.
And that's true.
So I don't want to be misinterpreted as saying
society is a bad thing.
I think society naturally educates people.
You pick up your values from people around you.
Your parents give you ethical norms.
Schools give you ethical norms.
And I think it's exactly what the question said, it said who
gets to decide?
Is it some group of elites who decide or is it the whole
society collectively deciding what is good for everybody.
And what's good for everybody may not be one thing.
It may be the decision is well, different people need or
want different things.
And we think a good society is based on the idea that people
have freedom to follow their interests.
And also, some required work that everyone need to learn,
for example, reading.
But then what you read may be up to you.
So yeah, I don't think all social education is a bad
thing at all.
I think all education is social.
There's no way to avoid that.
Inherently we're social animals.
And it's the question of what's in that education?
And it's the same thing, political
barriers educational change.
It's not that politics is inherently a bad thing.
The question is, what kind of politics do we have?
And how can we make that better and more humane?
So for example, I think recycling is a good example of
making things more humane.
OK, if competition demotivates some people does it motivate
other people?
Does eliminating competition reduce maximum performance?
Other than the studies referred to by Alfie Kohn, I'm
not sure if the answer to that is known.
I mean, there's certainly studies on how, for example,
competition leads to a lot of waste.
The classic example in economics is suppose you--
and this was actually a real example--
give people 160 acres of land--
I think that was the a 1/4 plot-- or 640 acres of land
way out in the west.
And the rule is whoever gets there first gets to claim that
piece of land.
And you get there and you stick posts up and you put a
fence there.
That's roughly how the Homestead Act worked.
Well, the problem with that is that it does
cause a lot of waste.
Which is that tons of people might run out and
chase after that land.
And make a whole bunch of effort buying train tickets,
go on a wagon with their whole family out west.
But only one person gets the land.
So a whole bunch of people actually put in a lot of
wasted effort.
So that's a classic example of how competition
can be quite wasteful.
Other examples, where exclusive
rights do that, or patents.
So as is the case, a patent's only given to one person--
or the inventor--
and you have 15 people or 30 people
trying to invent something.
So the more the competition, in this case, the more waste
is going to happen.
Because all these people are going to invest funds.
But only one person is going to get the exclusive right.
And the other people are just left high and dry.
So there's many examples where eliminating competition will
actually increase the amount of social wealth contributed
towards useful ends.
But to the direct question of whether it reduces maximum
forms, I don't know if that's known.
The studies in Alfie Kohn's article pointed to how
competition reduces high-level performance.
For example, complex cognitive tasks.
Maximum performance, probably, one would need to define that
pretty closely.
And then one could do studies on it.
OK, so there was an interesting question about the
understanding multiplication.
So the understanding multiplication example I gave,
where people could multiply 6 by 3 and get 18 but then
couldn't come up with a word problem that used 6 by 3.
Or they could, but the word problem was Johnny buys 6
apples on Monday.
He buys 3 apples on Tuesday.
So 6 times 3 is 18.
So that was, maybe, a bit unfair to ask students.
Because writing a story draws on skills beyond mathematical
understanding such as imagination and language.
So it's true, it does draw on those skills.
But I don't think those are separate from mathematical
understanding.
If you can't explain the mathematics that you in you,
you don't really understand it.
When I was an undergraduate a friend of mine and I used to
torment the math grad students.
It was sort of unfair.
And we were really curious about math.
We were fascinated by math.
And we wanted to know what people do in graduate school.
And only later did I realize we were
actually tormenting them.
We weren't doing it intentionally.
We would ask them, OK, what are you working on?
Sometimes we had classes with them or we'd see them in the
math lounge.
And they would say, oh, blah, blah, the theorem.
And we were undergraduates and young.
And we didn't really know what the theorem was.
So we'd say, well, can you give us an example?
And that produced just deer in the headlights.
Example?
That was completely foreign and not at all what they were
thinking about.
It was completely out of their space.
And later I actually realized that that was actually a very
fair question.
And if you wanted to test whether people understood what
they were working on.
And I found that things I can give examples on I understand.
The things I can't, I don't understand.
Another example that is Feynman.
He said, I have always found that I don't understand
anything unless I can give a freshman lecture on it.
Or equivalently, people asked him to give
a lecture on something.
He said, no, I don't understand.
I don't understand that well enough.
