Educational gap, math, science and social studies

Bob Herbert has an op Ed piece in the NY Times this morning on education and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

I posted a comment (see further below) but want to give a very short additional example to illustrate my point -- namely, that true social studies is more important than math and science.

Suppose Apple, Jones and Smith are heads of households living in poor neighborhoods with high crime rates and low literacy. They both want to move to better neighborhoods.

Apple, with neither math nor social studies, sees an ad for house mortgage too good to be true, moves there, and discovers it is, in fact, too good to be true. His life is pretty well ruined by this error.

Jones, with extensive math and science, is able to compute Net Present Value, Annual Percentage Rates, etc. with ease. He understands that a jump in interest rates from 3% to 6% is a doubling of his monthly payment, not a "small percentage increase." He figures out he cannot move to the suburbs and becomes depressed. He avoids a tragic error but is stuck in the ghetto.

Smith, with true social knowledge, finds a wise person in his community who does understand math and science, and asks this person about the great mortgage deals. He finds out they are a trap for the unaway and avoids them. But he still wants to move to the suburbs so his kids can grow up in a better life. He searches around and finds two other families with similar problems, and despite their individual low income, collectively can afford a nice place in the suburbs. They move out there together, sharing a large house, able to resolve and reconcile problems because they understand how to deal with social relationships.

Quiz question - Who has the better solution?
Extra credit - if that's the better solution, why isn't it taught in school?

Wade
=========================
My post to the NY Times under my pseudonym "Raymond"

Ann Arbor, MI

September 29th, 2009

6:16 am

Amen. Still, it might be good to have our educational system learn, and then teach basic skills of leadership, mediation, social interaction, and relationship building and repair. This is not really covered by the dreaded "group work" unit lesson where students learn to divide up a task into pieces they can all go work on separately without needing to get along with each other, let alone inspire each other to greatness.

I realize it's playing devil's advocate, but, as a former physics grad, I'll argue strongly AGAINST more math and science in this new world, and much more in the way of applied reasoning and social skills. And, no, I have seen no signs that an education in science trains people to be rational or to be able to parse an argument or make a case, thank you.

More serious discussion of alternatives on my weblog:
http://newbricks.blogspot.com...

The old man and the apple

Once there was an old man in a village who lived alone. One day there was a storm and a big tree fell and blocked the gate to his garden. He only had enough food left for a week, if he couldn't get to his garden. He thought about what to do, and got his small savings out of a can and went to a gymnasium.

"Can you make me strong in a week?" He asked? "I can pay my life savings!" They just laughed at him and said "No. Go away old man." He was very sad. If he couldn't eat he would surely die. All he had left was one apple, in his pocket.

As he walked home, and pulled out the apple, he passed an old monk who was begging. He told the monk about the tree and the gym.

"Oh, I can move the tree for you!" said the old monk, if you let me have that apple. The old man just laughed but thought that he only had one day left to live, so what difference did it make?! He gave the apple to the monk.

"Can you help me get up?" asked the monk. "Of course!" said the man, now laughing out loud at this frail man who thought he was going to move the heavy tree.

As they walked back through the village, the monk greeted everyone they met. He asked each one if they wanted to come learn how to move a heavy tree with an apple. More and more people joined the crowd, each wanting to see this.

Finally the large crowd arrived at the old man's garden, and saw the large tree. The monk blessed the apple, and told everyone it now had special powers. He asked to borrow a knife, and carefully sliced the apple into many small slices. He offered each person a tiny slice of the apple.

Then went over to the fallen tree and started trying to lift it, but it did not budge. Then he asked politely if people could come help him lift, now that they shared the magic apple's power. Everyone joined in and lifted the tree easily and moved it out of the way.

"And that is how you lift a tree with an apple!" said the monk. "There are no obstacles you cannot move, if you just learn the lesson of the apple and tree!"

Guanxi, social capital, relationships, and health, wealth

INTRODUCTION

If we don't understand the nature of life, we can't possibly reason correctly about the "health" property of it, let alone reason about finding cost-effective interventions to improve or sustain it.

The nature of life is not obvious. I believe we have it all wrong, and as a direct consequence of this we have flawed personal behaviors, corporate behaviors, and a flawed national policy and system of "health care." Until this error is fixed, our efforts to improve "health" will simply fail in baffling ways.

Where did we go wrong?

THE OLD MODEL OF LIFE

Biology 101 teaches us, and we absorb deeply, this model:

1. LIMIT: All life is made of one or more biological cells.
2. LIMIT: Cells are blobs of protoplasm surrounded by distinct walls that clearly separate the inside from the outside. Only cells that touch each other in a more-or-less fixed shape can form "higher" life forms.
3. LIMIT: Although humans and "higher" organisms are both made of cells and have an independent life of their own, even larger colonies or collections of higher life forms cannot and do not form even "higher" life forms with a life of its own.
4. LIMIT: Life can only arise from other life and be "passed on".
   
