Some ideas from a recent post by Clay Shirky have been running around in my head for more than a week, although I’m not sure have enough of a grasp on them for this rant to make complete sense.
He starts with a book by an anthropologist and historian titled The Collapse of Complex Societies in which the author theorizes that past civilizations collapsed because they became too complex.
Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.
Shirky sees a direct connection between those collapsing societies and some of the complex organizations with which he consults, particularly media companies that are largely in denial about the collapse of their traditional corporate models.
The focus of his entry is business, of course, but I wonder if Shirky’s thesis could also apply to public institutions that grow too large and inflexible to respond quickly to changes.
Like American education, an increasingly complex system that seems to define the concept of “too inflexible to respond”.
In discussing bureaucracies, Shirky notes that “it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one”.
That observation might very well apply to our overly-large school district, where we seem to spend a lot of time trying to write regulations to cover every possible contingency while discouraging individuals from experimenting with new ideas.
So, am I being too pessimistic in thinking that our educational bureaucracy (both local and not) is fast approaching that point where it’s too large to re-tool in less complex ways?
Have we grown too big not to fail?
I’ve written my own response to this article you cite in my blog at http://andrewbwatt.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/dangerously-irrelevant-clay-shirky/
I think it’s a real problem, and it applies equally to public school districts as to private schools. We are none of us too big to fail, as Central Falls High School in Rhode Island shows. Poverty outside a school can bring it down, as can neglect or upset among its faculty, students and parents.
the iron cage of bureaucracies plagues modernity; learnt that in an Ed grad class. but the reality is that the reform cycle of urban ed is so perpetual it’s comparable to an individual being in a car crash every other year; there is no time for recovery, and in fact some bones (programs in the organization) are totally removed. therefore, the system becomes too flexible, you could say limp, in some of its traditional capacities, and where rigidity is the norm it largely serves as a prop for present administrative reform efforts. These ‘props’ are usually politicized, resented, and don’t fully address some of the most pressing needs in meaningful ways.
‘so you get what we have here today, which is the way some men (and women) wants it, well if [they] want it… they get it’
“So, am I being too pessimistic in thinking that our educational bureaucracy (both local and not) is fast approaching that point where it’s too large to re-tool in less complex ways?”
Based on my dealings with school boards and Superintendents, administrators, BOSs, and the schools themselves over the last couple years, no. I have come to the conclusions that every office/classroom should consider posting a sign that says “KISS” because keeping things simple appears to be the last thing on peoples minds…
This article reminds me of copyright laws. Is it possible to regulate everything that everyone borrows from another author, photographer and the like, especially at a time when information of all kinds is available in a heartbeat? Teaching students, teachers and others about copyright laws is important, but is it realistic to think that you could ever possibly hold everyone accountable for copyright violations? Likewise, will more school regulations make things better? I doubt it. Those regulations are only as good as the follow through and again, issues surrounding technology are too complex to think that we could possibly regulate them.
Great post. The scientist in me screams, “the second law of thermodynamics applies to everything!”