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French filmmaker Laurent Cantet’s highly praised film “The Class (Entre Les Murs)” has finally been released on DVD. I think the film deserves high marks for its effective use of cinema verite style and demonstration of the complexity of the relationship between teacher and student.

In an interview with Dennis Lim in the New York Times on Sept. 21, 2008, Cantet said “I don’t want to make a version of ‘Dead Poets’ Society‘ where the teacher is brilliant and heroic and knows everything. I wanted to show a school in all its complexity, where the students don’t always learn and the teachers are not always sure of what they’re doing.” I think he certainly realized his intentions. And I think Lim is correct when he says that The Class simultaneously revives and undermines the heroic teacher genre.

As a teacher myself, however, I think that the teacher who is the focal point of the film provides a classic example of inappropriate pedagogy. That teacher is not a fictional invention, but rather one Francois Begaudeau, the teacher on whose autobiographical book the movie is based. Maclean’s reviewer Bryan Johnson called him “a passionate instructor who challenges his students,” but New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis was closer to the mark when she called him a “quietly stubborn, prickly man.” Begaudeau’s pedagogy is Socratic to the extreme, as he argues or quibbles with virtually everything his student’s say and routinely teases his students.

Begaudeau bears a physical resemblance to Colm Feore, one of whose roles was as Pierre Trudeau, and revels in the disputatiousness of the Jesuits who educated Trudeau or the Talmudists who provided some of my education.

The question is whether this is appropriate pedagogy for Begaudeau’s students, who are a diverse multi-ethic and multi-racial group in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris, not unlike the disadvantaged and insecure students Jaime Escalante faced in Stand and Deliver. The question is particularly acute because Begaudeau teaches French grammar, and one of his points of confrontation with his students is over the use of the complex subjunctive forms. While Begaudeau defends the snobbism of traditional grammar, the students advocate contemporary usage. (Traditional subjunctive forms also appear to be disappearing in English as well.)

The movie revolves around Begaudeau’s assignment that his students write, and then present to the class, self-portraits. Self-portraits can, of course, encroach on all sorts of personal issues. The students are clearly uncomfortable with the assignment. And why shouldn’t they be uncomfortable revealing themselves to an instructor who teases and belittles them?

The instructors in Begaudeau’s school hold evaluation sessions for the students at which two student representatives are present. In his case, the student representatives - both women whom he has ruthlessly teased along the way - afterwords reveal to the students his critical comments in the evaluation sessions. (I should say that I found it surprising that the student reps were not sworn to confidentiality.)

When this comes out in class, Begaudeau accuses the women of behaving like bitches at the evaluation session. This incendiary remark immediately is taken up by the school’s gossip mill to the effect that Begaudeau called the women bitches. Begaudeau’s distinction between behaving in a way that will be perceived as bitchiness and being a bitch hardly nullifies the inappropriateness of the remark. In a later scene, Begaudeau confronts the women in the school yard, and, as the student audience grows, his own loss of self-control increases.

Begaudeau has confused being rigorous and intellectually challenging, which is desirable, with being culturally and personally arrogant. The heroic teachers of such films as Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, and Freedom Writers display a level of empathy that is entirely foreign to Begaudeau. I use the word foreign deliberately, perhaps because Begaudeau’s behavior was entirely consistent with French, rather than North American, cultural norms.

While I enjoyed the complexity of the movie, as a teacher myself, Begaudeau made me cringe. I found him an object lesson in dangerously ineffective pedagogy. Yes, The Class undermines the heroic teacher genre, but it does so because Begaudeau’s pedagogy itself is so flawed.

In my previous post, I concluded that what strategic planning needs is a more populist approach that engages more people from the organization(s) that would be implementing the plan and the public that will be affected by the plan. The question is how to do that. I think there are two answers, one involving information technology, the other narrative.

The information technology approach is to post draft plans on a government website and invite public comment. My co-author David Brown and I, in Digital State at the Leading Edge (www.digitalstate.org) discussed early initiatives of that kind undertaken by the federal and Ontario governments: for example the federal government’s dialogue on foreign policy and the Ontario government’s budget consultation, both undertaken in 2003. The challenge with such consultations is how to stimulate public participation and then how to incorporate the responses into the ultimate plan.

In the years following those early initiatives, social networking software has greatly improved, providing opportunities for enhanced outreach. So, rather than being conducted entirely on a government website, a planning process could also take place on Facebook or YouTube. If the plan involves controversial issues, it is a certainty that citizens on one side or the other will set up their own YouTube channels and Facebook groups. Again, planners in government will have to monitor, interpret, and incorporate what they read there.

