zenpundit.com

This will be the first of several related posts. 

The other day, I happened to be talking to my friend Dr. Von, a physicist and educator, and he brought up a post by The Eide Neurolearning Blog, on educating children in terms of “big picture thinking”:

What is ‘big picture’ thinking? Business consultant Andrew Sobel described it as:

1. Having a simple framework
2. Using analogies and metaphors
3. Developing multiple perspectives
4. Looking for patterns and commonalities….

Instead of training for compliance, careful rule-following, and exact memorization or a paragon of crystallized intelligence, we need to make more room for ‘big picture’ thinkers – while still recognizing the need for basic skills and knowledge.….Pint-sized big picture thinkers really do exist and they seem to be over-represented among gifted children who underperform or cause behavioral disruptions in their early elementary school years. Many of these kids are ‘high conceptual’ thinkers, those who like discovering novel subjects, themes, and things that don’t make sense(“The thing that doesn’t fit is the interesting thing” – Richard Feynman), but the reason for this is often not random – inductive learners (learners who derive rules from examples) use novelties to generate new hypotheses or new rules.If you really want to teach and interest big picture thinkers, you would expose them to rich multisensory and chronologically-advanced experiences. Look for subjects, phenomena and ideas that could be compared and contrasted. Complexity should be embraced and not shunned. For big picture thinkers – complex is simple and simple is complex. Complexity often brings more meaning because there are enough examples that one can make a pattern.….Many of them are seeking the overarching framework inside which they can put their new bit of knowledge. Often these are ‘why’ kids – who need to know why something is true, not just that something is true.

The Eides have given an excellent explanation of the big picture thinker as a cognitive type and had some implied suggestions in that description on how a teacher or professor could approach students to get them thinking – models, metaphors, analogies, exposure to patterns and multiple perspectives. Note: all students willl derive some benefit from these techniques and become better at seeing the larger context. Many people can, with sufficient practice, can become significantly better, but the natural big picture thinkers are the ones who will react with insightful leaps of reasoning, imagination and questions with little or no prompting.

Unfortunately, such experiences in public schools and even our universities have become increasingly rare. Dr. Von explains why:

When I talk with students (juniors and seniors in high school) about how different subjects and classes are taught, invariably it comes down to great amounts of memorization. Most students, when you engage them in real conversations about the education they receive, will open up freely and get right to the point…because of the continued emphasis on grades and GPAs by colleges, students feel the need to focus first on memorization and get the grade on the test, and then move on to the next topic without much concern with what was just studied. When this is the case in school, has true learning just occurred? Likely not, if students are unable to recall and actually apply concepts that were covered in the past.

….To make matters worse, as students rely so heavily on memorization and short-term success on tests (and this is driven home even more in the ‘high stakes testing’ environment we find ourselves in in the era of No Child Left Behind, as resently implemented), those students, many of whom are gifted, as the Eides point out, who prefer complexity in their learning, are not benefitting from the way many (most) classrooms are run. By complexity, I mean those students who want to ‘see the big picture.’ Those students who want to know why something works, and how it is related to the material that was studied last semester as well as to the material that was covered in another class. For example, I love when students in my physics classes come to me asking about how to interpret and apply a particular integral result which was just studied in calculus class, or how Einstein’s theories changed political and military history, as studied in a history course. Those moments happen every so often, as a result of student curiosity and their wanting to truly learn about the material rather than memorize something for the test, and good teachers recognize such moments when they happen…

It falls to me to discuss why it matters: As a nation we are crippling the next generation of visionaries by retarding their intellectual growth with bad educational policy as surely as we might if we were adding lead to their drinking water.

Scientists and inventors, philosophers and artists, entrepreneurs and statesmen, individuals who conceive of and accomplish great things do not emerge from schools and colleges that emphasize low-level thinking and a curriculum without intellectual depth or rigor. They emerge in spite of them.

