order, control, ludic fallacy
Education is impossible because schools dehumanise students by imposing spurious order in the classroom. This stems largely from misplaced accountability levied on school leaders and teachers by the system - that outcomes promised are duly and certainly delivered. Inadvertently, this contrived certainty leads to a clandestine advent of ludic fallacy in the classroom; the consequence of erroneously believing that fixed rules and predetermined outcomes can approximate real-life.
This conundrum could not have been more elegantly described by Dr Jordan Peterson:
Order is explained territory. We are in order when the actions we deem appropriate produce the results we aim at. We regard such outcomes positively, indicating as they do, first, that we have moved closer to what we desire, and second, that our theory about how the world works remains acceptably accurate. Nonetheless, all states of order, no matter how secure and comfortable, have their flaws. Our knowledge of how to act in the world remains eternally incomplete - partly because of our profound ignorance of the vast unknown, partly because of our wilful blindness, and partly because the world continues, in its entropic manner, to transform itself unexpectedly. - Jordan B. Peterson
Entropic World: Ludic Fallacy
Ludic comes from the word ludus which means games in Latin. Games, by design, are orderly. They have fixed rules that players must abide by and well-defined outcomes that determine who wins. Gambling is a game and even casinos have rules.
... gambling was sterilised and domesticated uncertainty. In the casino, you know the rules, you can calculate the odds, and the type of uncertainty... is mild... You cannot expect the casino to pay out a million times your bet, or to change the rules abruptly on you during the game. - Nassim N. Taleb
The casino will not pay you a million times your bet but the most successful companies and individuals reap such returns - the oft mentioned 1%. Neither can the casino change the rules abruptly on you during a game (the regulators make sure they do not) but the entropic world can and surely does.
Very often, when schools and teachers try to create learning experiences that aim to be more authentic, they tend to approximate real-life with game or simulation. However, they end up with a caricature of reality and introduce ludic fallacy into the curriculum instead. One of the most lucid examples of ludic fallacy in education is teaching the topic of probability and random events through the game of dice. When you roll a die, there can only be outcomes of one to six and each roll will yield only one outcome. Given that the outcome of rolling a die is random (assuming it is fair), it seems like a valid study of probability. However, possible outcomes of rolling the die of real-life are not restricted to just one to six. Despite extensive mathematical modelling, all of which may point toward six most likely outcomes, the entropic world might just throw up a seventh when we least expect it; circa 2020 global pandemic.
Order Imposed: Ill-advised and Rigidified
I really believe in the zoo animal thing. We go to the Central Park, Bronx Zoo right now and release those animals in their natural habitat, they're dead in 10 seconds. And I think we have to be very thoughtful for the parents in this room, (they have) especially brought their kids here night. You have to let them loose... fake environments are destroying their actual competence. - Gary Vaynerchuk
Furthermore, the order we strive to impose on the world can rigidify as a consequence of ill-advised attempts to eradicate from consideration all that is unknown. When such attempts go too far, totalitarianism threatens, driven by the desire to exercise full control where such control is not possible, even in principle. This means risking a dangerous restriction of all the psychological and social changes necessary to maintain adaptation to the ever-changing world. - Jordan B. Peterson
We can have a plan, an order by which our actions will yield our desired results. Try as we may to impose such an order and rule on reality, real-life doesn’t care for your rules and my rules. We are prepared to accept this fact though we are still surprised when the plan fails. However, in the classroom, plans are not allowed to fail; administrative and accountability requirements demand that plans work. This is unrealistic. Teachers with years of experience know that their lesson plans almost always go out of the window as soon as they step into the classroom because students’ responses to the learning activities are unpredictable. It’s only human. How then can we ensure that the plan works? By removing all ambiguity or randomness from the classroom, removing the human. Strict order must be imposed, behaviours of students managed, students’ obedience secured. This is good classroom management, hallmark of a good teacher.
The result is, unfortunately, the domestication of students, which is not unlike how humans have domesticated the horse. A wild horse runs free and feeds itself, while the domesticated horse is put to work in the farm or pull carriages. Now that we are highly industrialised and the horse has been replaced by motorised vehicles, we use them as kiddie rides in the zoo. Before a harness and saddle can be strapped onto a horse, it has to be sufficiently tamed. It needs to stop running wild and enjoy being fed; in other words, its natural abilities and instincts are lost. Likewise, the rigidity of uniform behaviours imposed in the classroom disables students’ instincts of adapting to uncertainty and surprises; they do only as they are told, hallmark of a good student.
Moving into Chaos
... intelligence in our schools is defined as always having the same answers as everyone else... we’re taught how to calculate when two canoes will meet on a river, the river’s flowing five miles an hour... we should teach kids to raise their hand and say “No! That wouldn't work because you can't predict the water will be exactly five miles an hour and there's going to be wind”... - Steve Wozniak
And so we find ourselves inescapably faced with the need to move beyond order, into its opposite: chaos. - Jordan B. Peterson
Perhaps behaviour wise we do get that rigidity is problematic; it is observable and familiar. However, it doesn’t stop there. Less obvious but no less crippling is the domestication of the cognition. Not only do students need to behave uniformly, they must also give the same answer.
As with all games, there are predetermined rules that players need to follow and the winner is declared based on a predetermined outcome - in the case of education, that’s the correct answer found at the back of the textbook! Students are judged to have either succeeded or not by some form of assessment, by whether they have reproduced the correct answer. In Singapore, we have 12 years of general education and another three to four years of tertiary or university education. That is 15 to 16 years worth of indoctrination with the dogma of correct answers. There should be little wonder then that school graduates enter real-life expecting correct answers and expecting to find them at the back of some textbooks of life (therefore also expecting that life has a textbook).
Teaching the correct answer and having students reproduce the correct answer is often referred to as the answering pedagogy. The biggest problem with the answering pedagogy is that students are able to reproduce solutions for yesterday's problem but not create their own futures. Upon graduation, they find that their canoes do not meet on the river and they do not know why. That leaves us in a very bad position, in the impossibility of education.
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