sailboats

There are other ways to become smart, as a society, than having really smart individuals.   In fact, having a lot of smart people seems to have been making us, taken together as a society, dumb and dumber lately.

Tom Friedman in the NYTimes today bemoans overuse of texting and the dumbing down of students in the US.     I disagreed in a comment that may be posted later today.

Let me try to rephrase this again.

It's really important.

We have it all wrong. We're barking up the wrong tree. We're in the wrong ballpark.

We have been acting as if the only way out of the social mess we've gotten ourselves into is to create more and better "smart people."

So, based on that unexamined assumption,  we've been looking at our "educational system" and trying to measure "smartness" of our students, and trying to evaluate teachers based on how "smart" the students are.

But, if we simply read the papers, or look out the window, we realize that there are factors in society that seem to completely neutralize, negate, and otherwise remove the value of smart people.   As a society, we are still recovering from prior dumb things we have done, and are, in all likelihood,  continuing to do things that, in retrospect,  even we will agree were truly dumb.  I won't even name any, although violation of the Sicilian's advice in "The Princess Bride" does come to mind. ("Never get involved in a land war in Asia.")

More recently, spending a billion dollars on some magical Electronic Health Record thingie seems to be the disaster de jour that the fish are biting at and pouring our national treasure into, even though the track record of such projects is below dismal.  It may take on the scale of the magic self-paying-mortgage wealth-from-thin-air kool-aid we're still recovering from.
  
What do these grand schemes and subsequent wake up calls have in common?  We are failing to come to grips with the fact that we're doing something in general that's very wrong. We keep blaming the specific case (Thank you John Gall, for this insight), and failing to realize that this is a much more general problem that we keep running into, and one that has not been solved, so we are just about to run headlong into it AGAIN.

OK. So what are the take-away lessons here?

First,  about 100% of what we are asking our "educational system" do to is irrelevant.  We already have lots of smart people.   We don't even have jobs for the smart people we already have.   We have millions of smart people we've put out to pasture ("retired") that we're not calling upon to help out. That's what is NOT helpful.   We can stop looking up that tree for the "magic bullet".

Second,  what we DO need to do is to utilize the smart people we already have, so that, taken as a whole,  we, our society, stops making any MORE decisions that,  in retrospect, will appear even to us to have been so stupid we'll ask "How could we have been so stupid?".

To get to that noble objective,  I suppose first of all we need to realize the lesson that the cartoon character Dennis the Menace asked aloud one day, while being punished by "sitting in the corner".  He asked "How come dumb stuff looks so smart when you're doing it?"

Dennis is right, of course.  Stuff looks DIFFERENT from up close, and from far away.  Stuff looks DIFFERENT from right now and from later.   Worse,  this difference, we keep hitting our heads on and then promptly forgetting,  is the kind that hides the dumb parts from our eyes.

(Photo - "Marilyn Einstein" illusion, which changes depending how far back you stand from your screen,  See discussion of "hybrid images" if you think such things can't possibly exist!)

Garrison Keeler (Prairie Home Companion) told a joke one day about Sven and Ollie.  Sven comes by and Ollie's ears are bandaged.  He asks "What happened to you?"  Well,  Ollie says, "I was ironing and the phone rang, and I picked up the iron by mistake and held it to my ear."  "Oh. What happened to your OTHER ear then?"   "Ah... after I got hurt I tried to call the hospital. ...'

The point is,  "dumb and dumber" is defined by being unable to learn from experience, even vivid, first hand experience.

So,  rather than go off on a suggested solution to this situation that might turn people off, let me just try to wrap up what we might all agree on and see if in fact we agree.

1)   Dumb stuff often looks smart before we do it, at least to the people about to do the doing.
2)   There are other people around who could see how dumb it is, but they aren't included in the decision to go ahead and do the dumb thing.
3)   The way we normally interact and inter-connect and make decisions,  sometimes, yes, it is possible to "fool ALL the people",  so that EVERYONE is busy stampeding to do the wrong thing faster than everyone else.

I'll assert that these 3 points describe "A problem" that is more important to give a name to and provide research funding to than, say,  how to land on the moon or how to decode the XYZ3F doodad on some DNA strand.  It is MORE important to ask "How come our educating people in the past hasn't helped, even when we made really really really smart people?" before we waste a generation trying to dig out of our hole by generating even more of them, or yelling at each other because we're unable to generate more of them.

Take a breather, people.   It's not the components, the people, that are broken.  The people are fine.  It's the way we interconnect that's broken.

If we don't fix the interconnect, everything else we do in education is pointless.
If we DO fix the interconnect, we don't really need any more dollars or time spent on education.

And, more importantly:
Being able to transcend space and time with electronic networking may be the missing piece that allows us, finally, to get the strong muscles of "smartness" delivered, in real time, to the front lines where decisions are being made, in such a way as to give voice to the silent, secret dumbness of what we're about to do wrong NOW.

THAT kind of thing needs funding way, way more than almost everything else on the table.