|
ETHICAL
EDUCATION
The Application of Deming
Management Methods to Education
An Excerpt from
Heart and Mind
by Robert E. Podolsky
Abstract: This article
points out briefly some of the weaknesses in the Japanese
interpretation of Deming’s principles as applied to education and
explains how the success of Deming’s method in industry is due
mainly to the ethical principles inherent in that method. Then a
new set of Deming-style admonitions for education is derived to
conform to these ethical principles and the suggestion is made that
future experiments in quality-conscious education utilize these
admonitions rather than Deming’s original “fourteen points”.
Introduction
On the website of the International Journal of Educational
Management appears a well written 1995 article by Kosaku
Yoshida "Kosaku Yoshida" of the
School of Management, California State University, Carson,
California, USA. The article is entitled The Deming Approach
to Education: A Comparative Study of the USA and Japan
.
This article contains much that is excellent concerning the
managerial principles pioneered by Dr. William Edwards Deming and
proven so efficacious by the great experiment conducted by Japanese
industry. The article also explains many of the features of the
Japanese system of public education, especially the relation between
cooperative education as practiced in Japanese classrooms and
Deming’s admonition to reduce variation in a company’s products.
It is indeed most laudable that the Japanese have the
courage and wisdom to attempt applying Deming’s management methods
to education; and it is most encouraging that a similar attempt is
being made in some American school systems. As Dr. Yoshida points
out, however, the Japanese educational system is not without its
flaws. It is desirable therefore that those wishing to emulate the
Japanese attempt at Deming-style education be aware of the mistakes
that have been made by the Japanese in this attempt; and hopefully
avoid duplicating the mistakes along with the successful elements of
the method.
In the present article I point out briefly some of
the weaknesses in the Japanese interpretation of Deming’s principles
as applied to education and explain how the success of Deming’s
method in industry is due mainly to the ethical principles inherent
in that method. Then I derive a new set of admonitions for
education to conform to these ethical principles and suggest that
future experiments in quality-conscious education utilize these
admonitions rather than Deming’s original “fourteen points”.
The Power of Dr. Deming’s Method
As the Japanese have proven industrially there can be no doubt that
the Deming management method is powerful and effective; in fact the
most successful approach to industrial management in existence
today. This fact is widely known. Not so well understood is
the source of this managerial power. Many newcomers to Deming’s
methodology have assumed that the power is derived from the
mathematics tying managerial statistics to measurable observables
that characterize the performance of the system under scrutiny.
This assumption is false. While measurement and mathematical
precision are necessary to the successful application
of the Deming method they are not sufficient. They
are artifacts of the system; but they are not the source of its
power.
As I have suggested elsewhere, the source of the
power of Dr. Deming’s admonitions as applied to industry is the fact
that their application results in improved ethical relations
between all the people who come in contact with one another as a
result of the presence of the company using the method. In order to
apply the Deming method successfully outside the industrial realm
for which it was intended the relation between Deming’s method and
its underlying ethics must be clearly understood. Only then can
this powerful method be properly reformatted for use in education,
government, charity, religion, and any number of other settings in
which one might want to derive the benefits inherent in the method’s
power. In examining the method from this perspective we can gain a
still more “profound” appreciation of the forces at work when the
Deming method is properly applied.
Questions Unasked…and Unanswered
It is a substantive weakness of the Japanese educational system that
the following questions have not been properly asked and answered:
·
Is it
optimal that the “product” of Japanese education is
competent (high-scoring) workers?
·
If the
“customer” is industry; who ultimately pays the costs and
what are they?
·
If the
supplier is the student’s family, what is the quid pro quo?
·
What is
the competitive significance of the fact that cooperative
groups evolve leaders?
·
How are
cooperatively taught children to learn to compete?
·
Why
change from cooperative education at lower levels to
competitive college entrance later?
·
What is
the significance of the existence of “prestigious schools”
successful competition for which confers financial rewards?
·
What
does it mean if variation of student performance is made
less than variation of innate ability?
Omissions in Dr. Yoshida’s Article
It is possible that the Japanese have already considered the
following points; but Dr. Yoshida’s article does not discuss them;
and they are critical for optimization of the Deming-based
educational system:
· Until
the ultimate purpose of education is well defined and the
supplier / “manufacturer” / customer roles properly established
(or dropped altogether) it is inappropriate to define what
process corresponds to reduction of variation in the “product”.
· Deming’s
admonitions pertain to manufacturing; but not necessarily to
education. Translation from one realm to the other is more
complex than treated in the article. In education
maximization of academic test performance does not necessarily
optimize the system; in fact probably not.
