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Education: what works?

Finland & South Korea – that is what works. The problem with copying this success is that Finland and South Korea follow almost polar opposite strategies. South Korea is #2. They follow what seems like a hellish, highly competitive study system where the kids study from early morning until late at night.  In contrast, #1 Finland follows a laid back Andy of Mayberry plan.  Kids don’t do much homework at night; they don’t even do schoolwork during all of the relatively short school day.  Clearly one size does not fit all and culture makes a big difference.  East Asia has a hierarchical educational system with roots in highly competitive civil service examinations that go back 2000 years in China. In theory, anybody could take the test. The tests were cruelly hard, pass rates vanishingly low and the stakes dizzyingly high. Passing the test meant prosperity for the aspirant and his whole family.   Failure could mean poverty & misery. This testing culture persists. Finish culture is very different.  Hierarchy is not much respected and the idea that a single test could determine someone’s future just doesn’t seem to make any sense in the north woods.  I am glad that Finland beats out South Korea, even if it is an irony that it in some ways uses a hierarchical list to argue against a hierarchical system. Mine is clearly a value judgment and I don’t shy away from making it.  Hard work is an important part of life but it is not the only thing and it is just smart to accomplish our goals with as little effort and suffering as possible.

Phrases like “you are always looking for the easy way out” and “you are just picking the low hanging fruit” are often used pejoratively, implying that there is something wrong with doing these things. But who is stupid enough to advocate a harder way to do something if a similarly successful easier way is available? I am willing to work hard when I must but I find no virtue in working hard unnecessarily. I like this phrase, “if it NEED not be done, it need NOT be done.” Lots of what we do during a workday add little or no value to the goals we are trying to achieve. One of our top jobs should be to determine things that need not be done and eliminate them. Presumably we can redirect our efforts to more effective and higher priority tasks.  One priority task that often gets short shrift is thinking about what we are doing and/or preparing to do so by reading good books or taking training.  If you are worried about the exact language in a memo requesting a package of pencils, you are not doing your job or your job isn’t very important.

This is what may be happening with education in these places. Korean kids are working full out and producing excellent results but probably spreading their efforts to include lots of low or no priority activities. It is a kind of full court press.  It gets everything done but at a high cost to participants. We emphasize effort a bit too much. Sometimes the added results are not worth the added effort especially if you have other options. What to do is as important as how to do it. Pick the low hanging fruit first and if that is all you need, move along to the next task. There is no virtue in doing what need not be done, unless it if fun and then that is a different type of game.

I didn’t really talk much about what works in education. I suggest you listen to this from NPR that inspired me to write.  I ordered on Amazon the book “Finnish Lessons” mentioned on the program.  Maybe I will have a few more ideas after I read it. I have already decided that I would not want the U.S. to copy the Korean model.  Finland looks better.

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Learning from success and mistakes of others

The U.S. used to be the model of economic freedom, but as you can see from the nearby chart, we are losing our edge as others catch up. The “Economist” runs an interesting survey of the Nordic countries. They are not what we recall. Sweden, for example, has school voucher program that would make Milton Friedman proud.

Economic freedom in the U.S. peaked around the year 2000, right about the time of our great prosperity and declines after. Meanwhile, the Nordic improved their results and we are now at about the same level. Please read the articles starting at this link.

In many ways, the Nordics got to the future first. The Nordics have not given up on their welfare model, but they have harnessed the power of the market to help pull it. They have vouchers for schools; private firms running public hospitals and vastly liberalized labor markets. BTW, we are using that word liberal in the original sense, meaning that employers have more freedom to fire workers. But they protect workers with retraining.

Countries like Norway, Sweden & Denmark can never provide a complete example for a big and diverse country like the U.S.  Denmark, Norway and Finland are comparable in population to Wisconsin or Minnesota and even the most populous of them, Sweden, has very people than North Carolina. One reason they can do so much is that they are not very diverse and so avoid both many of the challenges and benefits of a variety of different people. In fact, they have significant trouble integrating immigrants. But just as the states are laboratories of democracy, small countries can provide ideas that we can see tested.

Our Scandinavian friends have tried the routes and driven it to dead ends but have done other things that have achieved success. They have not given up on social justice, but they are learning to use freedom and market mechanisms to achieve success.

Anyway, I suggest you read the survey at the links above and ask what we can learn.

