October 25, 2022 • 23 mins
Rules can be seen as a tool in the war against mistakes, but it can also inhibit the development of wisdom and judgment. Barry Schwartz explains when taking a “trial and error” approach is a good thing.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome.
(00:36):
You're listening to the Happiness Formula. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli.
Barry Schwartz has taken us on quite the journey. We've
traveled to ancient Greece to learn the principles of wisdom
from Aristotle. We've met nurses and doctors who navigate difficult
situations every day with vulnerable patients, and we've met parents
(00:57):
trying to figure out the best way to raise their kids.
We've learned that happiness is less about chasing goals and
more about cultivating wisdom and making good decisions. So this
week Barry talks about how to start applying what we've learned,
and how rules can actually keep you from gaining wisdom.
(01:18):
Go figure, well, Barry get us started. So we spend
a fair amount of time together, and I hope I've
managed by now to convince you of how important wisdom
is too doing work that's good, having relationships that are good,
(01:41):
and ultimately to being satisfied with your life. Friends, lovers, parents, doctors, lawyers, teachers, hairdressers,
retail salespeople all need wisdom to practice well. Yet when
things go wrong, as they do, managers, administrators, policy makers
(02:07):
don't try to make practitioners wiser. Instead, they reach for
tools that may ameliorate problems in the short run, but
they make them worse in the long run. They reach
for carrots and sticks, incentives and rules in an effort
(02:28):
to change the behavior of their workforce. But what I'm
going to try to convince you of is that the
more supervisors rely on rules and external incentives, the more
the wisdom they need is endangered. Too many rules undermine
the development of moral skill, and too much reliance on
(02:53):
incentives undermines moral will. I'll begin with an example. I
call this the lemonade example. One day in the early spring,
a father, a professor of archaeology at the University of Michigan,
took his seven year old to a baseball game. A
(03:17):
few winnings into the game, his son asked for lemonade.
The dad dutifully went to a concession stand to get some.
Mike's Hard lemonade five alcohol was all they had. The dad,
having never heard of it, bought some and brought it
(03:41):
to his son. While they were cheering on the Detroit Tigers.
A security guard happened to notice the child sipping hard
lemonade from the bottom. He immediately called the police. The
police immediately called an ambulance. The ambulance rushed to the
ballpark and then rushed the child to the hospital. He
(04:05):
had no trace of alcohol in him, and the doctors
were ready to discharge him. But no, not so fast.
The police put the child in a Wayne County Child
Protective Services foster home. They hated to do it, they said,
(04:25):
but they had to follow procedure. County officials kept him
there for three days. They hated to do it, but
they had to follow procedure. Next, a judge ruled that
the child could go home to his mom, but only
if his dad left the house and checked into a hotel.
(04:49):
The dad who had endangered the child by giving him
Mike's Heart lemonade. The judge hated to do it, but
he had to follow procedure. After two weeks, the family
was finally united. In telling this story on National Public Radio,
(05:13):
Scott Simon observed that quote, procedures may be dumb, but
they spare you from thinking. And to be fair, procedures
are often imposed because previous officials have been lax and
let a child go back to an abusive household. And
(05:33):
we all know the truth in this second piece of
what Scott Simon said, every year or two, there's a
story in the newspaper about some horribly abused child who
was under the watchful eye of child Protective Services and
somehow escaped detection enough to have been starved down to
(05:55):
weighing fifty or sixty pounds. And right away the response
to that is, we can't let this happen ever again,
and so a rule is put in place to make
sure that this particular failure won't recur. But some other failure,
of course will. So here's an example, the Lemonade story,
(06:17):
where people respond to the failure to protect children with
more and more procedures that police and UH judges have
to follow. Here's another example. Let me remind you of
Judge for Judge Lois for remember way back when when
(06:41):
I talked about the case of Michael who had stolen
fifty dollars from a taxi cab driver and the passenger,
young black male high school dropout without a job. He
stole fifty dollars from a cab driver while brandishing a
toy gun. There was no doubt in for his mind judge,
(07:03):
for his mind, that he was guilty, But the penalty
post problem, she said. The prosecutor wanted a five year sentence,
Pennsylvania sentencing guidelines called for a two year sentence. She
thought both of those were excessive and sentenced Michael to
eleven and a half months in county jail, permitting him
(07:27):
to leave jail to go to work every day so
as to support his family. He served his time working
all the while was successfully reunited with his family, and
it seemed like a good solution to an unfortunate problem.