5. LIMIT: The algebra of living things only includes division -- one living thing can divide to form two living things, but two or more living things don't re-assemble into one living thing. (A notable exception is sperm and egg, which are each separately alive and yet reassemble into a single life form.)
   
6. LIMIT: all life forms die.
   

Although every one of these rules or limits or statements has "exceptions", the model is treated as if it is "essentially correct" and not questioned very much. I will challenge it much more strongly right now, stepping on the toes of tradition and religious faith in the process.

I will propose a much more general model of life that reduces to the above model in the the special case of looking at biological life on the surface of the earth today.


MY NEW MODEL OF LIFE

1. All life is based on processes that have at least one closed feedback loop which is self-aware and self-protective. There is not limit to the special case of biology. A computer network, a family, a corporation, a culture, a nation all are "life-forms" with such loops. One very important class of living entity is called a "relationship" between people. Another class of living entity is the relationship between cells in "an organ" or "a body system", such as the heart or the circulatory system or the digestive system. These are independently alive.
2. A living entity has fuzzy edges which extend outwards, possibly across great distances with gaps in between, to anything else that forms part of its closed regulatory feedback loops.
3. Essentially all living entities are in the middle of a hierarchy of life, encompassing smaller life-forms below, and comprising parts of higher life-forms above, simultaneously. Each "level" has a "life" (closed feedback regulatory loop) of its own, and there are also some loops (lives) which span multiple levels.
4. Life can be created on-the-fly, systematically, on purpose. It is not that hard to create new life. We do it all the time. Various aspects of life can also be extinguished on the fly. It is not that hard to damage or kill life forms. A Life-form becomes "dead" when its primary closed loop no longer functions.
5. Any number of living things can combine, and often are already weekly combined, into larger life-forms with separate independent lives of their own.
6. There is no reason a life form has to die.

So what? WHAT DOES THAT CHANGE?

First, if we recognize that people, corporations, and nations are all linked together into a huge multi-level life form, then we realize that it is not possible to have one part of this "healthy" while another part of it is "unhealthy." We are, basically, all chained to each other and our fates our linked.

Corporations are life-forms, as are nations, but they are not "separate" entities from "people."

It is true, for example that there is a "personal economy" and a "corporate economy" that have separate lives and interests in the very short run, but it is also true but unrecognized that there is a longer-time-span linkage between the two so that destruction of the personal economy in an effort to improve the corporate economy is simply self-defeating and self-destructive.

This means that it is nonsensical for "Public Health" to see corporations as "an enemy". Any solution that deals with personal or family health will collapse if the local economy collapses. Jobs are as important as medicine for personal sustainable health.

Similarly, it makes no sense for corporations to try to build a vibrant economy on the backs of and at the expense of people and the environment -- because, ultimately, they ARE people and if the people or environment are destroyed, the corporate entities and economies will die off as well. It won't work for corporations to try to become computer-based and get rid of all people, for reasons I'll get to later.

Similarly, people do not have "clean edges" where there is "my" health and "your" health. Every day scientists find deeper ways in which the health of "your neighbors" and "your friends" and "your friends' friends" contribute to and often even determine "your" health and "your" behavior. A cell with damaged DNA can go on functioning if it is surrounded by healthy cells that it interacts with strongly. The same is true for people.

"Our" health is not somehow contained within the boundaries of our skin. Things can go wrong with our health that are outside that boundary, and things can go right with our health that are outside that boundary. This is a cruicial fact!

It has been shown that, for an 60 year old American, making a new friend has a stronger impact on their survival rate and than dealing with smoking, drinking, exercise, and nutrition. This should not come as a surprise, with the new model of biology and life.


WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR NATIONAL HEALTH CARE POLICY?


I think it is evident that a set of interventions that improved interpersonal relationships ( life forms) would have more of a beneficial effect on our lives, morale, and "physical health" than most other interventions we can imagine (such as reduced drug costs or new insurance mechanisms.)

In other words, humans are part of a meta-biologicial ecosystem where the health of the relationship-entities sea that we swim in determines, effectively, the health of the protoplasm units we wear (our bodies.)

Similarly, in the business world, the sea of relationship-entities ("guanxi" or "social capital") is as important, or more important, than the individual roles and positions people have in determining the "health" of corporations and the regional and national economy.

Even on the departmental or work-team level, the relationship-sea, the ecology of life forms that occur "between" people is as important, or more important, than individual "skills and experience" in determining successful perception of direction and accomplishment of objectives.


CONCLUSIONS / RECOMMENDATIONS

Any strategy for personal health, corporate success, or a thriving national economy is doomed to failure unless it attends to the needs of the inter-entity life-form community as well.

"Relationships" are not just something that people "are" or "do" -- they are independent living entities that must be nurtured and which have their own "health care" needs and interests.

This is a much stronger mental model that can direct the attention and focus of policy in ways that will be much more successful at building a sustainable world than the old model.

Wade