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We did it before & we can do it again

Our infrastructure is getting old and needs to be renewed. It is not news that much of what we use today was built fifty, a hundred or more years ago. America was a much poorer & less advanced back then. A question that we should ask is how did a country so much poorer than we are today, with less developed technology and significantly smaller government spending do what we cannot? How can we shovel such piles of money out the door and have so little to show for it?The “Economist” has an article about our decaying maritime infrastructure that gives some hints. It talks about a lock that connects the Mississippi River to the Inland Waterway. This is worth billions of dollars in commerce yet it was built in, “1921, and is 600 usable feet long, or half the length of a modern lock. Its replacement was authorised in 1956. Construction on the replacement was authorised in 1998, and then stalled by lawsuits.” reference.

We used to be a nation of doers, engineers & visionaries and now we are a nation of wimps, weenies & lawyers. We used to design stuff and then just do it. There usually was lots of gnashing of teeth, but things got done. We finished the Hoover Dam in less time than it takes to get an environmental impact statement through the process. I read an interesting book about Hoover Dam called Colossus, on the building of the Hoover Dam. Almost each time I turned the page, I said to myself, “We could never do this today.” With the lawyers, NGOs and NIMBY folks arrayed around, they would not have been able to toss the first shovel full of dirt. I don’t doubt that we wiped out at least one subspecies of beetle or snail, but who knew then and who cares now?

We really need to get better at this. We don’t have to learn new lessons; we simply have to relearn what we used to do. Remember, we build most of the stuff we have to renew when we were poorer & less advanced and government budgets were much lower. We did it before and should be able to do it again.

On the plus sides, shale gas is creating an industrial renaissance in the Great Lakes region. Gas has been a real game changer and barge and ship traffic is is expected to improve more than any time in the last thirty years. I know this is a little off topic, but I grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan and anything having to do with the Great Lakes fascinates me.

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Coca-Cola is good for you

Parts of grievance industry are in full assault against Coca-Cola et al.  It is true that Coke can make you fatter. But there is the easy and obvious solution – Diet Coke.  I have been drinking around two liters of Coke every day since I was about seven years old. That makes it a whole half century and roughly 36,000 liters of Coke.  Around ten years ago, my advancing age overtook my quick metabolism. To cut calories I switched to Diet Coke, then Coke Zero. Problem solved.

I am in my eleventh year of Coke Zero, which means more or less 8000 liters. When I was in the Iraqi desert, I drank little water and mostly Coke. It hydrates well and it is a myth that it doesn’t refresh or that it is unhealthy. The only harm it seems to cause is that I have to pay for it, whereas water would be mostly free, although not always.   

If we believe that people are getting fat because of soft drinks sweetened with sugar or corn syrup, we should just get them to switch to calorie free soft drinks. It is hard to break a habit but much easier to substitute one. I didn’t have to give up Coke; I just changed the existing habit.

Drinking mass quantities of Coke has been useful. I don’t get dehydrated. In fact, I credit Coca-Cola with much of my management success. In the classic business book “In Search of Excellence” the authors advocated “management by walking around”. They said that leaders had to get out of their offices and talk to people in the organization. I agree. Drinking lots of Coke reminds me to get off my ass, since I have to go to the bathroom a lot I walk around.

Back when I was in college I had a couple of housemates who were vegetarians. Not only that, they were hostile to the “big food industry” and the reserved a special animus for Coca-Cola, which they identified as a type of devil’s brew. They had several annoying habits. Among them was making mooing sounds when someone ate a hamburger and constantly telling me that Coca-Cola was going to poison me. Since I was in robust health and neither they nor any of their hippie friends (we still had hippies back then) were up to ordinary physical standards, I discounted their advice. When they told me that Coke would kill me, I would ask them when.   

I have come to the conclusion that not only is Coke not bad for you, it has positive health benefits. As I mentioned above, you are always hydrated. I run, ride my bike and lift weights and never have to make a special hydration effort. Beyond that, the mild caffeine dose helps keep you alert all day and more energetic, so you get more exercise, so it is better than plain water.

So let’s praise Coca-Cola, at least in the calorie free forms, and encourage its use.

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Forced to buy imaginary fuel

A circuit court vacated the EPA’s cellulosic ethanol mandate that required firms to blend cellulosic ethanol with gasoline or face fines. The problem with this mandate was that zero cellulosic ethanol was produced and firms could not blend it. They were being fined for not doing what could not be done. Even Kafka would be surprised at the brazenness.

The rule originated in a 2007 law that elevates hope over reality. They wanted a fuel that could be produced inexpensively from a waste product. Who wouldn’t. So they figured that they could mandate into existence by government fiat and ruled that refiners MUST blend cellulosic ethanol into gasoline. They created a market for an unavailable product in the belief that they could call it into existence, more or less in the manner of creating wine from water.