The trouble is, as I warned you when I first
(07:48):
told you this story, the prosecutor was not satisfied with
the judges sentence and appealed it. It took a while
for the appeal process to wend its way through the
Pennsylvania court system. Eventually the appeal was decided. By then,
(08:12):
Michael was out of jail, back with his family, holding
a steady job. The appeals court ruled that michael sentence
should be extended to three years. He had to go
back to jail. Two things happened as a result of that.
First Michael disappeared. Second Judge four resigned from the bench.
(08:39):
She decided that judges no longer were allowed to use judgment,
and she didn't want to be a judge anymore. The
second example of excessive reliance on rules at the expense
of wise judgment. One last example this concerns battlefield judge mint.
(09:06):
A Lieutenant colonel named Chris Hughes was on a delicate
mission in the religious center of Najaf in Iraq in
April of two thousand two. The soldiers in his very
small unit were walking along a street when suddenly hundreds
of Iraqis poured out of the surrounding buildings, waving their fists, shrieking.
(09:29):
Frantic with rage, they pressed in on the Americans, who
looked at one another with terror. Lieutenant Colonel Hughes, behind
surfer sunglasses, stepped forward, rifle high over his head, barrel
pointing to the ground. Take a knee, he ordered his men.
(09:52):
They looked at him like he was crazy, Then, one
after another, Because soldiers follow orders, they knelt before the
angry crowd, pointing their guns at the ground. The Iraqis
fell silent, their anger subsided, and Lieutenant Colonel Hughes ordered
(10:13):
his men to withdraw. Catastrophe averted. A journalist happened to
see this occur live on CNN, and he got in
touch with Lieutenant Colonel Used and asked him who had
taught him to tame a crowd like that. Hugh said
(10:35):
that no one had prepared him for an angry crowd.
In an Arab country, officers learned certain techniques, like using
the rotor wash of a helicopter to drive a crowd away.
We've all seen that in TV movies, where the the
helicopter lands and the wind created by the rotor blade
(10:56):
pushes everybody away from the helicopter, or firing warning shots
over people's heads. Hugh said, the problem with that is
that the next thing you have to do is shoot
them in the chest. The Iraqis already felt that the
(11:16):
Americans were disrespecting their them and their mosque, and so
for Hughes, the obvious solution was a gesture of respect.
But what made this solution obvious? Hughes had to read
the context, what this crowd was thinking, what they understood,
or more likely, what they misunderstood. How he might get
(11:39):
through to them. He had to imagine the consequences of
any steps he took and make a decision in a complex, dangerous,
and highly unpredictable situation that had competing goals. He had
never trained for this situation, he had no rules to follow.
He came up with a solution that was the right solution. Now,
(12:02):
what's interesting about this is that even or the Iraq invasion,
the U. S. Army had become concerned that too many
of their field officers lacked the ability to do this
kind of improvisation. In the year two thousand, the Army
Chief of Staff wanted to figure out why, and he
(12:23):
brought someone in as a retired lieutenant colonel to do
research on what was going wrong in the training of
the field leadership. In the army, wartime experience is considered
the best teacher as long as you survived the first
few weeks. The question is is there are another good
(12:46):
teacher of battlefield leadership, and the consultant, Leonard Wong, found one,
and that was the practice that junior officers get while
training their units. Characteristically, these officers have to make lots
and lots of decisions as teachers to train their their soldiers,
(13:10):
and these decisions they make develops their capacity for using
judgment that they will need when they're on the battlefield.
