To be honest, I am struggling.
Over the Christmas break, I thought that running for the office of school trustee is a good idea. My knowledge and my experience could make a difference in the delivery of education and the running of the school district.
I understood nothing in primary school.
I barely made it through grammar school.
I did all right during my Ph.D. years.
I spent all my life in the education sector.
I ran a university career centre for a decade.
I understand behaviour -- animal, human, institutional.
I understand numbers.
This week, I looked at the qualifications and ideas of the current school trustees (1). I found ...
A lot of self-praise about volunteering (2).
A little about how they want the best for the students -- which is in fact the obvious goal.
Nothing about indicators how to measure the achievement of goals.
Nothing about actions how to achieve goals.
Nothing about the people who do the actual work at the school district -- the teachers, the administrators, the staff (3).
Nothing about teaching and learning.
Nothing about slipping standards, the stupidification of students, or the real problems of young people in 21st-century society (e.g. mobile phones, social media, A.I.).
In any case, the little they say is somewhat embarrassing. Education is too important to be left too laypeople. (To be fair, not all is lost: Two current trustees are teachers and one has worked in the school district.)
I also found out that all four trustees who currently represent the Coquitlam portion of the school district also serve in some capacity at the Coquitlam Foundation. This should worry you, and not only if you are a parent. You see, the reason why governing boards are made up of a number of people is to ensure a diversity of ideas and opinions. The problem with similar people is groupthink. As Janis formulated it (4):
"The main principle of groupthink, which I offer in the spirit of Parkinson's Law, is this: The more amiability and esprit de corps there is among the members of a policy-making ingroup, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against outgroups."
Here then is my struggle: As a citizen, I feel a duty to provide my expertise for the common good. I do not engage in bullshit; quite the opposite (5). I do not love power; quite the opposite (6). Do I really need the aggravation?
So will I run? I would set the subjective probability that I will run at 30%. I would set the subjective probability that I will be elected as a trustee at less than 10%. There are still more than nine months to go. I will evaluate my motivation and my chances as I go along.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
(2) I am always suspicious about people who emphasise their volunteerism. How much time did they actually spend? Was the work a sacrifice (e.g. cleaning public toilets) or did they enjoy it (e.g. coaching a sports team)? Is public acknowledgement of their volunteerism the payoff they seek for their time, and is this then still volunteerism?
(3) When I was at the University of Vienna, I worked at a zoo for two summers. A researcher did a study on the living conditions of animals in zoos: I alerted her to the fact that in each habitat there are always two species: The animal the visitors come to see and the animal that feeds that animal, cleans up after it, and takes care of it when it is sick. Both species must be properly accommodated.
(4) I. L. Janis (1971), Groupthink. Psychology Today (Nov 1971): 43 - 46, 74 - 76.
(5) There are always some readers who are put off by the use of the word bullshit. A few words are in order here. The function of language is the communication of ideas. Like the idea of beauty, the idea of bullshit is hard to define, yet we all know it when we see or hear it. In his 2005 book On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt (2005) defines the essence of bullshit as "this indifference to how things really are". A bullshitter is a charlatan, a deceiver. An objection to the use of the word bullshit is even worse than bullshit, and for two reasons: The first pointed out by Wittgenstein in his 1922 book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." The second pointed out by George Orwell in his 1949 book Nineteen Eighty-Four: "Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum." Do we really want to limit our thoughts by limiting the language about facts?
(6) "But what we need is that the only men to get power should be men who do not love it[.]" Plato (ca. 375 B.C.E.), The Republic: The Simile of the Cave: 521b.
ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY
I am struggling whether I should run for the office of school trustee or not -- the eternal problem, duty vs. convenience.
