The Tyranny of the Formula

Clay Shirky, in a stunning piece drawing from Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies to describe how business models collapse, explains why independent education--and education in general--is suffering from the tyrannical hold of the formula:

N Students + X Teacher(s) + Y Classroom(s) * Z Hours = School

Using examples from media, where old business models seem impervious to adaptation given new environments, Shirky points out that large, bureaucratic systems fail to change because regression to simpler states is impossible at a certain level of complexity.  

Quoting a MIT mechanical engineer who designs things for the developing world ("If you want something to be 10 times cheaper, take out 90% of the material"), Shirky makes the case that cheaper media simply can't be produced exactly like more expensive media.  In a similar way, we have been making the point at dozens of individual schools and conferences that doing school they way we have always done it is untenable going forward.  

The problem is that asking board members, administrators and teachers to rethink the formula is exactly like asking media executives to rethink the business model--it can't happen!  A year ago, I met with a task force at a school that was grappling with what to give up; in other words, every one in the school agreed that the schedule was too full, teachers' and students' lives too pressured, and costs too high.  Using Shirky's language, the issue before the task force was how to simplify an incredibly complex system.  Yet, after two days of intense work, the task force somehow ended up adding to the schedule without removing a single thing.

Something like this happens again and again when school people ponder how to reinvent school.  It just ends up looking the same, only more so.  Shirky's conclusion, echoing Tainter's, is that at some point collapse is just the only means left to achieve simplicity.  Sure, and, to quote von Clausewitz, war is a continuation of politics by another means.  I would just like to think that human intelligence can imagine and pursue another way.