This miracle failed to happen. Lots of people talk about cellulosic ethanol, but nobody has been able to make it in any quantity. Or maybe, put another way, it makes much more sense to blend in Jack Daniels or Jim Beam and burn that in our cars and trucks. At least those products are available.

Cellulosic ethanol has been a big disappointment. It should work. It is such a good idea and it would solve so many of our problems. It is a magical solution to our energy needs. The problem with magic is that there is no such thing. As a tree farmer, cellulosic ethanol could be a big deal for me and I have studied the cellulosic ethanol equation in significant depth. I don’t believe it can EVER work, even if a technology is developed that easily converts wood wastes to ethanol. The problem is physical bulk. Raw materials such as forestry waste and corn husks are bulky and they are spread all over the place. Simply gathering it together is a challenge. The problem is moving them to a plant where they could be converted to ethanol and storing them.

If you want to make energy out of wastes such as this, the solution is to burn them directly. Dominion Power is converting some of their coal burning power stations to accept wood chips. This makes sense and I plan to sell chips. It is not as exciting because it is old tech, but it will always be better to convert to energy with fewer steps.

The problem with government experiments is that they cannot easily admit that the experiment has shown it cannot be done. Ethanol from cellulose was a nice idea that was proven impractical by experiment and experience. Give up and move along. There are things we just cannot have, not matter how much we all agree that it should be possible.

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Facebook envy

Envy is one of seven deadly sins for good reason.  It harms both the object of the envy and the person feeling it.  And there is no doubt about its power.  Veja reports on a study that shows that Facebook is accentuating envy and making connected people less happy.

It makes sense.  You can feel envious only if you know that others have something you want.  Facebook provides ample raw material for envy by providing outlet for another of the deadly sins – pride.  People write about their successes and their good luck, sometimes about the stuff they acquired.  Of course, envy can be provoked by the mere knowledge that someone seems happier than you are or are getting more attention. Most people think they deserve more than they have, so it is easy to cloak envy in the feelings of injustice.

According to the study, the thing that annoyed people the most by far were pictures of people having a good time while travelling or partying.  Of course, this is one of the most common things on Facebook.

Facebook teaches something that most people know but in the absence of direct evidence can ignore.  It shows us that our experiences are not special.  No matter where you go or what you do, somebody has been there and done that already.  We are not wired for this revelation.  In a small group, the kind we lived in for most of human history, each of us can be unique. Get enough people together, however, and we start to look like statistics.  It is unsettling.  

It is worse in Facebook because it is more personal than mass media. If you read about it in the paper, it is them; Facebook is us.  We feel it more personally when we think we know the people.

I recall an old advertisement that showed a professor telling his class that they could not all get published because of the tyranny of the publishers. A student stood up and explained the publishing potential of the Internet and that they could all be published. Social media – the Internet in general – let’s everybody be published. We all have the freedom to talk and write. But the numbers of readers and listeners has not increased. Frustrated authors can now publish, but they remain frustrated because nobody reads. I also recall a note written in a computer lab when they still had those big mainframes and card readers.  It said, “To err is human, but to really mess up you need computer support.”  Social media magnifies individual reach but also accentuates defects.

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Paper or plastic

We have been using the same shopping bags for around fifteen years.  We bought a bunch at Giant.  I think they are made out of recycled plastic for Coca-Cola bottles, so it is appropriate.  I use them because I don’t want to waste plastic bags, but mostly because they are much more convenient.  I can stuff in five or six 2 liter bottles of coke in each one w/o worrying that they will break and send everything crashing to the ground.

I am not sure how much pollution my shopping bags avoid. Plastic bags are bad for the environment, although banning them for shopping may not have much of a positive effect.  Lots of people use the bags for garbage. If they don’t have the plastic shopping bags, they buy plastic garbage bags.  Paper shopping bags cause no net harm to the environment, at least in America, since they are produced with a renewable resource and are biodegradable.  As I wrote in other places, paper is produced from thinning.  If forest owners cannot earn money from this, they cannot afford to thin and forest health is adversely affected.

Lately I read of another permutation.  The reusable bags get dirty and may carry pathogens. I don’t know about that.  I am not sure that I can wash my recycled plastic bags. I will try one. 

Banning plastic bags may cause more plastic to be used, as I explained above. Not using paper may harm forest health and reusing the same bags can make you sick. Nothing about the environment is simple.