· Before
a system can be optimized strategically via the Deming method
it must be optimized ethically. If this is not done the system
will amplify ethical weaknesses and eventually destroy itself.
· The
source of value in the Deming
method is the fact that when applied in an industrial setting it
adds positive ethical features to systems that are otherwise
often devoid of true ethical controls.
· Deming’s
admonitions are shown elsewhere to be the logical consequences
of a more general set of ethical principles (The Bill of
Ethics). More about this is described below.
· To
translate the Deming method into
the educational realm I suggest it is necessary to derive
educational admonitions from the more general Bill of Ethics.
· Competition
is an important part of life and a cornerstone of evolution.
Ethical
schools must provide an ethical means for children to learn to
participate in competition.
Definitions
Throughout the rest of this article repeated mention will be made of
several terms that must be defined at the outset.
· Dr.
Deming ’s Admonitions: I
use this expression to include the original “Fourteen Points”
that Deming called to the attention of American industry in
combination with both the “Seven Deadly Diseases” that he said
plagued western businesses and with the “Four Obstacles” that he
said must be overcome to make an industrial company function
optimally. For details of these twenty-five admonitions I refer
the reader to page 34 of Mary Walton’s excellent book for
beginners in this field.
See also the previous chapter of this book.
· The
Ethics: In its simplest
form this expression can be said to refer in this article to the
definition of an ethical act and the logical consequences
thereof. For an extensive explanation of these terms I refer
the reader to Book 2 of this series. Briefly I choose to define
an ethical act as any act that increases creativity, and/or any
of its logical equivalents (see below), for at least one person
(including the person acting) without limiting or diminishing
creativity for anyone.
From the above definition the Bill of
Ethics deduces the ten main principles needed to make
ethical day-to-day decisions on a practical basis. It also
delineates the relationship between ethics and law implied by
the definition above. At times I will refer to the Bill
of Ethics and its logical consequences as “the Ethics”.
· Creativity
may be seen as the product of ethical awareness and
intelligence, as symbolized by the equation: C=EI. As
such it may be increased in two ways; by increasing someone’s
ethical awareness (or equivalently their degree of personal
evolution, love, and/or growth) or by increasing the
intelligence of someone who doesn’t use their intelligence
destructively (say by increasing their access to objective
truth, their grasp of true information, their access to energy,
or their freedom); where by intelligence generally I mean the
ability to predict and control the environment or to initiate
and sustain causal relationships between events in the
observable world. Hence “increasing creativity” encompasses any
increase in any of the resources listed above or in any other
resource that increases awareness or intelligence.
· Logical
Equivalents of Creativity:
By this expression we refer to those resources that must
increase when creativity is increased and decrease when
creativity is diminished, or vice versa, as
explained above. Conversely when any logically equivalent
resource is changed creativity must change accordingly. There is
no limit to how many such equivalencies one may list.
· Persons
or People: Since ethical
discrimination only applies to the acts of people or persons
(the acts of young children and animals, for example, are
ethically neutral or natural; neither ethical nor unethical) it
is necessary that we define what we mean by “person” in this
context. I call a “person” any being that possesses awareness
of his or her (or its) own awareness. Thus dolphins and
chimpanzees would be included in this definition; but chickens
and butterflies would not. In the not-too-distant future there
are likely to be machines that qualify as “persons” in this
sense.
Deming and Ethics
Now we are ready to discuss the relationship between Dr.
Deming’s admonitions and the ethics of business. I have shown
elsewhere that the entire Deming methodology as defined by the
Admonitions can be proven to be a subset of the logical consequences
of the Ethics. This makes it obvious that at their core the
Admonitions are ethical admonitions rather than statistical or
technical admonitions. In other words, if an industrial company
were to adopt the Bill of Ethics as the keystone of
its bylaws, and if the terms of the bylaws were strictly enforced,
the company would have to be managed in accordance
with the Deming Admonitions. And it is possible that other
admonitions might also be derived that are not contained in the
twenty-five principles set down by Dr. Deming. But at the very
least his admonitions would have to be upheld. Let’s see what the
implications are for education.
Adapting the Admonitions to Education
Since Dr. Deming’s Admonitions are logical consequences of The
Ethics as applied to industry, there will be nothing lost ethically
if we properly adapt the admonitions to the educational
environment. In the previous chapter I restated the
Admonitions as follows with no loss of information and none added to
the Deming formulation:
· 1.
Adopt the new philosophy. Accept the Admonitions.
· 2.
Take action. Accomplish the transformation [implied by the
admonitions].
· 3.
Commit to constantly and forever improve the product, the
service, and the system that provides them.