To force a systemic improvement in public education, the Bush administration pushed through “No Child Left Behind” with rigid timetables, mandated high stakes testing and punitive consequences for schools and districts not making standards. That is to say, the Bush administration addressed the lack of rigor in educational process with a sledgehammer – but ignored the lack of rigor in educational substance ( at least directly – under NCLB some schools had to toughen their curriculum to teach to the state test, but other schools or schools in different states dumbed down for the same reason – curricular alignment).

That NCLB forced public schools to ensure that our weakest students verifiably succeed at understanding the fundamentals is laudable. That this emphasis increasingly comes at the cost of schools only educating all their students at the level of the fundamentals is inexcusable. Perhaps criminal. NCLB is the overarching legal framework that was superimposed on a system whose content was (and often still is) frequently less than demanding and taught by instructors who themselves have not majored in the subject they are teaching. 

At the postsecondary level, long before the measure and punish model of NCLB arrived at k-12 schools, colleges and universities abandoned any semblance of a core curriculum or traditional canon and undergraduate degree requirements were larded with plenty of au courant esoterica as course options. Esoterica formerly left for footnotes in dissertations or as the subject of longwinded, diatribes at the dreary meetings of extremist splinter parties. Ivy League, big state schools, small third tier colleges – it does not matter; with only a few exceptions, the “cafeteria a la carte” model of undergraduate education prevails.

While a few students absorb and become true believers of fashionable cant, most students graduate high school and college unaffected by the large amounts of rubbish and trivia they have been exposed to because it was presented without any kind of sensible context and being committed to short term memory, quickly forgotten. The real damage to students comes from the cumulative effect of the absence of substance – the waste of time where meaningful content and the pressure to think through hard problems should have been.

The costs of educational myopia are here and they will grow worse with time. We already see sharply declining public support for science (because more people are now ignorant of basic scientific literacy),  lower rates of innovation and other negative economic effects. In the area of governance, across the board, regardless of party label or ideology, we have national leaders in their 40’s, 50’s and early 60’s who see the world primarily in short-term, tactical terms and who confuse career or class interest with governing in the national interest. Oligarchy is inherently a non-strategic worldview because it eschews making choices because choices require sacrifice in the near term in order to acquire systemic advantages in the long term. 

“Oligarchy” seems like a a harsh word because we think of “oligarchs” as being selfish, exceedingly greedy, political sociopaths. While such figures do exist outside of TV and the movies (Burmese junta, Iranian hardliners, Soviet politburo etc.) most people are neither particularly malicious nor eager to consciously and openly do things society acknowledges to be wrong or counterproductive. Even less so are they eager to be seen by the public as incompetent. The problem is that, frequently, people are prisoners of their own limited frame of reference and, when their conscience might be tweaked, they excel at rationalization and denial.

This is not a question of smart or dumb or of expecting politicians to be moral paragons. There’s plenty of IQ wattage inside and outside of Washington, DC and petty larceny in politics goes back to the stone age. Rather, on average, the difficulty is that our nation’s intellectual potential has not been effectively maximized. Is it reasonable to educate people in a way where all subjects are disconnected from one another, prioritizing narrow specialization, emphasizing accumulating facts over understanding principles, rewarding the “right answer” instead of the “best question”, demanding conformity instead of curiosity and then expect our leaders to be visionaries and adaptively creative statesmen who think in strategic terms?

Why would our societal orientation in complex, dynamic, fast moving situations be good when our educational system trains people only to think through simplified, linear, sequential problems? Strategic thinkers need to be able to see “the big picture” and handle uncertainty, or they cannot be said to be strategic thinkers.

The ship of state has been steered, over the last forty or so years, into an epistemological cul-de-sac and we are headed for the rocks. America needs a grand strategy for a competent citizenry in order to reach the point where it can again have a grand strategy to deal with an unruly world.

LINKING TO THIS POST:

Red Herrings

Project White Horse

Fabius Maximus

The Committee of Public Safety ( provides an extensive analysis of the subject)

RELATED TOPIC:

Liberty/Security – Rethinking liberal arts

Blogfriend Matt Armstrong had an important post regarding The Strategic Communication Science and Technology Plan, April 2009. An excerpt:

The plan describes current efforts within the Department of Defense, the military services, the combatant commands and other agencies on SC. In total, these efforts could be linked together to form the foundation of an S&T thrust area for strategic communication. The report also includes a macro-analysis of capability gaps not being addressed by ongoing initiatives and lays out potential areas for future S&T investment.