I'll have to first work out a freshman lecture on it.
Then I can explain it better.
And so there's famous lectures of his where he's explained
anti particles and spin.
And he finally got it to a level where he thinks it was
actually suitable for a freshman, so first-year
college students.
So it's a brilliant lecture.
If you search for the Dirac Memorial Lectures by Feynman
you'll find that lecture there.
And it's fascinating.
So it shows the level of how hard work it is to actually
understand something of that level.
And almost essential to that process is examples.
So examples, explaining, understanding, I think those
are intrinsic to mathematical understanding.
So it wasn't an unfair test.
It was actually a test of high-level mathematical
understanding.
One point was made, Swarthmore was not a women's college.
Yeah, that's true.
I mentioned that women's colleges were much more
successful in producing women Ph.D. students in science.
And I listed Bryn Mawr and Smith.
And then I listed Swarthmore, which was not correct.
That was crosstalk between Bryn Mawr is and Swarthmore.
I grouped them all, Bryn Mawr, Haverford,
and Swarthmore together.
So Swarthmore is a coeducational college.
And I meant Bryn Mawr and Smith.
And I was thinking of Wellesley as well.
So Wellesley is an all-women's college, unless they've
changed lately?
No, OK.
I mean every once in a while colleges think of changing.
But they're still all women.
Now, people asked for references and further
information about that.
So I'll put a link on the website.
But it's Barbara Whitten at the Colorado College physics
department, she's done the most extensive studies on not
just what makes for women being successful in science,
but in general, what makes for students in
say, physics majors.
She was the chair of the Colorado College physics
department when I interviewed there.
What makes for a successful undergraduate major program?
So this is quite interesting for people
interested in teaching.
Not just revising one course, but revising an entire
department curriculum.
So she's done cross-institutional studies of
the culture of departments and what facets of the culture are
responsible for students continuing on in science.
And what she's found is that the same features that help
women continue in science help everybody.
So I highly recommend her work.
And I'll put a link to her web page on our course web page.
Barbara Whitten.
I think it's W-I-T-T-E-N. But it might be W-H-I-T-T-E-N, the
Colorado College physics department.
OK, it's clear that I don't like No Child Left Behind.
But would I do if I were the Secretary of
Education in this country?
Yeah, well, Hell would probably freeze over before
that happened.
There's a long vetting process before people become that.
And you have to show your loyalty to pretty much every
aspect of the current system before that happens, before
you're appointed to such a post.
But if Hell froze over what would I do?
I think one of the fundamental problems with education in
America is the vast inequalities
in funding, in resources.
So the wealthy school districts have two, three,
four times as much funds per student as
the poor school districts.
And there's a good part of that.
I mean, the disparity is bad.
But there's a reason for the disparity.
And the reason isn't all bad.
The reason is that America education is a local affair.
It's controlled by local authorities.
So the constitution reserves a bunch of powers for the
federal government, printing money, making war, various
things like that.
Then it says, OK, then the states can do a bunch of stuff
like, for example, regulate voting.
And then it says anything not explicitly given to the
national or state governments is given to the people.
Or in fact I think it says-- this is the 10th or 11th
commandment--
especially devolution.
It says any powers not given to the federal government go
to the state.
If they're given to the state.
And if not given to the state they go to the people.
And so education is in that category.
It's nowhere mentioned in the constitution, education.
So it's not given to the states.
It's not given to the federal government.
So in America it's given to the local authorities.
Now the problem is that different communities have
different wealth bases.
Because there's some very rich suburbs.
And for a while the cities were wealthy.
But then people fled.
All the wealthy people fled the cities in the 1950s during
suburbanization.
So the centers of cities became very poor.
So there's vast disparities in wealth there.
And I think one thing that the federal government could do is
actually just correct those.
So there've been lawsuits along those lines for forcing
state governments to try to correct that because there is
some role for the states in education.
I'm not sure where that comes from in the constitution.
But there are state boards of education.
And I think it's Vermont and New Jersey, there've been
lawsuits in state courts to force the states to equalize
funding across school districts.
So somehow mitigating the differential in
property-tax revenues.
And I think the federal government
could do that as well.
So those lawsuits are based on--
I'm pretty sure-- the 14th Amendment, equal
protection of the laws.
Now, there's no reason the federal government couldn't do
that as well.