· 4.
Institute vigorous education, training, and retraining of
workers to do their jobs. Stress teamwork and statistical
technique.
· 5.
Institute leadership.
·
5.a.
Help people do a better job.
·
5.b.
Encourage pride of workmanship.
·
5.c.
Provide both opportunity and security, thereby reducing
mobility of management.
·
5.d.
Engage in long range planning.
·
5.e.
Improve communication and cooperation between staff areas
and between people.
· 6.
Do what works; stop doing what doesn't work.
·
6.a.
Stop mass inspection.
·
6.b.
Stop basing long range decisions on short term
considerations.
·
6.c.
Stop trying to motivate educators with slogans, targets, and
exhortations.
·
6.d.
Stop relying on technology to solve problems; but
incorporate it into methodology
·
6.e.
Stop following examples; develop specific solutions.
·
6.f.
Stop purchasing based on price tag alone.
·
6.g.
Drive out fear; stop intimidating your personnel.
·
6.g(1)
Stop using numerical quotas, tests, and grades as
"motivation".
·
6.g(2)
Stop using performance evaluations or reviews.
Clearly, Admonitions 1., 2., 4., and 5. are
applicable and usable in their current forms. Admonition 6. is
applicable, but detailed admonitions 6.a. through 6.g. require some
changes; so for the time being we will use the following list as a
starting point for the new Educational Admonitions:
·
1. Adopt the
new philosophy. Accept the Admonitions.
·
2. Take
action. Accomplish the transformation [implied by the
admonitions].
·
3. Institute
vigorous education, training, and retraining of workers to do
their jobs. Stress teamwork and statistical technique.
·
4. Institute
leadership.
·
4.a.
Help people do a better job.
·
4.b.
Encourage pride of workmanship.
·
4.c.
Provide both opportunity and security, thereby reducing
mobility of management.
·
4.d.
Engage in long range planning.
·
4.e.
Improve communication and cooperation between staff areas
and between people.
·
5. Do
what works; stop doing what doesn't work.
Now let’s consider Admonition 3.: Commit to
constantly and forever improve the product, the service, and the
system that provides them. This is the crux of the challenge in
adapting Dr. Deming’s Admonitions to the educational arena. We need
to know answers to these questions:
1.
What is the product?
2.
What is the service?
3.
Who is being served?
4.
What is the system that provides the product/service?
5.
Is a business model, involving
products, services, providers, and customers, appropriate to
education?
What Education Is
As young children we are told that we have to go to school to learn
the skills we will need as adults in today’s world; to get jobs; to
make a living. In effect we are told that it is we who are being
served by education. Most us of accept this explanation; but few of
us believe it. And still fewer thrive on the experience. The
reality is that most children don’t like school. They endure
it. Later they rationalize the coercion of school by saying, “It
was for our own good; we couldn’t be making a living without it; and
so forth.” Then they go out and tell their own children the same
lame excuses. Who benefits from these lies?
Albert Einstein once compared attendance at public
school with the experience of a ravenous tiger that is force-fed
until it has no appetite left at all. Children, in case the reader
has forgotten, come into the world with an intense appetite for
information…useful, true information. This appetite is called
“curiosity”. Yet by the age of eighteen most children have had most
of their curiosity drilled out of them. They don’t love to learn
any more. What kind of “education” does this to children? How can
it possibly serve them? In fact it doesn’t. Why then has our
educational system become what it is today?
I maintain that a publicly funded school system that
trains competent workers to participate in the nation’s industries
and which sorts and pigeonholes them by subject matter and grades
predominantly benefits the prospective employers. By perusing
diplomas and grade transcripts the prospective employer can identify
those individuals most likely to meet their needs at
minimal cost for testing and training. Who said it was the
responsibility of the public, the student, the parents of the
student, or the educational institution to spare the employer such
costs? Yet this is what the public has accepted the world over.
But it isn’t the employee who gets to enjoy the profits that a
business generates; it is the employer or business owner.
Like it or not this is the system that is.
As education changed from the “broadening experience” of Liberal
Arts enjoyed by the well-to-do to the job-training experience almost
universally experienced today, the customer for education shifted
from the individual student to the future employer. Seen as a
business, today’s educational system manufactures workers for the
use of employers. The suppliers of raw materials are the parents of
the students and, as far as publicly funded education is concerned,
the taxpayer foots the bill. Note too that most taxpayers don’t get
to spend the corporate profits generated by the “use” of the product
workers. In most situations it is the customer who pays for the
product and enjoys its use. Somehow in this situation the taxpayer
has been duped. Surely this is not ethical. Let’s not be fooled by
rationalizations about how the taxpayer benefits from the resulting
“good economy”; or how the public owns the stock that represents the
hiring corporation; or any of the rest of such nonsense that we are
commonly told. The vast majority of taxpayers don’t receive any
dividends. A tiny minority enjoys the benefit of vast corporate
dividends. The rest of us just go along with the plan and
facilitate the continuation of what is.
