image courtesy of Kim Joris
I’ve been thinking a lot about a book Paul Watzlawick co-wrote several years ago called Change. This is one of the few books I’ve read that required me to map the discussion so I could follow and comprehend it. There are plenty of books written beyond my grasp but this one was important enough to evoke my inner cartographer. The book is built upon two theories:
• Group Theory – concerned with what happens within a group.
• Theory of Logical Types – concerned with what happens between groups or systems.
The relevant distinction for this post, the thing that brought me back to Change, is that Patti and I are currently focusing our work in education and the education system in America is a fantastic study in Group Theory (no real change is possible). Here are the defining characteristics of Group Theory:
a) Grouping is the basic, necessary element of perception (true enough!)
b) Altering the order of members within a group brings change-ability in process but invariance in outcome (rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic will not keep the ship from sinking).
c) A member may act without making a difference: Action does not equal change (this is also known as “first order change”).
d) New combinations produce change but the result is still within the group. So nothing really changes.
A system is a living thing and will fight to the death to stay intact even if it is irrelevant, archaic, destructive to its members, and serves as the impediment to its stated purpose. Group Theory is one way a system fights to stay alive! It provides the illusion of change, action for the sake of action: First Order Change. Standardized testing is First Order Change. No Child Left Behind is First Order Change. Tying teacher pay to performance is First Order Change, continuing to treat content as if it could possibly be separate from method is First Order Change, shuffling teachers from site to site is First Order Change, imagining that the purpose of education is to provide a better batch of consumers or workers for a factory floor that no longer exists is First Order Change.
Action does not equal change. Rearranging the order of things within the existing system will continue to bring change-ability in process but invariance in outcome. It will certainly provide the illusion of change for a while, at least until the next election cycle or until the next generation of students dulls their minds enough to survive the system (and learn to say to their kids, “If it was good enough for me, it is good enough for you.”).
I wonder what it will take for us to desire more than “good enough.” The world has changed considerably since 1850 (seriously changed, not rearranged); we continue to swap the furniture in the factory school and wonder why it continues to fail in our new world order. Blaming teachers, blaming anyone in the equation is First Order Change and will take us nowhere.
R. Buckminster Fuller said it best:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
The existing model is already obsolete. Let’s build something new.
