Wicked: Questioning what we know

As a frequent Metropolitan Opera goer, I haven't gotten out to see many Broadway shows in recent years. So I was delighted to catch up with the performance of Wicked during its latest Columbus run. While not the same caliber experience as the opening cast on Broadway, the touring company versions we get here compare well to the later casts of long-running shows in NYC. Wicked was no exception: bright, energetic, entertaining, with an appreciative audience; it made for a very enjoyable evening.

Wicked is currently the longest-running show on Broadway (it opened in Oct. 2003). I wanted to see it mainly to learn the backstory it presented to The Wizard of Oz. For those who haven't seen it, Wicked tells the Oz story from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West. We learn how the Cowardly Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow came to be as well as many other aspects of the story that, thanks to Judy Garland, is so well known to all of us.

While I was being entertained by the show, songs, and story, I kept thinking how we grow up thinking of history in one way. Of course, The Wizard of Oz is fiction, not real history. But Wicked asks us think whether the story we know so well is what really happened.

So while I was watching and listening, I thought about Josephine Tey's book The Daughter of Time and learning at Cornell several years ago what the study of history is all about. (See my prior blog: Why Study History?) In her book, Tey turns around the story of King Richard III and asks the reader to question whether history's view of the wicked hunchbacked Richard portrayed by Shakespere in his play (and by Lawrence Olivier on the screen), is really accurate. History, after all, is written by the victors, and in Richard III's case, depicting Richard as wicked served the purposes of the succeeding Tudor dynasty. Tey raises her question, though, through a fictional mystery story, much as Dan Brown raised his question, 52 years later, on Jesus Christ's real relationship with Mary Magdalene in his wildly popular The Da Vinci Code.

A more direct history vs. history challenge has been raised by Gavin Menzies in his book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World in which Menzies challenges the story American schoolchildren have learned for generations: that the European explorers starting with Christopher Columbus discovered the sea routes that led to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The romantic history we were taught is that Columbus and other Europeans were so bold that they questioned the flat earth notions of the time. Menzies reveals documentary and other evidence that Chinese Admiral Zheng He led Ming Dynasty treasure ships around the world in and after the year 1421 and prepared maps that reflected the world - maps that ultimately Columbus and the other European explorers had seen that helped them in their voyages.

American education has long been criticized as being far too Euro-centric. My purpose in this blog entry isn't to carry on that debate (I'll leave that issue to a future blog), but to raise the issue of questioning what we know.

Questioning what we know can be a dangerous pursuit. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History,  wrote of the slings and arrows he suffered in questioning what we all think we know in his book and PBS show The Pluto Files. When Tyson and other astronomers downgraded Pluto's status from "planet" to "Kuiper Belt Object" he and his colleagues were vilified by the venerable NY Times and scores of third-graders (at least until the Times published another story, 5 years later, acknowledging the reasonable position the scientists had taken). So many of us learned (and had drilled into us) the fact that there are 9 planets in our solar system; that history must be respected and protected. As one who once aspired to be an astronomer myself, my sympathies are with Tyson. But the reasons for my sympathies go further.

One of the fundamental purposes of post-secondary education is to develop critical thinking. But thinking critically about issues - whether they be about stories, histories, or the definition of scientific terms such as "planet" - is not merely an intellectual ability. Critical thinking is also a disposition: a willingness to undertake the hard work of questioning what we are being presented with. Such disposition does not come naturally after 12 or so years of elementary and secondary school education in the U.S., since much of what we learn in school is so often presented as unquestioned fact to be accepted and memorized.

With the continually growing volume of factionalized political argument we are faced with, the future of our democratic system of government and the future of our country depend on our ability to instill more Americans with the ability and disposition to think critically about the "facts" we are presented with and the choices we are being asked to make. I am delighted that a Broadway show might get some in the audience to question what they know and so help underscore the importance of critical thinking.

Comments on "Critical Thinking about Economics"

My friend K.S. and my Mom left thoughtful comments on my prior blog on "Critical Thinking about Economics." I started replying in as comments, but found my replies were getting rather long, so here's a new blog instead.

First, K.S. suggests that shocking events like 9-11 and the economic meltdown are required to enable Americans to accept changes that they wouldn't have otherwise, even though critical thinking might have unveiled the desirability of such changes. While I agree that shock makes such changes more popularly acceptable, there are other ways to change opinion. Most importantly: Leadership. Whether such leadership is charismatic or visionary, the kind of leadership that can change public opinion goes beyond what Bergen Evans observed in 1954: "For the most part, our leaders are merely following out front: They do but marshal us the way that we are going."

