I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I've seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers - so it's not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, "Let's start a school." You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they'd start schools. And you'd have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.

They'd do it because they'd be able to set the curriculum. When you have kids you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don't learn until you're older - yet you could learn them when you're younger. And you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school?

God, how exciting that could be! But you can't do it today. You'd be crazy to work in a school today. You don't get to do what you want. You don't get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?

These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn't it. You're not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school - none of this is bad. It's bad only if it lulls us into thinking we're doing something to solve the problem with education.

Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.

It's not as simple as you think when you're in your 20s - that technology's going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won't.

One of the aspects of the current plan for Pre School Excellence is that it is based on making the school bureaucracy the kingpin of the new system.

We know that this is wrong but no other possibility is allowed right now.

Cynthia Livingston loves being home with her two-month-old son Owen, but when her maternity leave runs out next April she doesn’t know if any childcare spaces will be available.

Infant care spaces on P.E.I. are extremely difficult to find. According to provincial data, of the estimated 2,948 full-time spaces across the province, only 192 are for children under two.

That’s why Livingston, like many parents, has her name on several childcare waiting lists. She had to start getting on those lists when she was still pregnant to have even a hope of getting an open space by the time she resumes work next spring.

Her choice program for little Owen is at the C.H.A.N.C.E.S. Family Centre in Charlottetown. She got on their list in November, but there are still over 100 people ahead of her.

She’s got her fingers crossed for C.H.A.N.C.E.S., especially because many of the early learning centres she called told her they couldn’t even put her on a wait list.

“I was just told ‘call back in June’ because they didn’t know if they would have anything available because they might close due to financial reasons,” Livingston said. “It made me feel really anxious because I have a year’s maternity and I know that I have to go back next April and if you’re on a waiting list it’s really just a waiting game.”

Livingston is not alone.

Parents across P.E.I. looking for child and infant care within the next year are finding their search confusing and difficult since most centres do not know how they will look or whether they will even remain open within the next few months.

The big idea here of helping our kids to have the best start possible in life is admirable. What is going to crater the idea is that those who designed the plan have offered a simple process to a complex project.The key elements of the new system cannot be known in advance. The assumption here is that they can - this is the fatal flaw.

Everyone seems caught and confused.

The Centres have to make up their mind by July 1 - but the information needed to help them do this is not available yet.

Parents don't know what to do either.

With only about 2,900 places planned - there is no answer yet to the question of what to do about the more than 4,000 kids in the age group. No specifics too about the most vulnerable.

Families and centre owners in rural areas seem especially worried.

It seems that centres in the rural areas will have to make the additional decision to merge to bring their numbers up. Not an easy call. Rural parents are concerned that merged centres will be too big and too far away. It seems also that rural owners will not be offered a buyout.

There is a real risk that there may be even fewer places in rural areas where many of the most vulnerable live. Is this a plan or a factor that was not anticipated?

Parents want choice. But what seems to be on the table is a bureaucratic process that makes all the decisions.

It also seems that the plan is to allocate places in the new system by the use of a list: "The province also has a plan to deal with the childcare waiting lists. A centralized wait list will be created and managed by the Early Childhood Development Association (ECDA). But details about how it will operate and who will be given priority once the list is created have yet to be worked out."

So parents will have no choice about where they will send their children.

The process designed to implement this is not working. The officials have to make it all up as they go and are already way behind as they must be because so much cannot be known.

We don't know yet how any of the centres might operate. We don't know the curriculum either. These centres have never operated. How will they work? It's like Apple showing a box with a nice picture but no phone and no idea how the phone will work.

There is no plan for the vulnerable. The group that are most at risk and that create risk for all the others is not in the plan at all. This is like BP assuming that all will be well when they drill a deep water hole.

There is no plan for how to knit the entire system from Prenatal, family outreach, to daycare to centres to kindergarten. What we have to do is build a system that is interoperable. This is like Apple building phones, laptops and iPads and not spending a minute on how they might all work together.

So what to do?

What is on the table here is a complex change that cannot be planned up front. This is the key point that those that planned this missed.

My advice - TIME OUT!.

Take a year - define the outcomes we need - this has not been done. the only outcome that has been decided is to build a new and unknowable system in a year.

What outcomes? How to have a seamless continuum from conception to kindergarten that includes the child AND THE PARENTS. What are the key elements and what is SUCCESS. How will it be measured?

Build some key Beta nodes and see how they work. They wont all work well at the get go. For we don't know how to do this. This is how to see operationally how all the parts and the whole works.

Then in 2012 all will know how this will all work.