But what Long discovered is that, starting in the nineteen eighties,
the Army had begun to restructure training in ways that
had opposite results. Instead of giving company commanders a handful
(13:34):
of objectives and allowing them to meet those objectives in
whatever way they thought best, they gave them longer and
longer lists of specific training exercises. And what that meant
is that the commanders in training their troops had less
(13:54):
and less reason to use their judgment in deciding how
to train, which meant they had less and less opportunity
to develop their judgment as they were trained the troops,
which meant when they actually needed their judgment under battlefield circumstances,
they had nothing to call on. All of the specific
(14:17):
training requirements that the Army introduced were of course designed
to improve training, making sure that nothing was missed as
troops were trained for battle, and it's possible that in
some respects it did improve training. But the price that
was being paid, which nobody realized, is that at the
(14:39):
same time that you were maybe providing better training for
the troops, you were providing worse training for their leaders,
and the result was mechanical activity in the battlefield because
the ability to improvise, read the situation, used discretion and
judgment had not been built into field commanders. Too many rules,
(15:00):
too many requirements removes discretion and stifle the development of
flexible officers, and that results in a kind of reactive
rather than proactive thought, compliance with rules rather than creativity,
adherence rather than audacity. These are not the kinds of
(15:22):
officers the Army needs, and unpredictable, quickly changing situations where
specific orders are absent and military protocol is unclear. What
Wong concluded was that the Army is creating cooks who
(15:42):
are quite adept at carrying out a recipe, rather than
chefs who can look at the ingredients available to them
and create a meal. And of course, it perhaps goes
without saying that Wong and the high level army leadership
thought that the army needed more chefs and your cooks
(16:07):
to use the language that I've been using. The army
needed more wisdom and less rule followed, and it was
inadvertently taking the opportunity to develop wisdom away from the
people who would need to display it under battlefield conditions.
(16:29):
It's time right now for a quick break. But when
we come back, how we end up with mediocre teachers.
(16:52):
Another example is how Jerome Groupman learned to give bad news. Again.
Remember Groupman telling his thirty year old patient that she
was probably going to be in two years. So he
describes his own education. The first point he makes is
(17:14):
that when doctors have these conversations with their patients, they
do it behind closed doors, so that the medical students
who are training the residents who are training don't get
to see these conversations and learn from them. They basically
learned themselves on the jump. So Groupman entered practice believing
(17:38):
in honesty, tell the truth. It was disrespectful and patronizing
to lie or to sugarcoat. So he had a patient
who would die of cancer, probably in six months, and
he told her. She was crushed, She was devastated. She
lived for two more years in a state of perpetual sadness.
(17:59):
So Groupman learned you can't just tell the truth. The
next time he sure coded things and his patient didn't
have adequate time to prepare himself and his family for
his death. Well, maybe you do need to tell the truth.
These early blunders is how Grouping described these decisions. These
(18:20):
early blunders are not surprising. It's always hard for doctors
to deliver bad news. People don't want to acknowledge that
their patient's gonna die. There's always some possibility that one
more test or one more procedure will prevent what seems
to be an imminent death. Conventional wisdom has always been
(18:42):
keep the patient optimistic. But as Groupman points out, he
had never watched the doctor have this conversation. The consulting
room doors were closed, and so he was flying blind.
Here's a quote. During my nine years of medical school
and professional training in the nineteen seventies, I was never
(19:04):
instructed how to speak about dying to a gravely ill
patient and the patient's family. It was presumed that as
medical students, we learned how to deliver bad news through
careful observation of our mentors, just as we learned how
to lance and access by watching doctors and then trying
it ourselves. But most physicians prefer to speak to their
(19:26):
patients in private, and the subject was never raised in
our classrooms. That's another example. Still another example the way
in which many school systems have responded to disappointing or
woefully inadequate instruction provided by teachers is to give teachers
(19:51):
scripts to follow. The idea is that some expert sitting
in the central administration of the Board of Education, some
group of experts, will design the ideal sc for teaching algebra,
the ideal script for teaching Civics, the ideal script for
teaching grammar, and then they'll it will be handed in
(20:14):
a big, loosely notebook to the teachers who will simply
follow the script. What means, of course, that teachers now
become script readers and rule followers, and their opportunity to
develop the discretion and judgment that will enable them to
(20:35):
figure out what the particular kids in that particular class
need has been essentially eliminated. Teaching as script following is
not a job that most teachers want. And so either
you drive the wisdom out of teaching by giving teacher
(20:55):
scripts to follow, or you drive the wise teachers out
of teaching because they find the jobs so unrewarding the
way it's constructed, and the worse performing a school system is,
the more inclined it is to take discretion away from
(21:17):
the teachers and give them scripts to follow. If we
have mediocre teachers, we got to tell them what to do.