On this 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's moon landing, we're reminded of a young American president who led us to do things we wouldn't have otherwise. One might observe that Pres. Kennedy's vision was built on the shock of the Russians beating America into space. Maybe so. Or maybe Kennedy led us in a chosen new direction; he could just as easily have led us into ignoring Russian scientific advances and have Americans continue to focus inwardly, cutting taxes instead of investing in creating an entire generation of scientists, thinkers, and innovators.

Mom noted the challenge of having the masses understand vision and future greatness. She further noted that to counter greed, families and schools must develop ethical behavior and character in their kids. I totally agree. As I noted, developing critical thinking abilities and dispositions in more Americans is one way to increase openness to new visions and the possibilities of the future. And focusing on the development of virtuous character traits is so sorely needed in this country and world.

In his recent book Five Minds for the Future, Harvard Professor Howard Gardner wrote of the vital importance today of educating our kids not only in the academic disciplines, but also so they can synthesize (connect) information, create new ideas, respect the ideas of others, and behave ethically - beyond self-interest - to improve the quality of life for all.

We all see the impact of the lack of such ethical understanding and behavior in the excesses of greed in our society today. Our families, communities, and schools share the responsibility for this failure. I believe we can and must change this situation and each of us has the opportunity to improve the character of kids, ourselves, and our neighbors within our own communities. Like Ronald Reagan's "thousand points of light," by working on character development one community at a time, we can create a brighter America. The City of Pleasanton, California is a wonderful example of a community that is accomplishing this objective.

Finally, K.S. cited a Guardian article in which experts explained the current financial crisis to Queen Elizabeth. He asked for my comments on that article.

I agree with the points reported in the article. I think the underlying problem goes deeper, however, than the lack of jurisdiction, failure to understand collective risks of the system, the "psychology of denial," and personal incentives that differ from society's interests.

The basic question they didn't address is: What is the purpose of financial markets, from society's perspective? In business school, I was taught that the financial markets provide capital for investment, and ultimately, the purpose of investment is to create wealth.

Even while taking the course on stock markets, however, it seemed to me that the stock market is an inefficient means of providing investment capital. While IPOs provide initial capital for company formation, the continued trading of the stock doesn't provide any additional capital to that company for investment. Trading of already issued stock is merely gambling that the company will pay off more in dividends or the share price will appreciate. But that appreciation is based on gambling that someone will pay more for those shares, expecting more in dividends or capital appreciation. I also learned a term describing a principle in this secondary trading: "The greater fool theory." It's a theory that's hundreds of years old, going at least as far back as the Dutch tulip bubble of 1624, in which speculators bid up prices of single tulip bulbs to today's equivalent of $100,000 before the bubble burst.

Of course, continued trading of a stock can provide additional capital to a company that issues more stock or trade in their own already issued shares. But fundamentally, how much of the money that is traded in stock ultimately ends up as capital usable by companies to create wealth versus money that is just bet on future share prices? With all the concern about legalizing casino gambling, we seem to be oblivious to the fact that the stock market has made gambling legal and socially acceptable - even admired - for centuries!

We have accepted significant changes in the financial markets during the past few decades - notably the creation of increasingly exotic derivatives and increasing deregulation of the markets - during a period of unprecedentedly long market expansion. These changes have helped a relative few make fortunes in personal income for awhile. But these changes haven't created much inherent wealth or wealth-creating investment. Rather, they've created a huge casino enabling a few to make fortunes on other peoples' money and risk.

These changes have worked to lull the world into complacency and also to ignore fundamental truths and lessons of the past. For example, a basic economics lesson is that a company that is too big to fail - a monopoly - needs to be highly regulated in order to protect society's interests.

My answer to Queen Elizabeth's question "How come nobody could foresee it?" is that many people could and did foresee the economic crisis. However, most of us just didn't like the pronouncements of the critical-thinking, ethical Cassandras. Instead, we hoped the easy money would continue to come along with the easy answers. Well, most of us are paying for that misplaced hope.

The current economic meltdown is providing "a teachable moment." Will we learn or will we continue to keep our heads in the sand? I guess the answer will depend on our families, teachers, and the leaders we elect.

Critical Thinking about Economics

I was delighted when the Ohio Board of Regents hired me as Chancellor to help them and the state "think out-of-the-box." That's what my education and management consulting career had trained me to do. So I've been especially pleased when I find others who do so and help others stretch their thinking.

Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational introduced me to a new field - behavioral economics - and it challenged my previous thinking.

