Narrative Fallacy
We like stories, we like to summarise, and we like to simplify, i.e., to reduce the dimension of matters… what I call the narrative fallacy. (It is actually a fraud, but, to be polite, I will call it a fallacy). The fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. It severely distorts our mental representation of the world... The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding. - Nassim Taleb (emphasis in original)
The narrative fallacy is particularly insidious because we cannot resist attributing cause to effect, regardless of whether such a causal link is warranted. Worse, there is often no clarification which is the cause and which is the effect to begin with.
The human mind is perturbed when sequences of facts or events are placed alongside one another without “a logical link”. Hence we force one into every blank we come across. Consider the following two statements:
the boy had an ice-cream
the boy was thirsty
We are a lot more at ease with “the boy had an ice-cream because he was thirsty“. Now that makes more sense! Furthermore, we have reduced two pieces of information into one, making it is easier to remember. However, when was the last time you quench your thirst with ice-cream? Is the “arrow of relationship” pointing in the correct direction? Could it instead be that the boy was thirsty because he had ice-cream? In fact, should there be an arrow to begin with? The boy might have had ice-cream because he likes ice-cream, and he was thirsty because he has not had any water for a long time.
Narration Sickness
Education is suffering from narration sickness. The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalised, and predictable. Or else, he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to “fill” the students with the contents of his narration – contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity. The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power… - Paulo Freire
Let me try to delineate this narration sickness through the following illustration.
The first box represents a real-life observation that has been recorded. There are many letters in different fonts, in different sizes, and in different colours. They coexist, side-by-side, in a seemingly random sequence. The observation doesn’t seem to make sense. Our proclivity is then to look for patterns, to “join the dots”, hopefully distill some knowledge from the observation.
The data is analysed for patterns. Once identified, colours and letters that do not match the pattern (especially the special characters because they are outliers in the data) are dropped. This then paves the way to formulating a research finding. We find that everything is now a lot neater and we are happier. The research finding spells “narrative fallacy” - that makes a lot of sense; we are enthralled by the discovery. Eventually, this knowledge, well-proven, is published in the textbook in black and white, and Arial.
So we first decontextualised the data then proceeded to publish a standalone piece of wisdom, which is a-contextual, without finding the undertaking problematic. Indeed, would the green and yellow letters even stay as they were after being removed from their original settings? Is that the only narrative possible, permissible? This is what we are asking our students to consume, and upon graduation, apply this knowledge in the real world to solve real problems.
Narrative Fallacy in Curriculum
Unlike Taleb's allusion, I'm not necessarily saying that there is malice or ill-intention on the part of the agents involved; though I would argue that there is still fraud insofar as untruths are proffered, regardless of intents.
The video above is analogous to how narrative fallacy finds its way into the classroom through the curriculum development process. The expert practitioner is trying to reproduce his expert practice (the drawing) while the curriculum developer attempts to codify it from observation (the feelings of pen strokes on his back). Whilst he is able to grasp some elements of it, he is unable to construct a coherent structure from these elements because some of the coalescing details are missing. Such details are often tacit knowledge (intuitions) or prior experiences of the expert that are hidden from the curriculum developer (analogous to be being unable to see the actual drawing in this game). These unseen constituents bind the expert’s practice, without which it falls apart. Thus the curriculum developer understandably struggles to make sense of the expert’s actions (strokes of the drawing felt on the back). As such, he compensates by filling in the gaps with his own intuitions and experiences. Consequently, the expert practitioner’s drawing and the curriculum developer’s drawing start to deviate and end up significantly different even though the strokes used were very similar.
The tragedy (or comedy if you could bring yourself to laugh) escalates if the lecturer teaching the class is not the developer. A further layer of interpretation morphs the curriculum into an entirely different monster and students no longer learn the true practice, despite the best intentions of the expert practitioner, curriculum developer, as well as lecturer. Perhaps this is why that course on best sales practices, which was modelled after your star salesperson, did not produce more sales.
The impossibility of education sits squarely in the codification of the curriculum.
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