When we tell them what to do, of course, they
remain mediocre teachers, and it is probably better to have
a mediocre teacher than an awful one. But it is
(21:37):
not good enough to settle for mediocre teachers and lose
any chance to have inspired ones. The appeal to rules
is a war against mistakes. It's a war against trial
and error. It's a war against using judgment, and it
(21:57):
is self perpetuating because you the more you take judgment
out of the practice, whether it's the practice of talking
to patients, or the practice of teaching elementary school kids,
or the practice of leading battalion company on the battlefield,
(22:18):
the more you take it out of the practice, the
less wise the practitioners become. The less wise the practitioners become,
the more you need rules to substitute for the wisdom
that the practitioners unfortunately don't have. So this has been
the model, a model for making medical practice better, educational
(22:43):
practice better, financial services practice better. We can't rely on
these people to use their judgment. Give them rules to
follow that will assure a given level of quality of
whatever is the service that they provide. But as Lieutenant
(23:04):
Wong said in evaluating the Army, the world needs chefs
and rules are for cookes. Something to think about. Are
you approaching life as a chef or as a cook?
Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time when Barry
(23:26):
talks about why being a person of character is not
about doing the right things, but about doing the right
things for the right reasons. The Happiness Formula from One
Day University is a production of I Heart Podcasts and
School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a
(23:48):
review in your favorite podcast app, and check out the
Curiosity Audio Network for podcasts covering history, pop culture, true crime,
and more.
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome.
(00:36):
You're listening to the Happiness Formula. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli.
Barry Schwartz has taken us on quite the journey. We've
traveled to ancient Greece to learn the principles of wisdom
from Aristotle. We've met nurses and doctors who navigate difficult
situations every day with vulnerable patients, and we've met parents
(00:57):
trying to figure out the best way to raise their kids.
We've learned that happiness is less about chasing goals and
more about cultivating wisdom and making good decisions. So this
week Barry talks about how to start applying what we've learned,
and how rules can actually keep you from gaining wisdom.
(01:18):
Go figure, well, Barry get us started. So we spend
a fair amount of time together, and I hope I've
managed by now to convince you of how important wisdom
is too doing work that's good, having relationships that are good,
(01:41):
and ultimately to being satisfied with your life. Friends, lovers, parents, doctors, lawyers, teachers, hairdressers,
retail salespeople all need wisdom to practice well. Yet when
things go wrong, as they do, managers, administrators, policy makers
(02:07):
don't try to make practitioners wiser. Instead, they reach for
tools that may ameliorate problems in the short run, but
they make them worse in the long run. They reach
for carrots and sticks, incentives and rules in an effort
(02:28):
to change the behavior of their workforce. But what I'm
going to try to convince you of is that the
more supervisors rely on rules and external incentives, the more
the wisdom they need is endangered. Too many rules undermine
the development of moral skill, and too much reliance on
(02:53):
incentives undermines moral will. I'll begin with an example. I
call this the lemonade example. One day in the early spring,
a father, a professor of archaeology at the University of Michigan,
took his seven year old to a baseball game. A
(03:17):
few winnings into the game, his son asked for lemonade.
The dad dutifully went to a concession stand to get some.
Mike's Hard lemonade five alcohol was all they had. The dad,
having never heard of it, bought some and brought it
(03:41):
to his son. While they were cheering on the Detroit Tigers.
