There's never enough time!!
From Red House Wiki
The way it is
- On this wiki is a page about feedbacks that describes the growth of plants. When they reach equilibrium, all that frantic photosynthesis is producing no net change at all, they're running to stand still. Institutions are just the same. At equilibrium, everybody in them is fully occupied doing whatever they do, so -
- doing anything else always means "extra work for over-worked people".
- But that doesn't mean things can't be different. In France, for example, there's a culture of long lunches and employment protection which can make getting things done annoying and expensive. The interesting thing is productivity is actually no worse than in countries which work much longer hours and eat sandwiches at their desks. You can't squeeze more out of a system at equilibrium, but you can reorganise its priorities.
Some thoughts on priorities
1. Here on this wiki is a simple way to make online galleries of pictures. This could be useful at the school -
- pictures and projects can have a much wider and longer performance life
- they can cross-fertilise each other and other things
- they can add new dimensions for "critical thought" and help directly with students' digital education
- they can do a similar thing to Tapestry (connect with parents, demonstrate progress etc) without all the tricky privacy issues etc
- But it comes at a cost to someone. Someone has to prioritise it, scan or photo pictures, upload the files and set up a gallery page - or organise their students to do it. Regardless of any net benefit, or how easy it is to do, this could well prove too demanding because people already have other priorities.
2. I'm not sure how the decision to shorten the school's day came about, but it happened and it reflected some change in priorities.
- As I understood it, the reason for having a longer school day was to make students' days less intense and their "learning journeys" more personalised, both important reasons for choosing the school. The longer day had other benefits. I know the extra break helped school friendships and social life etc. I know that for at least some parents, it made pick-up and those crucial discussions at the gates possible with flexible working hours. Staggering the school run eased congestion (so much so actually, that despite the shorter school day, we get home at the same time as before). However, there were clearly costs for teachers, who have a lot of obligations to cram into their day. Maybe overall our cumulative collective time is better spent now, I don't know.
3. One of the reasons I like things like wikis is that they're inherently rebellious and disruptive - they work bottom-up rather than top-down.
- By itself top-down control is a pretty inefficient way to set priorities. Obviously it's the people implementing priorities, not the people setting them, who can see what the real problems are, and understandably people end up deeply cynical. So there's often a lot of talk (at least) about "devolving" things and subsidiarity etc.
- People are not only resistant to top-down control, they're perhaps even more suspicious of each other. In Utopia for Realists, there's a very telling study where people were asked what they would do with Universal basic income. Apparently 90% had positive, constructive ideas about what they would do. But when asked what they thought everyone else would do, they estimated that 90% of it would just be wasted on drink and drugs!!
- The book ends on an upbeat note. Apparently in groups, the natural tendency is for people to automatically support whatever the consensus is, so much so that the assumptions involved are rarely questioned. But it only takes one dissenting voice to force those assumptions to be reviewed, and this is the way that groups end up changing their mind.
- Clearly bottom-up tools can be helpful with all these things.
4. In the end, the school's mission recognises some need for improvement in education, and this is reflected in a non-typical set of priorities.
- The more the school's priorities fill up with all the normal things, the harder it is to be anything other than a normal school. So its non-typical priorities must remain high enough up the agenda to have effect, and other priorities will just have to bend or slide to make room. I'm sure the school already does this, but an obvious way to approach it is by using its own measures of success to monitor progress, assess priorities and make decisions (see e.g. Gain Pain Ratios).
