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Dangerous mediocrity

I WONDER what Einstein would say about the moral/paradigm behind consistent behaviour?

During a discussion last week, I was reminded of an experiment that involves five monkeys (10 in total), a ladder, a banana and water spray. The juxtaposition between Einstein’s insanity definition and the consistent behaviour paradigm is intriguing.

(The original study is cited as: Stephenson, G R [1967]. Cultural acquisition of a specific learned response among rhesus monkeys, in Starek, D, Schneider, R, & Kuhn, H J [Ed], Progress in Primatology, Stuttgart Fischer, Pp 279-28.)

The experiment essentially tried to see if rhesus monkeys could be trained to avoid a banana. The experiment proceeded as follows: first, five rhesus monkeys were placed in an enclosure along with a ladder to the banana. If one of the monkeys tried to reach the banana by climbing up the ladder, it was sprayed with water.

The five monkeys in the enclosure soon learned that the banana was off limits. Secondly and in succession, each of the five original monkeys were replaced with five new and naïve ones, but only after each new one had learned to not go for the banana. By the time the original five were replaced, the five new monkeys had no idea why they could not climb the ladder for the banana; all they knew was that the banana was off limits.

This is where the consistent behaviour aspect comes in because despite not knowing the reasons for something, the behaviour was mimicked. So perhaps the definition of insanity attributed to Einstein should be modified to something along the lines of: insanity is acting consistently and expecting different results.

Perhaps this is where our country is stuck (please note, I am not equating anyone to a monkey). We are stuck in following policies conceived and initially implemented in a different world; not just the apartheid years but in years prior to the global economic crisis. We are stuck with leaders – both private and public – that are acting consistently, yet expecting growth, employment and poverty alleviation.

On the other hand, the general population is acting consistently because of, as I see it, fear or ignorance. Fear of a ruling party that might return to an apartheid mentality, or ignorance in the sense that whoever leads is irrelevant. Here, it is not simply that education is critical but that people must want to be informed, which has very little to do with education in the strictest sense.

If the work of Professor James Heckman leaves the world with just one pearl of wisdom, it should be that skill begets skill. Professor Heckman (a Nobel laureate) has demonstrated that the highest rate of return to the investment in human capital is between the ages of 0 and 3, and between 4 and 5.

If a child is not motivated and stimulated to learn and to engage early on in life, the more likely it is that when the child becomes an adult, it will fail in social and economic life. Moreover, the longer society waits to intervene in the life cycle, the more costly it is to remediate and this remediation is then often ineffective.

All our leaders and all parents need to understand this. Employment will not rise like a phoenix and poverty will not be alleviated through growth alone if we consistently encourage mediocrity. We are breeding a welfare state and one in which learned helplessness will soon ensure that any remediation is ineffective and worse, ineffective for a wide percentage of the population.

If we focus on education and not just a trivial matric pass rate but the quality and standard of education, we will begin to see results in this country. Skill begets skill and so from our children learning maths, science or geography at school, the adults of tomorrow will be world leaders in engineering and politics. These world leaders will then have the ability and foresight necessary to make this country realise its potential.

Employment is but the symptom of a population that is poorly educated and so treating the cause is not a short-term option, nor is it a medium-term one. This problem will only be solved in the long term if (if and only if) education is given the respect it deserves and if, regardless of geography and skin colour, all people receive a high level of education.

 - Fin24

*Geoffrey Chapman is a guest columnist and trade policy expert at the SABS. Views expressed are his own.



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