I see narrative fitting in in the way strategic plans are presented. For example, plans often involve alternative scenarios. Rather than presenting scenarios abstractly, then could be presented as narratives. The narratives could include big pictures (for example, a future involving mainly renewable sources of energy) as well as vignettes involving households, businesses, or third sector organizations.

One of the issues posed in the previous post is how the strategic plans developed by forward-looking rationalist planners could deal with the limits on human rationality, for example the willingness of many people to act on the basis of backward-looking concerns such as retribution. A populist planning process will help, or perhaps I should say force, planners to take into account public sentiments, some of which may be very irrational. It would force them to confront strongly-held public sentiments either as constraints or as obstacles to be overcome through public advocacy. The example that comes to mind is Paul Krugman’s recent vignette of the citizen at a public meeting who wanted the government to keep its hands off his Medicare -willfully denying, even when told, that Medicare is a government program.

To summarize, I see online consultation, located on both government websites and social networking sites, and incorporating narrative as a way of communicating with the public, as the way forward for strategic planning.

I will be taking another week off next week, but will return during the third week of August.

One of Robert McNamara’s controversial accomplishments was putting in place a rigorous strategic planning process in the Defense Department. Essentially, McNamara elevated strategic planning from the individual forces to the departmental level, and assigned it to a small group of people chosen in his image - brilliant young quantitatively-oriented civilians - and reporting directly to him.

His bright boys wanted to deliver the most bang for the buck and proposed options that integrated across the forces to achieve this goal. The forces bitterly resented this attack on their cherished autonomy. While McNamara unleashed this model of strategic planning on the Defense Department, over the years it has been applied to many other public sector organizations, generally under rubrics such as Program, Planning, and Budgeting Systems (PPBS) or Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB).

I applied this model of strategic planning against the eleven lessons from the life of Robert McNamara that are set out in Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War. Some of the lessons, such as “get the data” and “maximize efficiency,” are clearly consistent with his strategic planning model. But many of the others are not.

“Belief and seeing are often wrong” casts a skeptical eye on data-gathering, implying that the data are always filtered through the biases of the analyst.

“Empathize with your enemy” makes the point while organizations interact with other organizations, the interactions come down to relationships among people. Strategic planning often imagines the world in an abstract way that ignores the human element. One lesson McNamara ultimately learned from the Vietnam War was that the North Vietnamese weren’t governed by simplistic stimulus-response psychology, but were rather a proud people with a history, and this self-image drove their decisions.

McNamara’s deepest, and most skeptical, lessons for planners are that “you can’t change human nature” and that “rationality will not save us.” However rational your plan, it doesn’t take into account the frequent irrationality of human behavior.

A nuclear policy of mutually assured destruction depends on the critical assumption that all protagonists prefer life over death, but as McNamara discovered during the Cuban Missile Crisis there were some, most notably the Cuban leadership and the American military, that were willing to countenance millions of deaths for ideological reasons.

In a speech given in 1966, McNamara himself clearly recognized the limits of our rationality:
“Who is man? Is he a rational animal? If he is, then the goals can ultimately be achieved. If he is not, then there is little point in making the effort. All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal with a near infinite capacity for folly. His history seems largely a halting, but persistent, effort to raise his reason above his animality. He draws blueprints for utopia, but never gets it quite built.”

Bearing in mind these limits on human rationality, the question that arises in my mind is whether any other strategic planning process would do better than McNamara’s quantitative and elitist approach. I tend to believe that a more populist approach, engaging both the people who will be implementing plans and will be affected by plans, would do better. They would provide greater empathy while demonstrating the limits of rationality, leading to conclusions that are likely less subtle and complicated than those that would result from an elitist process, but, conversely, more likely to win widespread approval.

I will be away next week, so my next post will be the first week in August.

I just read Winston Churchill CEO a new book by Alan Axelrod, who describes himself as a prolific author of business and popular history books. The book is a most recent example of the “lessons from …” genre of business books.

The book has several strengths. Axelrod is a lucid and eloquent writer, easy to read. He does a good job analyzing the effectiveness of Churchill’s greatest speeches, particularly those of 1940, which inspired the nation at the moment its future looked darkest.

