collaboration – Montessori Muddle

Cyberwar

Perhaps it’s cultural conditioning, or maybe it’s genetic a predisposition, but adolescent boys to seem to have more of a predilection for war games than their female peers. The games they like tend to be first-person-shooters, like Call of Duty, and, given the trends toward improved video game graphics and remote, kinetic military action, real and simulated life seem to be converging.

Recently however, the Stuxnet virus exposed a much less glamorous picture of the future of cyber warfare. Kim Zetter has an excellent, extensive article in Wired on the computer scientists and engineers who reverse engineered the virus to try to figure out who made it and what it did. Since the virus seems to have been aimed at damaging Iran’s nuclear enrichment plants their work brought them to the edge of the world of international espionage. And they still don’t really know who created this remarkably sophisticated virus, though they suspect the U.S. and Israel.

One of the most interesting take-home messages from Zetter’s article is the amazing degree of international collaboration it took to figure things out. The virus was discovered by someone in Belarus. Researchers from the anti-virus company Symantec’s offices in California, Tokyo and Paris worked together passing information from one office to the next to keep the project going 24 hours a day. They published their findings to share them, and when they ran into stumbling blocks they couldn’t solve they put out calls for help on the internet – and people responded, bringing in expertise from Germany and the Netherlands.

The virus’ secretive creators and the open, diverse collaborators who untangled the virus reflect two conflicting aspects of the future that computer technology and the internet are making possible. And this conflict is showing up more and more in different areas – take Wikileaks for example – so it will be very interesting to see where the future takes us. Of course, we are not simply flotsam on the tides of history. As citizens of the internet, we have been enabled. We have a certain power, and a concomitant responsibility, to shape what we have for the benefit of our fellow citizens and those that come after us.

Leadership and competitive games

“Treat a person as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat him as he could be, and he will become what he should be.”
–Jimmy Johnson

As much as I want to offer my students near-autonomy for at least a small part of the day, I am finding it necessary to reinforce the lessons of the classroom during PE. Physical education is an important part of a holistic education not just for the fact that healthy bodies lead to healthy minds, but because it offers another domain for students to develop their leadership skills.

I’ve found that not everyone who is great in the classroom will be great on the playing field, so students who are often learning from their peers when they’re inside, get a chance to teach and lead others. Often however, because they are unused to it, they need a little guidance to recognize the reversal of roles.

It is also interesting to note that some students who are great at peer-teaching the academics can get really riled up on the field and loose all sense of perspective, forgetting those carefully taught collaboration skills. This is particularly true when we play competitive games and they have to balance competition and collaboration. Fortunately, there is a well established term (even if not gender neutral) that sums up appropriate behavior in competition, sportsmanship.

Artists sit to the right

With open classrooms allowing lots of movement, we don’t often have to deal with issues of seating arrangements. But, an interesting study (from back in 1993) found that students (adults in this case) who sit on the right side of the room are more right-brain oriented. They tend to be more the artistic types, less cautious in responding and less analytical. Right side sitters also scored higher on femininity on a Masculine-Feminine scale.

Since we’re creatures of habit, I wonder if we can see this pattern in the seating arrangements for lessons and community meetings. On balance though, I’d think this would be another argument (if another was necessary) for allowing students and lots of movement so there is more mixing and sharing of talents.

This seating pattern preference also shows up in where people prefer to sit in movie theaters.

A sense of justice as a key to moral development

On an personal level, I’ve always felt that the sense of justice shapes the way people react to the world on a fundamental level. In the language of Montessori, justice is a fundamental need of humanity. As we mature we begin to see justice from different perspectives, and after going over the history of human rights, I wonder if this applies to societies as well.

Lawrence Kohlberg’s famous theory about the stages of moral development center around the idea of how people see and react to justice and injustice. His first level (pre-conventional) is based on how moral actions affect oneself; if I do this then they will do that right back to me (and I won’t like it). In the second level (conventional) the main concern is how actions affect and are perceived by society; it’s not right to do this because everyone will talk about it (and I don’t like that). The final level (post-conventional), moral judgments are made based on some underlying principles; I should not do this because it will violate someone’s universal human rights (and I would have violated my own principles).

When we talk about the history of human rights, we are discussing how society has gone through these different stages. The first rule of justice, no matter the culture, is some variant of the Golden Rule, an eye for an eye. Eventually we discover the rights of the citizen, then finally the rights of humans. In humans, this moral evolution is innate in potential but not necessarily realized. Similarly is societies, after all, the Greek democracies eventually failed. But there seems to be a general trajectory of history toward post-conventional morality. Robert Wright, in his book “Nonzero” sees this path as the almost inevitable outcome of the beneficial nature of cooperation to human societies.