This is such an important initiative. So much is at stake. We can do this - we can build a great system but not unless we acknowledge that we have to shift the process from Simple to Complex.

Unusually Happy Children

There was something about the children pictured in the photo attached to this CBC story about Kindergarten registration that made me think “those don’t look like real Prince Edward Island children.”

I’m not sure what it was – were they too happy? sitting too attentively? equipped with unusual musical instruments? – but it turns out I was right: the children are generic Preschool Children in a Music Class from iStockphoto:

The cover of the report is not of Island Kids but is a stock photo. No big thing really but symptomatic of the approach I think.

What I did find that made me think more was that the much touted "consultation" with parents and the public of 800 was in fact only 40. The rest was the online survey.

No real debate - no real conversation before hand is what is making the roll out so hard. Few of the really pragmatic and testing questions have even been asked until now.

Suggests that the result was agreed on before the work began.

Key is that all involved missed the fact that creating a new human system is a complex not a simple of complicated thing. That with a complex thing the outcome cannot be predicted - it has to emerge as the result of conversation and trial and error.

You need time to do this. But they have offered no time.

In the book More Space, Johnnie Moore defines the complicated and complex as follows:

"The wiring on an aircraft is complicated. To figure out where everything goes would take a long time. But if you studied it for long enough, you could know with (near) certainty what each electrical circuit does and how to control it. The system is ultimately knowable. If understanding it is important, the effort to study it and make a detailed diagram of it would be worthwhile.

So complicated = not simple, but ultimately knowable.

Now, put a crew and passengers in that aircraft and try to figure out what will happen on the flight. Suddenly we go from complicated to complex. You could study the lives of all these people for years, but you could never know all there is to know about how they will interact. You could make some guesses, but you can never know for sure. And the effort to study all the elements in more and more detail will never give you that certainty.

So complex = not simple and never fully knowable. Just too many variables interact.

Managing humans will never be complicated. It will always be complex. So no book or diagram or expert is ever going to reveal the truth about managing people.

But don’t panic. We can manage people if..."

You can't control complex systems. It's a mathematical impossibility. The Conant-Ashby Theorem: "Every good regulator of a system must have a model of that system." leads to the Law of Requisite Variety: "That the available control variety must be equal to or greater than the disturbance variety for control to be possible", which is to say, that the control mechanism of a thing must be more complex than the thing being controlled. 

The analogy to business is that managers often want to see new initiatives as complicated when they are in fact complex, and thus design complicated systems to manage the change. Which usually fail miserably in very short order when they encounter a circumstance outside of the control model.

The problem with designing control mechanisms for organizational change management is that the system being controlled consists of the entire contents of the minds of the effected group!  That is the epitome of a complex system.

This is why it all feels so bad. Only now are the questions that should have been raised in the consultation process coming to light.

“You know, I’m their parent, I’m not their best friend,” Mr. Marzovilla noted. “I have a duty to mold and teach.”

Olivia, the 11-year-old, was looking at the menu. “How does fried rabbit taste?” she asked.

“Very good,” advised Domenico.

Mr. Marzovilla works most evenings, but the children sit down every night at their home in SoHo with his wife, Astrid, for a meal she cooked, usually no later than 6 p.m. It’s such a given that the children do not bother trying to negotiate their way out of it.

“Some parents, it’s important to them that their kids do sports,” Mr. Marzovilla said. “To me, it doesn’t mean a thing. To have this experience with their family is more important.”

The table was not just a place to eat for a young Mr. Marzovilla — it was a place to grow. At mealtime, he literally had a seat at the table, along with the adults and his older cousins. Two of his three siblings now live nearby, and their families often join forces in Chinatown or at their mother’s home in Murray Hill, where smaller children see older ones keeping it together for the course of the meal and eating whatever is put in front of them with an open mind.

It happened at our table Sunday at I Trulli. The restaurant experience of my twin boys, who will turn 4 this summer, extends to exactly one local diner, where, yes, they have been known to eat chicken fingers and fries. At a worshipful distance across the round table, they kept their eyes trained on Julia, Olivia and Domenico. Like them, my children devoured orecchiette with rabbit ragout. When offered a clam off the shell, one asked that I remove some brown stuff at the base — and then ate it. No, he didn’t like it. But he tried it.

“If you don’t ask your children to try things, how will they ever know what they’re capable of?” Mr. Marzovilla said. “And isn’t the same true of us?”

We became human as a result of sharing food around a fire. Only wolves and Bonobos also share food.

In the last 25 years, out of millions, we have stopped this process.

Want to do the best for your kids - bring back dinner. It's more than a meal - it's where your family is formed.

HT Josh Biggley