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Immigration world turned upside down

Things have changed and the verities that have ruled our world since before any of us can remember do so no longer. In the course of just a few years, the immigration equation has changed because the demographic variable is very different. Birthrates are dropping all over the world and populations are aging. We have taken for granted that the U.S was a magnet for immigrants and our challenge was keeping out the excess. Our challenge now will be getting productive ones in.

Fertility rates (the number of children a woman can expected) have dropped in Mexico and Latin America and once the current demographic bulge is passed Mexico will have a lower growth rate than the U.S. does. The massive flow of immigration from south of the border is stopping and will never resume.

I wrote a longer note re Brazil a few weeks ago. 


What about other sources? Who would ever have believed that China would have a labor shortage, but it is on the way. This year for the first time in history China’s working age population shrunk. This will now to be trend for a generation. The number of 15-24-year-olds will shrink drop very quickly, by 38m, or 21%, over the next decade.

Europe and Japan long since entered this demographic decline. Deaths in many places are exceeding births and populations in Japan, German & Russia, among others, are actually shrinking already. I recall the gloomy symmetry in a school in German that had been converted to an old folk’s home. One old lady explained that she had gone to school there as a child and would die there.

There are places in the world were populations are still growing, principally in Africa and the Middle East, but even here the rates of growth are falling fast. Of course there is a difference between dropping rates of growth and dropping population, but the one portends the other.

Let’s be clear. Total population will continue to grow worldwide, but at a slowing pace until it begins to decline in absolute numbers near the end of the century. What affects us in particular is the diminishing rate of growth and where it happens. The world is growing economically and there is a shortage of skilled and semi-skilled labor already. If/when our own country resumes its robust growth, we will be in competition with others for this shrinking pool of workers.

This is a paradigm shift. America has always had the choice. We could accept immigrants or keep them out but there was always a rising tide of huddled masses yearning to be free in America. Now we’ve got competition. We are no longer the only game in town.

There is no such thing as destiny, but the thing that comes closest to it is demography. The workforce of 2025 is already born. We cannot make more if we need them. All we can do is move the ones we have and they will have more options than before.

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Brasília Days

It rained for four days w/o stop. Sometimes it rained little less and sometimes it poured really hard. I walked to the grocery store on Sunday while it rained only enough to make you feel a little damp, but I don’t think it stopped raining completely for a full hour during those four days.  Today it rained too, but it didn’t rain all day.   In fact, the sun came out strongly.  While I was eating lunch, outside but under a roof I saw it rain a little, rain a lot, become very sunny and then rain again.  In other words, today was more like the “usual” summer weather here.  This time of the year in Brasília, it usually rains every day but not all day. “Todos os dias, mas não o dia todo,” is the phrase I learned in Portuguese.

The four days before today were rainier than usual, but the weeks before were dryer.  It rained only a couple times a week, which is strange.   It was sunny and it got a little hot during the middle of the day.  But the temperatures in Brasília are nearly perfect.  It gets down to around 65 at the coldest and never more than 90, w/o much humidity.

Brasília is pleasant, although the original design is not conducive to things like walking, biking or generally being a human not sitting in a car.   It improves as you get away from the original plan, but the parts of the city are disconnected.  Riding my bike to work, even during the dry season, takes significant commitment.  The city represents what some intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s thought the future would look like.  It is purposely car dependent and unfriendly to pedestrians and bikes.  There have been some improvements, but it is hard to fix the core of the city because of various protective rules.  Lago Sul where I live is better than the planned city and there is a nice bike lane along the main road, but it tends to end where cars merge and it is dangerous at these points.   In general the places where you can more or less ride safely are separated by nearly impassible stretches.   When I ride to work, I use some sidewalks, where there are sidewalks.  After that, I have to cross a bridge on a “sidewalk” about three feet wide, then ride on the grass, pass as quickly as I can under an overpass, then get off the bike and run up a grassy bank.  I finally get to the end of a road that leads to the Embassy.   The way home is a little easier.  I take the back road to one of the main highways at a point that features one of Brasília’s few stop lights.  When the light turns red, I run across the street – RUN across the street before the traffic catches up with me.  If you are not quick you will be dead.  On the other side of the big road, I ride through a series of parking lots until I come again to my bridge and the way home.

The sad thing is that it could have been such a great city.  With this marvelous climate and mostly flat topography, Brasília would be the perfect place for sidewalk cafes, bike trails and tree lined boulevards. Brasília is still a nice place in spite of the plan.  It could be fairly easily improved with a few pedestrian crossings and sidewalks and trails.  