Of course Nonzero was written in the post-Cold War and pre 9/11 period, when the world was breathing a sigh of relief when the potential for global thermonuclear war seemed to disappear (I also remember David Rudder’s 1990 had a similar theme).

Auto-Tune and the trajectory of fads

This intelligently done history of Auto-Tune is wonderful for several reasons. First, it has a simple, elegantly executed story arc, where it describes the trajectory of a fad from introduction to over-exposure to parody/remix and finally to a new equilibrium. And it discusses these concepts in a clear and entertaining way.

Know Your Meme: Auto Tune (featuring “Weird Al” Yankovic) from Rocketboom on Vimeo.

Second, Auto-Tune is a great example of something that was created for one purpose but finds a new life in a completely different discipline. The technology was created for analyzing seismic signals in petroleum exploration before being applied to music. It is amazing what can come from working with people of diverse backgrounds, and having a broad appreciation of the world. Group work is important.

Third, in touching on parody, it brings up an issue that adolescents, in particular need to understand; parody is not just a cheap joke, it has something important to say. It uses humor to address significant issues:

While making fun of something is easy [mockery], parody requires a study of both technique and form, before creating its own recontextualization.

Third, the overexposure stage of fads and memes is something everyone should be aware of. The meme infiltrates so many aspects of the culture that it becomes irritating. As a Middle School teacher I see it primarily in the language my students use. By introducing this concept to my student, we now have a common language for talking about at least one type issues in the classroom.

Finally, equilibrium. An important concept in natural and social science, the concept is neatly encapsulated in how the fad starts off small, overshoots and gets smaller but does not disappear as there remains some lower level of use.

Where does morality come from?

“Do to others as you would have them do to you”. The golden rule (in some form or the other) is almost universal. And because it is found throughout different cultures and belief systems suggests that much of what we view as morality and ethics are innate to the human mind. But what are we born with, and what do we learn from culture? Is the golden rule necessary for successful social groups, so that cultures with the golden rule are more successful that ones that don’t have it? These two questions are fundamental to how we educate, particularly in a method such as Montessori’s that has such a strong moral dimension.

Maria Montessori herself came from a strong catholic background, but the success of her approach in so many different cultures does argue that, at least for the younger kids, the innate aspects of morality and needs of the child are most important. By the time students get to the Middle School, however, the influence of the local culture has become much more important.

Morality and culture affect students’ motivations and behavior, yet much of what is considered acceptable in many cultures conflict with the core Montessori principles of respect for oneself and for others. Much of popular American culture for example, is driven by television where moral messages can be decidedly mixed. How often is it appropriate to use violence (or even torture)? Television shows give decidedly different answers from Montessori. But there are many other, more subtle differences. As Montessori educators we will be faced with the question of what to do when Montessori philosophy differs from the beliefs of the student, their family and the larger culture.

My thoughts are that the “cosmic education” that is a part of the Montessori method should be based on the “universal” aspects of morality that can be shown to make for successful individuals and societies. Some interesting work by Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia looks at how certain systems of morality have contributed to the success of societies. As Nicholas Wade summarizes:

… natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Could the behaviors evolved by social animals to make societies work be the foundation from which human morality evolved?

Haidt suggests there are “five innate and universally available psychological systems” of ethics, and different cultures add stories, virtues and ways of policing these ethics. The Moral Foundations Theory website has a good summary of the five systems, harm/care, fairness, loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. In a beautiful example of adding transparency and technology to scientific research, he even has a page for challenges to the theory. Each of the moral foundations these deserves separate consideration of how they evolved, how they benefit society, and how they mesh with Montessori philosophy.

Nicholas Wade has a good article on the subject and on Haidt’s work in the New York Times.

Why collaboration is important

Montessori middle schools depend a lot on collaborative work and discussions. Individual parts of group work allow students to specialize in areas, hopefully, where they are interested and willing to learn the most. Then when they share their work with the group the whole group gets the information, and the person presenting it gets feedback from different perspectives. Collaborative work is excellent preparation for creative work in the future.

Some recent research by Kevin Dunbar, a neuroscience at the University of Toronto, gives some strong support to the usefulness of collaborative work. He found that group discussions, with people from different backgrounds can be much more effective at solving problems than discussions among specialists. Different backgrounds mean that each person is forced to take a step back from their expertise and think and describe the problem in a way someone else with a different perspective can understand. This allows both the expert and the person they are describing the problem to, to see the problem from different perspectives.