Collective Nonsense

   You are working to put together a winning widget team.  You take some raw recruits and have two choices of how to train your team to become winners.

A	You have each individual in your team learn to do the widget thing as best as they can as individuals.  If they show some ability to excel at some aspect of widgeting, you promote them to further develop those skills. As your team becomes individually competent at widgeting, effort is made to coordinate their individual skills so that they can work and share their efforts as a winning team.
B	You arrange everyone into groups and encourage them to learn to widget together.  If one member of the group is falling behind, everyone in the group helps the slower one catch up.  If one member of the group is good at some aspect of widgeting, they must spend time sharing their expertise with others so the group can move along.

Question	Given these two teaching/coaching options for the same bunch of kids and you wanted to pick the widget team that had the most developed skills and would be most likely to be winners, which system would you pick?
Answer	If you have any experience or competency as a coach or employer, you would pick system A.

    Which of course explains why most of the kids in our public schools are taught by system B. :( 

    Think about it, when you coach a basketball team to shoot better, you give everyone a ball and have them practice shooting 50 shots.  Some may make 80%, some 50%, some 30%...  Some will find themselve to be great rebounders, or defenders, or dribblers, etc, etc.  You don't give a ball to your team and tell the team to shoot 50 shots -- you'll end up with the best player or two showing the others how to shoot 50 shots while the rest sit around watching.  Most of the team will never get full confidence that they can do it on their own and will always be looking for someone else to help them out when the going gets tough.  

   I had a discussion with a very nice third grade school teacher about this the other day.  She said that it was great to watch the more capable kids helping the others out.  She said that if the kids were put into classes according to their ability, rather than mainstreaming everyone in classes of all abilities, that the self esteem of the kids in the 'dumb' class would suffers. It had never occurred to her that the kids of lesser ability will never have the chance to be the best in a mainstream class.  However, they will have a chance to move to the front of a class where they can fairly compete with others of the similar abilities.

    She conceded there was something wrong with her conclusion -- the obvious apparently had never occurred to her, so deep was her faith in the 'system'. As far as that goes, like most honest people, I'd be willing to accept her perspective -- if there was any evidence that classroom collectivism improved the education of our kids.  The mass of evidence points to the contrary -- the SAT scores of our kids have fallen ever since collective teaching wormed its way into the classroom via the ivory towers of college teaching programs.  

   Whether it is doctoring, flipping burgers, or making widgets, one gets the most qualified individuals in any situation by training them as individuals first so that they are aware of their shortcomings and how they can individually dig deep into their personal reservoir of talent to overcome shortcomings through hard work, self awareness, and self esteem.  When such individuals (Team A) are put into a team situation, they will light up the playfield (or work room) with their ability to quickly adapt as individuals and as a team to a wide variation of dynamic situations -- the team will become an amalgam of individual abilities. It is nonsense that individuals can't work as a team unless they are taught that way.  Conversely, it is nonsense that individuals who are taught to work as a team will have better individual skills than those taught as self reliant individuals.  When Team B learns as a team to rely upon the team to overcome adversity, their ability to adapt is limited to the skills of key individuals in that team, rather than the collective abilities of all of the individuals as found in Team A.  Given equally talented recruits, Team A will win most every time.

     The notion that training people (or kids) to work together from the beginning so that they can rely upon each other will result in a winning team (or society) is just a lot of collective nonsense.  E Plurbus Unum (from many one), the slogan that has guided this nation from its inception, correctly implies that the best of civilization will result when you have many individuals working together to define a society, not when you have society defining what makes good (politically correct) individuals.  There is little, if any, evidence anywhere that the best of civilization will result from training individuals to think as small collectives for the greater good of the larger collective -- as a group for the group?  Give me a break...