My pictures show some of the pleasant little places on my walk to the grocery store.  As I wrote, Lago Sul is nicer than the center city, but it is still designed such that there are lots of dead end streets.   I think the trees with the spikes on the trunk are floss silk trees. My pictures show some of the pleasant little places on my walk to the grocery store.As I wrote, Lago Sul is nicer than the center city, but it is still designed such that there are lots of dead end streets.I think the trees with the spikes on the trunk are floss silk trees.

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Time enough for resting when the job is done

One of my favorite movies is “Groundhog Day” with Bill Murray.  It is an old movie now; maybe you could call it a classic.  The lead character – Phil Connors – relives the same day – February 2 Groundhog Day, over and over thousands of time.   No matter what he does during the day, he wakes up in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania at 6:00 am on February 2 to a clock radio playing Sony and Cher “I got you babe” and nothing has changed.  Nobody except Phil has any memory of the past experience. He gets to move to the next day only after he gets the endlessly repeating Groundhog Day just right.  He starts making better connections among the people of the town fitting into their lives and helping them.  Finally he feels he has done the best he can and the next time he wakes up it is February 3.  I saw the movie dozens of times and probably read too much into it, but the reason I like it so much is that it made me think about pursuing excellence.

Way back in my classical education days, I was enamored with the Stoic philosophy.   I read Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” in Greek class (although mostly on the English side of the Loeb Classic, I admit) and studied how Stoicism influenced Western thinking in general.  What I took away was that you accept your task, do your duty, not expecting necessarily to get credit or even to succeed.  You cannot control what happens to and around you, but you can control your response.  It is more complicated than this but IMO “Groundhog Day” tends to follow the outlines of Stoicism.

In the end, it is not so much about what Phil does as what he becomes.  He realizes that perhaps he cannot change the things that happen around him, but he can change and improve himself; control his own responses to the circumstances and in that way find his own place and control his own destiny.  When he achieves excellence, and lives the perfect day, he can move to the next step.   

Foreign Service life can be like “Groundhog Day.”  We go to assignments in different places but lots of things are the same.  I often had the feeling that I am reliving the same experience.  I do the same things and apply similar strategies and sometimes I feel like I have not really made any progress.  Things seem pretty much the same after I leave as they were before I arrived.  Each time, however, I hope that I can learn something and do better next time.  I always joke that it is better to be lucky than smart, but joke or not it is true that much depends on circumstances.  You have to adjust to the environment and its particular opportunities and threats. Sublime plans executed by superb teams can fail in an unfavorable environment and poorly planned and executed plans can succeed when things are just right.  You have some control in that you can sometimes choose the environment where you will act, but not always and things will change, often in unexpected ways.  Today’s royal road to success may be tomorrow’s path to perdition. Brazil may be the last day in my “Groundhog Day” saga and I think this time it will be the perfect day, or at least as near perfect as possible in this imperfect world outside the world of movies. Circumstances are great. Our Brazilian friends want many of the same things we do in the key area of educational exchanges and they are willing to put resources behind their aspirations.  This opportunity arrived almost exactly the same time I did and it made education and related institution linkages the theme of my time here.  My team in Brazil is as good as I could get.  I am halfway through my time here and things have worked out much better than I expected or predicted.  My problem has been too many opportunities.  I have had the luxury of taking choosing from among them. This is harder than it seems, since I have to turn down good proposals, but it is better than the alternative.

In fact, sometimes I am tempted to look for a reason to flee Brazil early so that I can quit while I am ahead, before my Royal Road turns into perdition’s highway.   I am afraid my luck won’t hold.  But then I think again about the Stoicism.  My job is not done.  I need to persist until the end, take the sweet with the bitter. Besides, sneaking out early is not a realistic option and I am reasonably certain I can hold it together.   

Most other jobs I could get would be a letdown anyway.  I cannot think of a better place to work as a public affairs officer, no place I would rather work and no time I would rather be doing it. In public affairs, this is the chance of a generation in Brazil.   I always tell people that five years ago would have been too soon and five years from now might be too late and I believe it.  The connections we help create between the American and the Brazilian people shape relations between our countries for the rest of my lifetime and beyond.  It is too important to let it go before I have done everything that I can do.

My picture up top is a posed picture of us in front of a group of Brazilian English teachers who will go to a variety of U.S. universities to learn to teach English better. Two years ago, we sent twenty.  Last year we sent fifty.  This year we will send 1080. This is an example of the opportunities.  Our Brazilian friends want to send them and pay for their tuition.  U.S. institutions are happy to have them and we (the Mission) facilitate the connection.  All of us “suits” look alike, don’t we?