Axelrod’s brief biography of Churchill made clear something I hadn’t quite realized, namely how much Churchill was a military man - indeed a warrior - all his life. He trained as a soldier and while serving as a war correspondent in South Africa, the Sudan, and India was also involved in military operations (i.e., he killed enemies and was himself captured). He was first Lord of the Admiralty and Minister of Munitions during World War I, and had a lifelong interest in military technology. He spent the thirties trying to persuade his countrymen to prepare for what he saw as an inevitable war with Germany, and was ultimately prime minister during that war. In both world wars, he was at the front as much as possible, and even while prime minister, frequently wore a uniform.

The surprising event that makes it evident that Churchill was primarily a wartime leader was his losing the 1945 election in a landslide, held just two months after his greatest moment of triumph. British voters listened to Churchill’s belligerent campaign rhetoric and, looking forward rather than backward, concluded that - despite his achievements in wartime - he was not the right person to lead in a time of economic reconstruction. Axelrod ignores this defeat because it speaks to the limitations of applicability from one context to another.

Axelrod fails to demonstrate the relevance of Churchill’s career as a leader of the public sector in crisis to the ongoing management of the private sector. The book jacket copy “we shall in the boardrooms” shows this incongruity. Axelrod’s approach is to scatter through the book in text boxes the learnings for private sector managers. Many of these are simplistically self-evident, such as “all business is people business,” or “make a sale, create a customer,” or “the goal of every enterprise is to win.”

The book also does not tell us who the implied reader is. Axelrod is writing for people in business but never attempts to show which functions and levels and which types of business. Had Axelrod taken his mission seriously, rather than scattering these bon mots throughout the text, he would have written a chapter or two in which he identified his audience, and then wrestled with the question of what one could learn from the career of an eminently successful wartime political leader that would be relevant to the sorts of careers and industries he was writing for.

Drawing lessons is ultimately a challenging task. What can be learned from an exemplar’s experience that is relevant to another person in a different time, place, and set of circumstances, particularly if the exemplar is as unique as was Churchill? Axelrod’s book unwittingly demonstrates just how challenging a task it is.

Two months ago I posted about my exam question asking for a hypothetical obit for Robert McNamara. With his actual passing two days ago, it’s fascinating to read reactions. He remains enormously controversial.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, who himself served during the war in Vietnam, expressed “utter contempt” for McNamara’s retrospective admission that the war in Vietnam was wrong. According to Herbert, McNamara — who knew early on that the war was a lost cause - should have spoken up at the time.

My Harvard undergraduate class (1971) runs a list-serv, and the comments were equally divided between those who, like Herbert, condemned McNamara for keeping silent in the past, and those who admire him for later in life admitting his errors and attempting to learn from history.

In the exam question, I asked for a Canadian perspective on McNamara. Globe and Mail obituary-writer Sandra Martin interviewed former diplomat Alan Gotlieb, who opined that McNamara was a person of honesty and integrity who, like many of the American elite, carried through his long life the belief that the US should be the world’s policeman and its conscience.

What an insider perspective, with the subordinate clause only hinting at a critique. Had she interviewed one of the many former objectors to the Vietnam War who have made their lives in Canada, I’m sure she would have gotten a different, less subtle or generous, perspective.

Documentarist Errol Morris, on his eponymous website, posted a radio interview he did attempting to sum up his nuanced thoughts about this complex man. Morris called him a technocrat with a moral dimension, a man who was torn between his loyalty, as a public servant, to the commander-in-chief and his own sense of right and wrong. Morris observed that McNamara was clearly opposed to the war in Iraq, but never forthrightly condemned it. Morris hypothesized that, in his own mind, McNamara was secretary of defense for the rest of his life. He was always the loyal servant.

I think this interpretation is exactly right: McNamara was quintessentially an insider, and while he was willing to criticize the mistakes of the past, he could never go that one step farther. He could never criticize what he disagreed with while it was happening because that would put in jeopardy his cherished insider status.

I close with a related personal vignette. While an undergrad at Harvard in the early 1970s, I sat on the student advisory committee to the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. We had occasional meetings (and receptions) with the “visiting committee,” which included Kennedy administration luminaries like Mrs. Onassis and Robert McNamara.

The night before one such meeting I received a call from someone in SDS, to ask about the details of the meeting and reception, so that they could confront McNamara. I told the SDS’er nothing, reasoning that, at a time when Nixon had ordered the bombing of Cambodia, embarrassing the former secretary of defense would do little to advance the cause of peace.

McNamara ultimately did not show up, which was not surprising, given that on a visit to Harvard in 1966 he was treated roughly by protesters. But, when thinking back about it, I still wonder if I didn’t facilitate a potential protest because I thought it was counter-productive, or whether I just didn’t want SDS’ers to crash the party to which I was one of the fortunate few who had been invited.