While the request for the plan itself represents recognition from Congress that SC plays a critical role in the public and private response to current and emerging threats, it also highlights that there is much research and development already underway and many tools available to increase the government’s effectiveness in global engagement. The rub today is the need for strong leadership and coordination to ensure: 1) awareness of the long list of capabilities; 2) incorporating these capabilities into plans; and 3) participation by stakeholders across the US government, NGO’s, industry, and private citizens.

The S&T plan sorts current efforts into the following categories:

• Infrastructure: Enabling and facilitating access to information from news to markets to vocational
• Social Media: Knowledge Management, Social Media, and Virtual Worlds
• Discourse: Analysis of radical and counter-radical messages and ideas
• Modeling and Forecasting: Gaming and anticipating adversarial messages and ideas as well as our counters and pre-emptive measures
• Collaboration: Increasing collaboration and training across and beyond Government
• First Three Feet: Empowering, Equipping, Educating, and Encouraging media and others to exist and freely report on events for what they really are
• Understanding: Develop country, culture, and regional expertise, including polling
• Psychological Defense: Planning and capacity building for dealing with critical strains on society in peacetime and wartime

The interesting thing here for me is that “strong leadership” is lacking because the people spread across and outside government who have the shared awareness of technology, social media and national security at a level of sophistication where they could actually craft a strategic communication policy, are usually many levels removed from the appointee policy deciders for whom these variables are (usually) fuzzily understood.

To use an analogy, the chefs are valet parking cars outside while trying to get the manager of the restaurant to acknowledge their recipes. Or, maybe that there should be cooking going on in the kitchen if they want to have any customers. Or that the business is, in fact, a restaurant and not a nicely organized room full of tables.

Time to juxtapose.

Dr. John Nagl at Democracy Journal – Intellectual Firepower New threats require new think tanks

….He proposes, instead, creating a Federally Funded Research and Development Corporation, or FFRDC, dedicated to thinking about the Islamic terror threat in the same way that RAND thought about the Soviet nuclear threat. Stevenson suggests the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a model. It is undeniably a good and long-overdue idea, with likely payoffs hugely exceeding the few hundred million dollars such an organization would cost the taxpayer every year. But beyond the basics, Stevenson is working from the wrong mould. RAND was so influential not least because it was the brains behind an enormously large and powerful set of muscles called the Strategic Air Command, where peace was a profession and war just a hobby; DARPA provides thinking that feeds the mammoth U.S. defense industry. Stevenson’s proposed think tank would need similar need bone and muscle. But unlike the Strategic Air Command or the Department of Defense, the muscle we need today would motivate soft power, rather than hard steel.

It is not for me, a scribbler in a think tank, to denigrate the idea of creating another one. In fact, an underreported cause of the recent turnaround in Iraq has been General David Petraeus’ creation of his own brain trust consisting of many of the military’s brightest strategic thinkers on the challenges of insurgency [See Rachel Kleinfeld, “Petraeus the Progressive,” on page 107 of this issue]. If Petraeus could do so much on his own, just with thinkers he knew personally, imagine what the nation could do with a call to service by a president who valued thinking hard about problems?

I’m certainly in favor of a foreign policy DARPA – glad the wonks are catching up to my early, amateurish, efforts at blogging – and I also agree that a “new kind of think tank” is in order too. Hopefully these ideas that originated in the blogosphere will gain currency and become a reality before 2016  or 2020. 🙂

Rialtas.Net -Government 2.0 – Stigmergic Collaboration

I have just finished reading Mark Elliot’s PHD dissertation entitled “Stigmergic Collaboration- A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration” and I found it to be inspiring and profound.

This is one of the most scientific and rigorous examinations of mass collaboration and social networking technologies and their interactions that I have come across, and I highly recommend reading it. In fact reading this paper has reinforced my interest in 2.0 technologies and my view that they are just the beginning of a new mode of working and of communicating. In fact I am now totally fascinated by research in the area of stigmergy and emergence, thank you Mark.