The only economics courses I took in college were in my MBA curriculum. While taking those courses - which I enjoyed - I thought I would have enjoyed taking economics as my undergraduate major (instead of the mathematics and physics which I took), and I have advised others interested in studying business as an undergraduate major to major in economics instead. With my math background, I quickly understood the economics principles from the models on which they were built. My understanding of the simple principles of supply and demand and economic efficiency became the basis for my self-described moniker of "free-marketeer."

From Prof. Ariely's book - and then a couple of sessions by Cornell University professors in Ithaca last year for the Trustee/Council Annual Meeting entitled "Why Trial Judges Make Mistakes" and "Using Psychology to Create a Better Economics" - I learned that the economics models that have been developed to describe decision making are perhaps too simplistic to reflect decisions that are actually made.

The notion that models don't perfectly predict performance isn't surprising to me. All models necessarily simplify the real world and hence must be produce somewhat inaccurate depictions of reality. The research done by Prof. Ariely at Duke and Profs. Jeffrey Rachlinski, Thomas Gilovich, and Edward O'Donoghue at Cornell, though, leads to real questions on how useful many of the fundamental economic theories are in depicting the real world, since their research shows that people behave so differently from what those basic theories predict.

This issue is not one of mere "academic" interest. The world has experienced an economic meltdown that has affected hundreds of millions of people - a meltdown that, at its core, was enabled by notions based on those basic economic theories. Alan Greenspan, for example, has testified that his lifetime of free-market thinking and economic policies were based on the mistaken belief that financial institutions would do what was necessary to protect their shareholders and institutions.

For over 20 years, I have questioned whether CEOs really would act in the long-term interests of their companies and shareholders. While I was certainly trained in my MBA studies to act with such interests, I remember first questioning that objective the year Michael Eisner earned what I recall was $104 million in his first year as CEO at Disney. I asked if any CEO who could make more money in one year than he or his heirs could ever spend in their lifetimes would be concerned about the future earnings, let alone survival, of their institutions. Wall Street earnings and bonuses have since made that $104 million look like chicken feed.

I cite the difference between Greenspan's and my thinking not to in any way to suggest that I'm smarter than he is. Rather, I do so to note the crucial importance of challenging old thinking. Trillions of dollars in net worth have evaporated because a basic old thought wasn't sufficiently challenged by those with the authority - and responsibility - to do so.

Developing "critical thinking" in its students is the professed objective of virtually every college and university in America. How these institutions accomplish this objective is a largely unexplored mystery. Certainly, some students have mastered the required disciplinary knowledge to think deeply about questions and are able to synthesize their knowledge to apply it to questions other than those they have studied. But how has their education systematically developed these abilities? Further, to be applied in the appropriate situations, critical thinking must also be a personal disposition, for unless a Greenspan challenges his own thinking, the mere possession of the knowledge and the ability to think critically will be woefully wasted.

As demonstrated by this new work in behavioral economics, one way academe gets its scholars and students to think out-of-the-disciplinary-box is to encourage interdisciplinary studies - in this case, the interaction of psychology and economics. Looking between the cracks in organizations has been a fundamental strategy I learned in my management consulting career. However, such exploration is a very unnatural act in academe, in which scholars' academic careers have been built on being experts in precisely small fields within single academic disciplines. As it's been said, a Ph.D. learns more and more about less and less. Then gaining tenure has required a slavish dedication to one's chosen discipline, if only as an act of career self-interest (for if you don't gain tenure in one institution, you'll need to look to your colleagues in your discipline to help you secure a position in another institution to try again).

So how do we actually get students to develop the knowledge, ability, and disposition to think critically? As I've noted, this is a crucially important question and it is one that transcends individual academic disciplines. The answer must not be sloughed off with simplistic replies like "Well, that's what liberal education is all about." After all, our current economic and political situation is one that has been developed by public officials, leaders, and voters who are largely products of that liberal education system.

We need to do better. Challenging our old ways of thinking is a way to start.

Regulate or de-regulate?

Regulation vs. deregulation. Alas, it's a false black/white, either/or choice. And a dangerous one.

Our current economic crisis is an example of what has occurred many times in past, given slavish adherence to deregulation dogma. In an almost religious quest for deregulation, we've suffered a repeat of the kind of impact we saw with the savings and loan crisis, derivatives debacle, junk bonds, etc. (yet with each occurrence, we've seen an increased magnitude of impact). In fact, the over-leverage by financial institutions in their investment in mortgages is reminiscent of the over-leverage by investors in the stock market of 1929.