So I would do that as step number one.
No strings attached, here, let's just
equalize the resources.
And then we can worry about what we're
going to do after that.
Whereas No Child Left Behind, what it does, it makes the
resources actually, more unequal.
Because it tests all the schools.
And the schools that are going to do badly are the ones with
less resources.
And then they're going to get punished for doing badly.
So I would take the opposite approach.
Is there a particular country's educational system
that I particularly admire?
That's a good question.
Again, I think it's local.
There's local educational experiments that I admire a
lot and occasionally larger-scale ones.
A whole country, not so much.
I mean, there's states in India, for
example, for awhile Kerala--
I don't know if this is still true-- but had an incredibly
high literacy rate, I think 98%, Which was much higher
than anywhere else in India and matches literacy
levels in the West.
And this has many benefits.
So for example, one study about population is that
population growth is slowed down the most
by educating women.
And Kerala actually, that 98% included women not just men.
So I think that's an educational system worth
looking into.
And places that I admire, there are local pockets.
The free schools in the 1960s.
There's a few places like that still in America.
There's the Sudbury Valley School.
Maybe it's 50 miles west of here.
It's in the Sudbury Valley.
And that's modeled on Summerhill, one of the
earliest free schools in England.
So actually, it has its good and bad.
So Summerhill, there's no required classes.
And there's no required curriculum.
And the students can go to class or not
and can play outside.
So that would work really well.
I think that works really well if all the
teachers are really inspiring.
Because then the students would be automatically drawn
in to learn stuff.
But if the teachers aren't very skilled then you have
problems with that.
So I think it worked mixed there.
But the potential is good and the freedom is really good.
And it teaches people to be responsible.
But it has its downsides.
So I have a personal experience with that.
Which is when I was three.
So I was born in England.
And we lived there for a few years.
And then we moved to New Jersey.
And I guess I was four maybe, my parents thought about
sending me to England to go to Summerhill
because this was 1973.
So it was in the middle of lots of
political change in America.
Free schools were a big part of the cultural discussion.
And my parents believed in those values, which
I'm glad they did.
And they thought, OK, let's see about sending Sanjay to
Summerhill.
So we took a trip back to England.
And they visited.
And the way they tell me what happened, was that everything
was fine except then they were wandering around with the
teacher on the tour.
And they saw these marks on the door.
And they said, what are those marks on the door?
Because they believed in the philosophy of letting children
do what they want to do and follow their interests.
But they said, oh, what are those marks on the door there?
And they said, oh, that's Johnny.
He likes to stand over there and throw knives at the door.
So then my parents thought, well, maybe that's just a
little too unsupervised.
Especially if the child is across the Atlantic from us.
And it's not really easy to see how things are going and
intervene if things aren't going so well.
So they decided not to send me to Summerhill.
But they sent me to progressive nursery schools
locally as well.
And I have good memories of those too.
So yeah, I would say there's a fundamental point in there,
which is there's a difference between freedom and license.
And so this is a distinction not often made.
So license is the bad pole and freedom is the good.
This is how I'm splitting the two parts.
So license is just do whatever you want.
Take drugs.
Be a prostitute.
Do whatever you want.
You're free.
Well, that's not really freedom.
You're licensed.
Whereas freedom--
in my mind-- has some intrinsic regulation on it.
You're free.
You're a free creature.
You have responsibility to use that freedom well.
And license doesn't have any of that responsibility.
So I think when one is designing curricula like that
you have to try to make the norm such that freedom is
promoted and not license.
Now, to some extent, you can't avoid a bit of license.
Because, for example, the Summerhill teachers say that
when students come from regular schools where they've
been basically competing with each other, basically feeling
beaten down, some of them come to Summerhill and just do
nothing for a year.
They just sit outside and play on the swings and in the
creek, just for a year.
It takes them a year of detoxification before they are
ready to go back into the classroom and
learn things formally.
So you could say that's a bit of license.
But maybe that's a bit of necessary license.
Or maybe they're actually just
discovering how to use freedom.
And it takes them a year because they never had any
practice with that.
So I think it's important to keep
those two pieces separate.
OK, so now there's so many questions.
OK so there's two that I think are particularly
important to discuss.
So there was a comment that one of the Alfie Kohn readings
was off putting because he made comments about people
with different political views than his and he seemed like a
left-wing nut.