So we are ready now to examine education through the
lens of The Ethics and to discover what education could be if it
were truly ethical; as we might imagine Dr. Deming would have
admonished us to make it if he had applied his principles to
education rather than to industry.
Educational Ethics
Article 3 of the Bill of Ethics
enumerates the following principles that are logical
consequences of our definition of an ethical act and which apply
directly to education:
3.1
…to act ethically each person must do their utmost to maximize
creativity and its equivalents.
3.2
Ethical actions always increase
someone’s creativity;
3.3
Ethical actions never destroy,
limit or diminish anyone’s creativity;
3.4
From the foregoing we infer that unethical means can never
achieve ethical ends, this principle rejecting the notion that
we can ethically sacrifice the creativity of the individual for
the “greater good” of society, the “many”, and so forth; from
which it follows that:
3.5
Unethical means always produce unethical results (ends); trivial
means always produce trivial results at best; and similarly
3.6
Means which are not ethical ends in themselves are never
ethical;
3.7
From the foregoing it is also apparent that inaction is
unethical. Creativity cannot be
passively expanded or increased... this must be done actively to
overcome entropic destruction inherent in the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. This principle is basically equivalent to the
adage that, "For evil to triumph it is only necessary for good
men to do nothing.";
3.8
It also follows that it is unethical to tolerate unethical
behavior. To do so is to violate Section 3.7 above. For this
reason we are ethically bound to defend ourselves and others
actively against injury or deceit when we or they are imminently
imperiled by another's unethical behavior; from which:
3.8.1 It follows that it is unethical to
augment the creativity of anyone whom one reasonably
believes will use such augmented resources
unethically... and it is therefore ethical to withhold
the augmentation of creative resources from anyone whose
ethical commitment one reasonably distrusts; and
furthermore:
3.9 It is ethical to
learn and unethical to be certain. When we close our minds on a
subject we cease to learn... to increase our own awareness and
creativity. Learning always increases creativity; and
3.10 It is ethical to doubt. Ceasing to have doubts about a
subject we become certain about it and have ceased to learn.
Doubts create new questions ...some of which yield new answers.
Doubt is one of the cornerstones of creativity.
Before attempting to expand the Admonitions in the
realm of education it is important that we create a suitable context
for this endeavor. To do this we must examine the ethical role of
education in the activities of humanity. If education must be seen
as a means to provide industry a skilled work force (a goal which in
and of itself is not necessarily unethical) then Article 3.6 above
requires that education also be an ethical end in itself. Article
3.9 tells us that it is ethical to learn, therefore as long as
education is designed to increase creativity it is also ethical to
teach. There is no reason why education should not provide
competent workers, if students desire to become competent workers
and if we decide that fulfillment of this goal does not interfere
with Article 3.1 which calls for the maximization of creativity.
However, if as a species we decided to take seriously the notion
that ethical education is a valid end in itself, many educational
practices would change, probably for the better.
So let’s examine this possibility. What would happen
if we put aside the goal of a skilled work force, maximized
creativity, and observed the consequences? Since all wealth and
prosperity is the product of creativity we might find ourselves with
a more skilled work force than we have now. For starters we could
abandon the industrial model upon which the Deming method is based.
We would no longer have to think in terms of suppliers,
manufacturers, customers, etc. Our goal would be simply to help our
children and our youth to become the most creative adults possible.
Now the admonitions to be derived from the Deming
model, as focused by the Bill of Ethics might look
like this:
· 1.
Adopt the new philosophy. Accept the Admonitions.
· 2.
Take action. Accomplish the transformation [implied by the
admonitions].
· 3.
Institute vigorous education, training, and retraining of
teachers and administrators to do their jobs more
creatively. Stress teamwork and statistical technique.
· 4.
Commit to constantly and forever expand the students’
creativity and improve the system that delivers this
service.
4.a. Stimulate student curiosity at every
opportunity.
4.b. Satisfy student curiosities in ways that further
stimulate curiosity.
4.c. Make all information resources available to the
student.
4.d. Teach students to doubt and to test the validity of
new information.
4.e. Teach students the scientific method.
4.f. Share with students at the elementary level the
excitement that a subject’s devotees experience at the
most advanced level. Continue this process on an
ongoing basis.