A security guard happened to notice the child sipping hard
lemonade from the bottom. He immediately called the police. The
police immediately called an ambulance. The ambulance rushed to the
ballpark and then rushed the child to the hospital. He
(04:05):
had no trace of alcohol in him, and the doctors
were ready to discharge him. But no, not so fast.
The police put the child in a Wayne County Child
Protective Services foster home. They hated to do it, they said,
(04:25):
but they had to follow procedure. County officials kept him
there for three days. They hated to do it, but
they had to follow procedure. Next, a judge ruled that
the child could go home to his mom, but only
if his dad left the house and checked into a hotel.
(04:49):
The dad who had endangered the child by giving him
Mike's Heart lemonade. The judge hated to do it, but
he had to follow procedure. After two weeks, the family
was finally united. In telling this story on National Public Radio,
(05:13):
Scott Simon observed that quote, procedures may be dumb, but
they spare you from thinking. And to be fair, procedures
are often imposed because previous officials have been lax and
let a child go back to an abusive household. And
(05:33):
we all know the truth in this second piece of
what Scott Simon said, every year or two, there's a
story in the newspaper about some horribly abused child who
was under the watchful eye of child Protective Services and
somehow escaped detection enough to have been starved down to
(05:55):
weighing fifty or sixty pounds. And right away the response
to that is, we can't let this happen ever again,
and so a rule is put in place to make
sure that this particular failure won't recur. But some other failure,
of course will. So here's an example, the Lemonade story,
(06:17):
where people respond to the failure to protect children with
more and more procedures that police and UH judges have
to follow. Here's another example. Let me remind you of
Judge for Judge Lois for remember way back when when
(06:41):
I talked about the case of Michael who had stolen
fifty dollars from a taxi cab driver and the passenger,
young black male high school dropout without a job. He
stole fifty dollars from a cab driver while brandishing a
toy gun. There was no doubt in for his mind judge,
(07:03):
for his mind, that he was guilty, But the penalty
post problem, she said. The prosecutor wanted a five year sentence,
Pennsylvania sentencing guidelines called for a two year sentence. She
thought both of those were excessive and sentenced Michael to
eleven and a half months in county jail, permitting him
(07:27):
to leave jail to go to work every day so
as to support his family. He served his time working
all the while was successfully reunited with his family, and
it seemed like a good solution to an unfortunate problem.
The trouble is, as I warned you when I first
(07:48):
told you this story, the prosecutor was not satisfied with
the judges sentence and appealed it. It took a while
for the appeal process to wend its way through the
Pennsylvania court system. Eventually the appeal was decided. By then,
(08:12):
Michael was out of jail, back with his family, holding
a steady job. The appeals court ruled that michael sentence
should be extended to three years. He had to go
back to jail. Two things happened as a result of that.
First Michael disappeared. Second Judge four resigned from the bench.
(08:39):
She decided that judges no longer were allowed to use judgment,
and she didn't want to be a judge anymore. The
second example of excessive reliance on rules at the expense
of wise judgment. One last example this concerns battlefield judge mint.
(09:06):
A Lieutenant colonel named Chris Hughes was on a delicate
mission in the religious center of Najaf in Iraq in
April of two thousand two. The soldiers in his very
small unit were walking along a street when suddenly hundreds
of Iraqis poured out of the surrounding buildings, waving their fists, shrieking.
(09:29):
Frantic with rage, they pressed in on the Americans, who
looked at one another with terror. Lieutenant Colonel Hughes, behind
surfer sunglasses, stepped forward, rifle high over his head, barrel
pointing to the ground. Take a knee, he ordered his men.
(09:52):
They looked at him like he was crazy, Then, one
after another, Because soldiers follow orders, they knelt before the
angry crowd, pointing their guns at the ground. The Iraqis
fell silent, their anger subsided, and Lieutenant Colonel Hughes ordered
(10:13):
his men to withdraw. Catastrophe averted. A journalist happened to
see this occur live on CNN, and he got in
touch with Lieutenant Colonel Used and asked him who had
taught him to tame a crowd like that. Hugh said
(10:35):
that no one had prepared him for an angry crowd.