Deregulation shouldn't be a religious quest by believers in a free market. The New York Stock Exchange - a global exemplar of a free market - depends on a high degree of regulation to ensure its reliable, efficient operation.

Now, with the problems caused by decades of over-deregulation, we can expect government regulators to step in and close the barn door after they've let the horses out. I'm not arguing that we don't need additional regulation. Re-regulation is needed to attempt to prevent similar bad things from recurring in the future. Such regulation may be appropriate, but trying to preventing unwanted outcomes is not the only approach that should be considered.

My first job was in management consulting within a public accounting firm. As a young associate, I was taught lessons in basic controls. Such controls are of two types: prevention controls and detection controls. Prevention controls keep bad things from happening (for example, preventing employees from stealing money from their company). Detection controls don't directly keep bad things from happening, but detect bad things after they happen (finding out that an employee stole money from the company). Well, what good is that? In the theft example, if the company had something of the employee's, it could claim restitution of the stolen funds - from the employee's next paycheck or pension funds. 

Given all the focus on and resistance to regulation, it appears that few lawmakers, government regulators, or bureaucrats know of these 2 types of controls. They focus solely on prevention controls. What's wrong with that? Prevention controls are very expensive. And they're often viewed to be oppressive. In fact, they are sometimes inappropriate, given the level of risk and the potential of detecting the problem and possibility of gaining restitution. 

So let's hope this time, policy makers, regulators, and bureaucrats consider such detection controls instead of relying solely on prevention controls. If they don't, they'll inevitably over-regulate, putting us into yet another round of ping-ponging to over-regulation begetting frustration then under-regulation again. And each time, it will cost us each more.

Experiential Learning

The George Lucas Educational Foundation's Edutopia features a 4-minute video report on "High Tech High": a high school focused on experiential learning. All their students are admitted to college. The students are shown to be engaged and developing critical thinking and communications skills. All their students are admitted to college.

More than a decade ago, the Ohio Board of Regents did a study on effective learning techniques (funded by the National Science Foundation), and concluded that students learn math and science more effectively through an inquiry-based (i.e., experiential) approach, rather than the traditional lecture/memorize/drill/test (didactic) approach. These are not new conclusions; John Dewey espoused them in the 1930s. Yet in seeing the results in the video, we are still amazed because teaching has changed so little in the past century.

Perhaps successes like those in San Diego will inspire more schools, parents, and policy makers to expect these important lessons be brought into our schools to help our kids learn in this 21st century.

TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

The Rotary Club of Briarcliff's blog on Chinese food led me to TED: a website devoted to spreading ideas. It's a wonderful source of talks (most about 20 minutes long), that have been given at the TED conferences that were originally focused on Technology, Entertainment, and Design, but have broadened out since their first conference in 1984. They range from light and entertaining to very thought-provoking (and often are both), and are free.

My finding and exploring the site reflect a few of the points I've made in my blog entries so far. First, I found it by following someone's blog entry. Responding to my FaceBook status saying I was exploring TED, a FB friend endorsed the site, saying it's wonderful (and suggesting other sites for me to check out as well). The hundreds of content-filled videos at TED are examples of Information Overload, but at least the ideas have been assessed (the conference organizers and TED's Brain Trust invite the speakers). Still, there are so many interesting sounding presentations (available both through the Internet and for my iPhone), that going through them will take a lot of time. I'm trying to play the talks I've selected in the background, replacing TV, while I'm working on other things (multitasking). I'll share specific items that I find interesting that are related to my own thoughts; doing so may help others sift through the talks and encourage them to do likewise.

So here's the first talk I'll share. It's one directly related to The Tyranny of the Either/Or - more pointedly, the difference between liberals and conservatives (I call them "tribes"; Haidt calls them "teams"). It's a surprisingly moderate talk (both/and), since was given at a TED conference (expectedly - and empirically - attended mainly by liberal thinkers), and presents the developed moral psychology differences between them. Among its conclusions, as K.S. commented in my blog: We need to be open to both black and white thinking. Here's a link to the talk on the TED site in case the embedded video doesn't work for you.

The Power of the Both/And

Thanks to K.S. for his comment on my entry on The Tyranny of the Either/Or, noting extremes are important: Black and white are needed to make a beautiful photograph.

It's a wonderful analogy! The beautiful Ansel Adams photographs that so many of us enjoy have an incredibly rich range of grays between the deep black and bright white extremes. (One of my treasured experiences was taking a 1-week photo workshop in Yosemite, offered by the Ansel Adams studio.)