One element covered by Elliot (and I hope he will correct me if I am misinterpreting him) is that the whole web 2.0 collaborative technology framework is an human emergent (stigmergic) structure, emerging spontaneously through the simple actions and interactions of many individuals self-organising and evolving more complex structures as the social and technological conditions necessary for these types of structure to emerge become more prevalent (just as termite mounds and ant hills arise out of the simple behaviour of individual insects). This is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of the web and collaborative work (and of course collaborative art, and entertainment, and play…)

Dr. Mark Elliot’s blog is here, just FYI. Seems to be on hiatus.

Collaborative learning and organizational/collective learning are going to be the “next big thing” on the horizon, leaping off of the Web 2.0 tech community, epitomized by figures like Clay Shirky, Jason Calcanis, Scobleizer and Howard Rheingold ( who has a book on the works on this very subject or related to this subject). I’ve previously linked to “Minds on Fire” by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler; if you have not read it, you should. They are on target.

The obscure tie in here is that Dr. Nagl had  issued a strong, even passionate, call to rebuild the military as “learning organizations” at the the end of his excellent book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. Becoming a “learning organization” (sometimes called a “Professional Learning Community” by educational wonks or a “Community of Practice” by techies and thought leader types) is dependent on organizational philosophy, not Web 2.0 technology but the tech is what gives social/collaborative/organizational learning the high octane of asynchronicity and the lowering of barriers to entry, distance and cost.

A wikinomic , “medici effect“world is coming.

It’s not often that I cite a MSM piece for it’s balance and thoughtfulness but I will recommend this one, from Alec MacGillis of MSNBC:

Academic elites fill Obama’s roster

All told, of Obama’s top 35 appointments so far, 22 have degrees from an Ivy League school, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago or one of the top British universities. For the other slots, the president-elect made do with graduates of Georgetown and the Universities of Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina.

While Obama’s picks have been lauded for their ethnic and ideological mix, they lack diversity in one regard: They are almost exclusively products of the nation’s elite institutions and generally share a more intellectual outlook than is often the norm in government. Their erudition has already begun to set a new tone in the capital, cheering Obama’s supporters and serving as a clarion call to other academics. Yale law professor Dan Kahan said several of his colleagues are for the first time considering leaving their perches for Washington.

“You know how Obama always said, ‘This is our moment; this is our time?’ ” Kahan said. “Well, academics and smart people think, ‘Hey, when he says this is our time, he’s talking about us.'”

Indeed. The Obamas may be moreso part of the bipartisan elite than were the Clintons whom academia overwhelmingly cheered, as Bill Clinton never could ( as Alec MacGillis duly notes) shed his ties to the Southern, good ol’ boy, wheeler-dealers of the courthouse clique. To an extent, Clinton reveled in winking at the corruption of his hambone cronies in wry TV soundbites. President-elect Obama is in far less of a hurry to bring Chicago’s more colorful political personalities to Washington and probably will not do so for several years until after Federal trials of Tony Rezko and investigations into city hall and the governor’s mansion and likely Federal trial of Governor Rod Blagojevich (D-IL) in Illinois have run their course.

I’m not unhappy with Obama’s appointments, finding them so far to be well qualified and I’ll offer high praise for Obama’s selection of General Jones and Secretary Gates. The Small Wars/COIN bloggers are jumping for joy and the national security bloggers, along with the conservative political bloggers, should be pleased; the next Defense Secretary or Secretary of State might easily have been Anthony Lake. It’s a more conservative national security group than any time during the Clinton administration. Count your blessings folks.

What strikes me as amusing though is the entirely visceral, euphorically emotive and almost tribal “he’s one of us” support from the elite for the President-elect. Reactions that run against the supposedly cerebral and “reality based” pretensions of empiricism and skepticism for which they make a claim but seldom practice because most of them are highly-trained, vertical thinking, experts. When you are accomplished within a domain and have built a reputation by operating within its’ often complex (to laymen) rule-sets, the price is often an acquired blindness that prevents you from challenging the cherished shibboleths of the group.  To look across domains and question fundamental premises in horizontal thinking fashion is to be the bull in the china shop. Or the skunk at the garden party. Or both.