In an Arab country, officers learned certain techniques, like using
the rotor wash of a helicopter to drive a crowd away.
We've all seen that in TV movies, where the the
helicopter lands and the wind created by the rotor blade
(10:56):
pushes everybody away from the helicopter, or firing warning shots
over people's heads. Hugh said, the problem with that is
that the next thing you have to do is shoot
them in the chest. The Iraqis already felt that the
(11:16):
Americans were disrespecting their them and their mosque, and so
for Hughes, the obvious solution was a gesture of respect.
But what made this solution obvious? Hughes had to read
the context, what this crowd was thinking, what they understood,
or more likely, what they misunderstood. How he might get
(11:39):
through to them. He had to imagine the consequences of
any steps he took and make a decision in a complex, dangerous,
and highly unpredictable situation that had competing goals. He had
never trained for this situation, he had no rules to follow.
He came up with a solution that was the right solution. Now,
(12:02):
what's interesting about this is that even or the Iraq invasion,
the U. S. Army had become concerned that too many
of their field officers lacked the ability to do this
kind of improvisation. In the year two thousand, the Army
Chief of Staff wanted to figure out why, and he
(12:23):
brought someone in as a retired lieutenant colonel to do
research on what was going wrong in the training of
the field leadership. In the army, wartime experience is considered
the best teacher as long as you survived the first
few weeks. The question is is there are another good
(12:46):
teacher of battlefield leadership, and the consultant, Leonard Wong, found one,
and that was the practice that junior officers get while
training their units. Characteristically, these officers have to make lots
and lots of decisions as teachers to train their their soldiers,
(13:10):
and these decisions they make develops their capacity for using
judgment that they will need when they're on the battlefield.
But what Long discovered is that, starting in the nineteen eighties,
the Army had begun to restructure training in ways that
had opposite results. Instead of giving company commanders a handful
(13:34):
of objectives and allowing them to meet those objectives in
whatever way they thought best, they gave them longer and
longer lists of specific training exercises. And what that meant
is that the commanders in training their troops had less
(13:54):
and less reason to use their judgment in deciding how
to train, which meant they had less and less opportunity
to develop their judgment as they were trained the troops,
which meant when they actually needed their judgment under battlefield circumstances,
they had nothing to call on. All of the specific
(14:17):
training requirements that the Army introduced were of course designed
to improve training, making sure that nothing was missed as
troops were trained for battle, and it's possible that in
some respects it did improve training. But the price that
was being paid, which nobody realized, is that at the
(14:39):
same time that you were maybe providing better training for
the troops, you were providing worse training for their leaders,
and the result was mechanical activity in the battlefield because
the ability to improvise, read the situation, used discretion and
judgment had not been built into field commanders. Too many rules,
(15:00):
too many requirements removes discretion and stifle the development of
flexible officers, and that results in a kind of reactive
rather than proactive thought, compliance with rules rather than creativity,
adherence rather than audacity. These are not the kinds of
(15:22):
officers the Army needs, and unpredictable, quickly changing situations where
specific orders are absent and military protocol is unclear. What
Wong concluded was that the Army is creating cooks who
(15:42):
are quite adept at carrying out a recipe, rather than
chefs who can look at the ingredients available to them
and create a meal. And of course, it perhaps goes
without saying that Wong and the high level army leadership
thought that the army needed more chefs and your cooks
(16:07):
to use the language that I've been using. The army
needed more wisdom and less rule followed, and it was
inadvertently taking the opportunity to develop wisdom away from the
people who would need to display it under battlefield conditions.
(16:29):
It's time right now for a quick break. But when
we come back, how we end up with mediocre teachers.
(16:52):
Another example is how Jerome Groupman learned to give bad news. Again.