How would his photos look without the grays? Fairly stark. Of course there are questions for which there are properly only yes or no answers. R.S.V.P.: Will you be attending the event? But many other questions involve nuances - shadings of choice. Those who try to polarize the public are very skilled at recasting complex, nuanced questions into stark either/or, black/white forms. It's a lot simpler to pick between 2 choices. Alas, often that's a false simplicity because the answer is "it depends."

An even greater challenge is when we're offered no choice: It's either all black or all white. What dull pictures those make! (Even Ad Reinhart's totally black Abstract Painting at MOMA - one of my favorites - is made of very subtly different shades of black.) If our worlds were all black or all white, we'd be blind and reliant on others to guide us. That's the danger that Adams, Jefferson, and others warned against in founding the U.S.A. We must be educated well enough to make our own judgments or we risk becoming relegated to being subjects of totalitarian government.

So the answer to the Tyranny of the Either/Or must at least be Consider Both/And. That answer doesn't quite do it, though, because we need to be discerning enough to see the multiple shades of gray. We'll need to find a pithy way of saying that, though.

The Tyranny of the Either/Or

So much of what we've seen in public policy for at least three decades offer us stark choices between extremes. Welfare or workfare? Pro-choice or pro-life? Regulate or deregulate? Liberal or conservative? Democrat or Republican?

The problem of the "tyranny of the either/or" (thanks to Liz Lanier, my first chair of the Ohio Board of Regents, for sharing that phrase with me), is that best answers are often in the middle: the "both/and" solutions. More recently, Jim Collins embraced that view in Built to Last.

The extreme positions - and those who advocate them - often want to keep us from seeing the reasonableness of the middle-of-the-road positions. This situation is particularly troublesome since so many Americans haven't developed the ability to think critically. (While the term "critical thinking" is much in vogue in higher education circles, it's rarely defined. I like Bard College's Susan Gillespie's succinct definition: "an ability ... to understand diverse points of view.")

We're all so busy and under so much pressure! It's so much easier for me to accept a good-sounding proposition without having to think about it. Let me just pick my tribe and I'll stick with them wherever they go.

Alas, this attitude has given those with extreme, passionately held positions inordinate power. It's also just this situation that our Founding Fathers feared and so they stressed the importance of educating the populace as the means of preserving our free and democratic society. But education must go beyond the ability to understand differing points of view. To defend a democratic way of life, we also need the disposition to understand differing points of view.

Living here in the Heartland of America, I see most of my friends and neighbors are not extremists, but moderates by disposition. Are there tools that can help make it easier for us think and act more critically? I believe there are - and I'll share some in upcoming entries.

Information Overload

Looking back at John Seely Brown's PowerPoint slides for the OLN conference, I'm reminded of his advanced thoughts - of how we need to focus not just on learning, but on the differences between "learning about" and "learning to be," and many other important concepts. I'm going to review his website in detail to check out his latest thinking.

I was searching for John's thoughts - that I recall from his earlier SHEEO talk - on the problem of information overload, given the masses of new, unfiltered stuff we now get. It's a growing problem because even the media don't do the job they once did in critically evaluating the substance and value of information and opinion.

For most of my life, there have been professionals who have evaluated and assessed the value of much of the information that has gotten to me. Educators decided what was important for me to learn. Librarians decided which books to put on the shelves. The New York Times decided what news was fit to print. Times have changed.

Although so much of education is still based on the rote transfer of knowledge ("learning about"), the Internet has opened access to an inconceivable amount of unfiltered information. And it appears to be a basic journalistic tenet today that to be "balanced," a reporter must offer a contradictory viewpoint for every issue. 

The problem then is that educators haven't focused on how learners can - and must - determine for themselves the value or validity of information and points-of-view. Are we preparing our kids or ourselves to weigh the arguments of those who want us to believe that the holocaust never occurred or that the theory of evolution must be abandoned because of ones faith in divine creation?

Yet the founding principles of the United States recognize that widespread education is required to preserve our free and democratic society. Given the huge volume of unassessed information now available to all, we need to educate people on different things than we've done for the past 100 years. Yes, I know the cries from educators: "How can you ask us to do even more than we're already doing?" I don't advocate doing more, but doing different.

I recall that John said that kids today do judge the validity of information they receive. But are they developing the needed "critical thinking" abilities and dispositions to apply judgment throughout their lives, or are they doing so only in particular compartments of issues and information? I fear it's the latter.

But enough for now; more on this critical question in upcoming pieces.