From the Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
“The public often gave credit to Generals because it had seen only the orders and the result: even Foch said (before he commanded troops) that Generals won battles: but no General ever truly thought so. The Syrian campaign of September 1918 was perhaps the most scientifically perfect in English history, one in which force did least and brain most. All the world, and especially those who served them, gave the credit of the victory to Allenby and Bartholomew: but those two would never see it in our light, knowing how their inchoate ideas were discovered in application, and how their men, often not knowing, wrought them.
Mind Hacks points to some interesting research on language and psychosis.
Mr Z illustrates the marked change in phenomenology that can be observed in such patients. He was a 30-year-old patient diagnosed as hypomanic with a history of bipolar illnesses. His mother tongue was English, and he had learnt Spanish after puberty. When he spoke in English, he was markedly thought-disordered and complained of hallucinations. On one occasion, whilst being interviewed by his psychiatrist, he addressed her spontaneously in Spanish, knowing that she was a Spanish speaker.
To his surprise, and hers, he discovered that when he spoke in Spanish, he no longer appeared to be thought-disordered. He commented on this difference by observing, in Spanish, that when he spoke in this language, he felt he was ‘sane’, but when he spoke in English, he went ‘mad’ (Zulueta, 1984). This bilingual dialogue took place within the space of half an hour. It would seem that in this case and in others with similar differences in psychotic phenomena across languages, the second language may, in some cases, exert a protective function in terms of psychotic symptoms.
Makes you wonder: if most of what you read online is in English, are the 2nd languagers (Dutch, Spanish, French et al) more likely to be writing sanely? 
From Times Higher Education [via idiolect]
“If we don’t put ourselves under pressure, nothing interesting or exciting is going to happen. How could it? In fact, what we’ve done is spent three hours the previous night making sure that it doesn’t happen.
“Then we have the gall to offer these hours of preparation as morally sound. Self-protection is being offered to the world as a moral value. That preparation has been done to protect the teacher from the students. Teachers spend hours and hours preparing because they are terrified of bring caught out.”
Made me think. One of the best teachers I’ve ever had [one Mr Claughton] was never afraid to praise a question and then think about it with the class, making no bones about the fact he might not have an answer. It made you a) feel like you were learning with him, and b) value what he said more.
From Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
… it had seemed to me that discipline, or at least formal discipline, was a virtue of peace: a character or stamp by which to mark off soldiers from complete men, and obliterate the humanity of the individual. It resolved itself easiest into the restrictive, the making of men not do this or that: and so could be fostered by a rule severe enough to make them despair of disobedience. It was a process of the mass, an element of the impersonal crowd, inapplicable to one man, since it involved obedience, a duality of will. It was not to impress upon men that their will must actively second the officer’s, for then there would have been … that momentary pause for thought transmission, or digestion; for the nerves to resolve the relaying private will into active consequence. On the contrary, each regular Army sedulously rooted out this significant pause from its companies on parade. The drill instructors tried to make obedience an instinct, a mental reflex, following as instantly on the command as though the motor power of the individual wills had been invested together in the system.
This was well, so far as it increased quickness: but it made no provision for casualties, beyond the weak assumption that each subordinate had his will-motor not atrophied, but reserved in perfect order, ready at the instant to take over his late superior’s office; the efficiency of direction passing smoothly down the great hierarchy till vested in the senior of the two surviving privates.
It had the further weakness, seeing men’s jealousy, of putting power in the hands of arbitrary old age, with its petulant activity: additionally corrupted by long habit of control, an indulgence which ruined its victim, by causing the death of his subjunctive mood. Also, it was an idiosyncrasy with me to distrust instinct, which had its roots in our animality. Reason seemed to give men something deliberately more precious than fear or pain: and it made me discount the value of peace smartness as a war-education.
Thought this was worth thinking about.
One of the things that Shirkey writes about is how the new social tools and the powerline graph of user use / success / downloads / etc… has meant that there is no longer a high cost of failure. He uses SourceForge and MeetUp as two examples where if a software project or a meeting fails, there’s no real loss, because there is no institutional infrastructure that is lost along with it. On an institutional level, schools have an incredible infrastructure that makes them hard to change, but that’s really not the big problem when we question the change through this lens.
The big problem is that we never, ever have a low cost of failure. When schools fail, kids lose.
[via Brian Lamb]
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