4.g. Eliminate all grading and rating activities for
students and teachers alike.
4.h. Find ways to teach competition skills without
making the educational process competitive or
stigmatic.
4.i. Encourage the development of better teaching
methods, teaching aids, and text books.
4.j. Expand the opportunity for learning experiences
outside the classroom.
4.k. Involve the community in the teaching role with
extensive “field trips.”
4.l. Reward community members for participating in
“field education.”
4.m. Teach students cooperative study and learning
techniques.
4.n. Invent more such techniques. Encourage such
innovation. Reward it.
4.o. Instill in every student excitement and joy in
learning.
4.p. A teacher’s work with a student is done when the
student is so motivated to seek new learning, and is
able to find it on his own, so that the teacher is no
longer needed.
· 5.
Institute leadership.
5.a.
Help teachers do a better job. For starters, improve
their education.
5.b. Encourage pride of teaching and learning.
5.c. Provide teachers and administrators both
opportunity and security, thereby reducing mobility
of the educational force.
5.d. Engage in long range planning.
5.e. Improve communication and cooperation between
staff and between all people involved in the
education process.
5.f. Reward teachers for helping other teachers to
be more effective.
5.g. Teach businesses better ways to evaluate the
potential of “unsorted” job applicants who come
without diplomas or transcripts. Insist they bear
the burden of paying for this activity.
· 6.
Do what works; stop doing what doesn't work.
6.a. Drive
out fear; stop intimidating your teachers and students.
6.b. Stop using grades and ratings as "motivation".
6.c. Stop using performance evaluations or reviews
6.d. Stop making long-term decisions based on short-term
financial considerations.
6.e. Develop ways to measure the performance of the
educational system without violating any of the
foregoing admonitions. Use this information to develop
statistical models to further improve the system.
Who Says It’s Impossible?
Obviously there will be many naysayers responding to
this set of Educational Admonitions. But Dr. Deming would have
liked it and seen its value. You will note that most of the people
who will object to this method are people with a vested interest in
keeping education the way it is today. Either their prestige or
their finances will be seen as adversely affected if these
admonitions are adopted. The adoption of such a set of admonitions
either here in the U.S. or overseas will meet with four kinds of
resistance.
First, some who simply lack imagination and don’t
want to change will say the transformation of education along these
lines is impossible; it can’t work. They will offer any number of
spurious reasons why this is so; but the reality is simply that they
don’t want to change and grow. They have reputations and tenured
teaching positions that they don’t want to risk losing; and they
don’t know if they could be successful in the new educational
environment that would result from the adoption of this new model.
Second, the corporate institutions that have been
getting a free ride from public (tax-funded) education will
bad-mouth this model even though their wealth is all built on
creativity and this model maximizes creativity.
And third, since public education is a function of
government, often delegated to incompetent local boards of
education, the successful adoption of this methodology could have
enormous implications suggesting the restructuring of many, if not
all, parts of government. Since government too is now mostly in
existence to serve the big corporations, any such change would be
perceived as a threat to people in many parts of government. In
this case not only are prestige and money at stake, but political
power also. This is likely to be the most vigorous source of
resistance to such change.
And finally, there will be massive bureaucratic
resistance to this idea. To the best of this author’s knowledge
bureaucracy is the greatest source of unethical behavior on the face
of our planet. This certainly applies to every government on the
planet and is the main reason so many governments have failed
historically. From the fall of ancient Rome to the recent demise of
the Soviet Union the main problem has been bureaucracy.
Deming-style education will not really thrive until/unless
government itself can be made less bureaucratic.
Conclusion: In his
excellent article, Grading...The Deming Way,
Del Nelson, Professor of Management at
American River College, Sacramento, California asks,
“Where can we find
the educational institution
dedicated to inducing "joy in
learning," collaboration on a win/win basis to build a "better
world" (improving health, declining poverty
, decrease in bias,
etc.), learning the System of Profound Knowledge, and dedicated to
leading the student(s) to the path of never-ending-improvement in
every facet of their lives? Our educational problems are only made
worse by grades, grades on the curve, honor roles, competitive
athletics, or ranking/testing of schools, none of which will support
(in fact, they will directly prevent) attainment of any such system
related/driven goals.”
In agreeing with this, I see that the Japanese have
not gone far enough in applying the Deming Method to education.
Their system will ultimately fail unless the same ethical principles
are applied to education and other parts of government that are
applied to their industry. The same is equally true in the U.S. and
throughout the world. We can only wonder where in the world these
realities will first be recognized and acted upon creatively.
   |