Remember Groupman telling his thirty year old patient that she
was probably going to be in two years. So he
describes his own education. The first point he makes is
(17:14):
that when doctors have these conversations with their patients, they
do it behind closed doors, so that the medical students
who are training the residents who are training don't get
to see these conversations and learn from them. They basically
learned themselves on the jump. So Groupman entered practice believing
(17:38):
in honesty, tell the truth. It was disrespectful and patronizing
to lie or to sugarcoat. So he had a patient
who would die of cancer, probably in six months, and
he told her. She was crushed, She was devastated. She
lived for two more years in a state of perpetual sadness.
(17:59):
So Groupman learned you can't just tell the truth. The
next time he sure coded things and his patient didn't
have adequate time to prepare himself and his family for
his death. Well, maybe you do need to tell the truth.
These early blunders is how Grouping described these decisions. These
(18:20):
early blunders are not surprising. It's always hard for doctors
to deliver bad news. People don't want to acknowledge that
their patient's gonna die. There's always some possibility that one
more test or one more procedure will prevent what seems
to be an imminent death. Conventional wisdom has always been
(18:42):
keep the patient optimistic. But as Groupman points out, he
had never watched the doctor have this conversation. The consulting
room doors were closed, and so he was flying blind.
Here's a quote. During my nine years of medical school
and professional training in the nineteen seventies, I was never
(19:04):
instructed how to speak about dying to a gravely ill
patient and the patient's family. It was presumed that as
medical students, we learned how to deliver bad news through
careful observation of our mentors, just as we learned how
to lance and access by watching doctors and then trying
it ourselves. But most physicians prefer to speak to their
(19:26):
patients in private, and the subject was never raised in
our classrooms. That's another example. Still another example the way
in which many school systems have responded to disappointing or
woefully inadequate instruction provided by teachers is to give teachers
(19:51):
scripts to follow. The idea is that some expert sitting
in the central administration of the Board of Education, some
group of experts, will design the ideal sc for teaching algebra,
the ideal script for teaching Civics, the ideal script for
teaching grammar, and then they'll it will be handed in
(20:14):
a big, loosely notebook to the teachers who will simply
follow the script. What means, of course, that teachers now
become script readers and rule followers, and their opportunity to
develop the discretion and judgment that will enable them to
(20:35):
figure out what the particular kids in that particular class
need has been essentially eliminated. Teaching as script following is
not a job that most teachers want. And so either
you drive the wisdom out of teaching by giving teacher
(20:55):
scripts to follow, or you drive the wise teachers out
of teaching because they find the jobs so unrewarding the
way it's constructed, and the worse performing a school system is,
the more inclined it is to take discretion away from
(21:17):
the teachers and give them scripts to follow. If we
have mediocre teachers, we got to tell them what to do.
When we tell them what to do, of course, they
remain mediocre teachers, and it is probably better to have
a mediocre teacher than an awful one. But it is
(21:37):
not good enough to settle for mediocre teachers and lose
any chance to have inspired ones. The appeal to rules
is a war against mistakes. It's a war against trial
and error. It's a war against using judgment, and it
(21:57):
is self perpetuating because you the more you take judgment
out of the practice, whether it's the practice of talking
to patients, or the practice of teaching elementary school kids,
or the practice of leading battalion company on the battlefield,
(22:18):
the more you take it out of the practice, the
less wise the practitioners become. The less wise the practitioners become,
the more you need rules to substitute for the wisdom
that the practitioners unfortunately don't have. So this has been
the model, a model for making medical practice better, educational
(22:43):
practice better, financial services practice better. We can't rely on
these people to use their judgment. Give them rules to
follow that will assure a given level of quality of
whatever is the service that they provide. But as Lieutenant
(23:04):
Wong said in evaluating the Army, the world needs chefs
and rules are for cookes. Something to think about. Are
you approaching life as a chef or as a cook?
Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time when Barry
(23:26):
talks about why being a person of character is not
about doing the right things, but about doing the right
things for the right reasons. The Happiness Formula from One
Day University is a production of I Heart Podcasts and
School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a
(23:48):
review in your favorite podcast app, and check out the
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