The Ratchet Effect
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Via Filling The Pail, a wonderful address by principal Jen Bourke. I've put the majority of the transcript below.
What is culture? When I think about what this word means, I imagine movies, great art, newspapers, or even sophisticated Europeans discussing the finer tasting notes of a great cheese. It can clearly mean these things. Culture can also mean the ideas, customs, and social behavior of a particular people or society.
Culture is an abstract word and one that is difficult to pin down. As a biology teacher, one way it makes sense to me to address this question is to ask whether animals can have a form of culture. It is commonly agreed among zoologists that chimpanzees have a form of culture. Like humans, chimpanzees exhibit behaviors that are learned and shared within social groups passed down from one generation to the next. Research has shown that different groups of chimpanzees across various regions, display distinct behaviors such as using tools, grooming techniques, or hunting strategies, which are not solely dictated by genetics or environment but rather by social learning.
Most animals do not behave this way. Instead, they rely on instincts. Anything they learn during their lifetime cannot be passed on to others. And so this at base is what culture means: it is the knowledge we hold collectively, it is the knowledge that can be passed from one individual to another so that we don't all have to start from scratch, working everything out from the beginning.
Isaac Newton, the genius who revolutionized physics, made this point when he said, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Fittingly, even this phrase was not Newton's and instead has a long history. And without Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and others, Newton would not have been able to construct his theories.
Clearly, schools are in the culture business. We aim to pass down from one generation to the next, that which has endured. Making a similar point this time last year, David Shepard quoted the 19th century schools inspector and cultural critic, Matthew Arnold, who argued that "culture seeks to do away with classes, to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere."
The best that has been thought and known.
In preparation for our recent staff professional learning days, teachers read an article by American thinker E.D. Hirsch, Jr. Hirsch made use of the metaphor of a ratchet, a metaphor we use when discussing our approach to improvement. Hirsch explains, "When evolutionary psychologists talk about the ratchet effect in human evolution, it's good to know what kind of ratchet they mean. It's not the horizontal circular kind that screws in screws or unscrews jars. With those, your hand can move back and forth in short strokes and the object under tension will just turn one way. The evolutionists' metaphor envisions the kind of ratchet that mountain climbers place on their ropes, enabling them to climb up while preventing them from slipping down . . . Cumulative cultural evolution takes place when the inventions in a cultural group are passed on to the young with such fidelity that they remain stable in the group until a new and improved invention comes along, the so-called ratchet effect.
Modern humans had a stronger ratchet effect than early humans and apes because they had, in addition to the powerful skills of imitation, proclivities both to teach things to others and also to conform to others when they themselves were being taught. Why does this idea of a ratchet matter? Teaching is sometimes seen as a guilty secret. Romantic iconoclasts stand up at conferences and tell their audience that standing up and telling children things is bad. Instead, schools should prioritize play and discovery, seasoned with a little motivation.
There is nothing wrong with play and discovery. This is how we learn vital things about our world, such as key vocabulary, how to find our way around the local environment, and how to take turns with others. However, the transmission of culture takes something more. Without the older generation passing on hard-won and meticulously created knowledge, young people will not discover the fundamental knowledge we want them to learn at school.
Even Newton would not have discovered his laws without learning from those who came before. I wonder if we appreciate this enough. I wonder if we value this enough. Or do we sometimes view progress as requiring a complete break from the past. This is where the metaphor of the ratchet comes in. Such a break could unintentionally lead us to slipping down. Instead, the cultural ratchet catches us to stop us falling. But that is not all. It enables us to then move ever upwards.
When young people learn about ideas and concepts, they are not stuck with them. They are challenged to improve upon them. Their role is to take stock of where we are now and suggest how we can be better in the future. This can involve reinforcing some ideas while improving on or abandoning others. But to do that, they first need to know what these ideas are. That is the mission of schools.
The article by Hirsch referenced in the video is here.