And that, therefore, that reading shouldn't be assigned.
So yeah, I agree that if you have quite a different
political view than Alfie Kohn it can be a bit off putting.
But actually, I think that's a good thing.
Now why is that?
It's because it's fundamentally important to
find views that challenge you and read them anyway.
So as you probably guessed, most of my views are not
mainstream.
So I do that all the time whether I like it or not, just
when I open the paper, or if I happen to watch television,
which I actually don't hardly at all.
But if I open the newspaper or read things, just right next
to my office there was a teaching magazine.
I forget what is called.
Prism maybe?
I forget the name of the magazine.
But it's on the magazine display.
And I just was walking by.
And turned my head this way to read the title
on the front cover.
And it said cash incentives are proving successful for
promoting student learning.
So this was against everything I believed in.
So if I have the time I'll actually read the article.
But I'm surrounded by things I disagree with.
And I think that's actually pretty healthy.
So if you disagree with the article read
it all the way through.
And the law professor Cass Sonstein from Chicago--
who's talked about as being a possible Supreme
Court nominee by Obama--
he's written eloquently about the dangers of not doing that.
Because it wasn't so possible 50 years ago.
There was large-circulation newspapers and maybe two,
three in each town.
And people read those.
There was a common discourse through that.
But now, everyone can get their own particular news on
the internet.
Right?
You can get your own views from this small journal or
from that particular newspaper or this person writing an
article that you happen to agree with.
And the danger is of people just collecting into small
little micro communities, where each community just
agrees with itself and only reads things and discusses
things that they agree with.
And that's very unhealthy for democracy he points out, which
I think is right.
So I think it's very important to actually seek out things
you disagree with.
And so if I happen to give you a reading that at first you
disagreed with it's not such a bad thing.
And it belongs, for sure, in an academic curriculum.
Because that's one of the purposes of an academic
curriculum.
The word university comes from-- it has Uni in it, one.
So the idea is it's one universe.
All ideas are open discussion, even ones we disagree with.
OK, so let's see.
OK, then the related one is, I find it off putting when I put
my personal biases and opinions as absolute.
For example, programming--
and this is related to the last point--
programming LaTeX may be easier and more
convenient for me.
But it's possible to develop familiarity with other
software and systems that makes them close to
equivalent, if not equivalent.
That may be true.
Though I think there's fundamental reasons to
wonder about it.
Just because By not using a system such as LaTeX or Tex.
What's common about all of them is that you program them.
And by not using a system like that, you give up the ability
to program.
And that is a huge loss.
You can see it, how much can computers do?
The way computers are so powerful is
because we program them.
And the fundamental recipe for programming is--
at least when I teach it--
this--
So this is how the fundamental idea of programming I think.
So you do something and then you do it again.
And when you're doing it again, you're like,
oh, I just did this.
Maybe I should write a program.
Nah, I'm too lazy.
But then the third time it happens again.
And you're like, OK, bloody hell, this
time write a program.
OK, so basically the recipe is the third time you're about to
do something, don't do it.
Write a program to do it.
So now you have a little mini program that you can reuse.
Now it's a new module.
And you can use that module to build still new programs.
You can build a huge power abstraction.
So for example, in the figure-drawing program you can
actually write programs that generate trees.
And then you can write a five-line script.
And you say, OK, feed that through my
tree-generating program.
And it'll make a tree that you can use in your figures, in
your talks, or in your books.
So I'll post a few examples of that.
The input as five-line tree and the output PDF.
So the first time you write that program it takes longer
than doing it graphically, no question.
Which is why this second part happens.
Because you do it the slightly hard way the first time.
You don't realize the second time you're like, oh, there's
something in common here.
[BUZZER SOUND]
But it's too late.
I just have to do it the slightly hard way.
The third time you think, OK, finally I'm going to do it
with the program.
So I think there are fundamental reasons to think
that if you can program your documents you'll
also be more efficient.
Now, that actually may end up not being true.
I suspect it is.
But it may not be.
But even if it isn't take it as not an absolute.
But as a suggestion to try in your own work
and in your own writing.
And I don't mean it as an absolute.
OK, so now there's 10 more questions.
But I'm going to leave them for now.
And if at the end we haven't used up all the time with
questions I'll continue with some of those questions.