Thorstein Veblen, who saw primitivism re-enacted in advanced capitalist societies would have understood this very well. So would Thomas Kuhn. The Bush administration, with its CEO-ex-jock mentality, was accurately criticized for it’s arrogant insularity and dismissal of critics and contrary evidence. I don’t know about you but I’ve been around an awful lot of very smart academics, including relatives and while their cognitive prowess is admirable, the unwillingness of many of them to reconsider assumptions in light of evidence ( or even notice that they need to do so) can be every bit as stubborn as that of a Wall Street “master of the universe”.

It’s great that Obama is appointing brilliant academics to high posts. Just throw some divergent, unorthodox, thinkers into the mix to keep them honest.

Briefly, here is a juxtaposition of posts worth looking at that portray war through the lens of the social scientist:

Rethinking Security – The Study of War as A Social Science

…Rather, it would be better to re-concieve the study of strategic affairs as a multi-disciplinary social science major combining sociology, international relations, philosophy, political science, cognitive science, economics, history, and “pure” military theory. This would be intellectually rigorous enough to banish forever the stereotype of the armchair general and the wargamer.

I see learning about strategy in itself as the key aim of such a curriculum–the goal would be to produce a student able to either apply his or her learnings in a think-tank or government, join the armed forces, come up with reasonable anti-war critiques as an activist, resolve conflict as a humanitarian, or apply strategy in the corporate world.

War as a social science akin to sociology or economics would bring empirical and quantitative rigor into the study of military history and affairs on the undergraduate level as well as a focus on the mechanics of war (tactics, operational art, strategy, and grand strategy) rarely seen outside of a Professional Military Education (PME).

SWJ Blog –  The Genetic Roots of the War on Terrorism

….In the article, titled “A Natural History of Peace,” Stanford Professor Robert M. Sapolsky compares and contrasts human aggressive tendencies with well-documented propensities for violence among several species of primates, and develops a case suggesting that human aggression of the kind that produces warfare mainly stems from the genetic impulses rooted in humans as primates (not a new suggestion of itself). But more significantly, he offers proof extracted from a now robust body of field work that even strong genetic tendencies for violence in certain species of primates can be mitigated by exposure to the equivalent of “cultural” forces. He singles out from the body of such observations the case history of one group of baboons (a particularly aggressive and violent species of primate) that he calls the Forest Troop, the intensely aggressive behavior of which was ameliorated after exposure to the more peaceful and tolerant “mores” of another baboon troop of an identical species with which the Forest Troop had come in contact. He concludes by asserting that “some primate species can make peace despite violent traits that seem built into their natures.” He goes on to muse, “The challenge now is to figure out under what conditions that can happen, and whether humans can manage the trick themselves.”

Sapolsky’s argument frames the issues associated with the current global conflict in which the United States is now engaged in a potentially very useful light: as a biological problem best understood and dealt with using means specifically tailored to deal with human genetic tendencies in order to promote cooperation and tolerance instead of competitive violence. This stands in contrast to the current approach which appears to assume that the conflict mainly results from a combination of cultural and economic factors that can be dealt with by a strategy that combines selected violence, targeted monetary investments mixed, and cross cultural messages through so called strategic communications.

The Social Sciences are a powerful but fractionating, reifying lens. Individually, they unearth certain aspects of large and highly complex phenomena albeit at the cost, at times, of distorting the proportional importance to the whole of the aspect that the social scientist chooses to study. The sociobiological perspective is a radical and controversial one but it is a position that is far more open to empirical investgation in a scientific sense than are many traditional components of strategic theorizing.  At Rethinking Security, Adam wisely tries to balance the heavy load of quantitative methods in his proposed program with at least a few qualitative disciplines; input from military practitioners and security experts would also be helpful to the prospective student in this regard as well.