A seven percent solution

I recently heard someone describe how the Legislature dealt with the revenue shortfall by saying that their solution was to cut education by seven percent.

A seven percent solution. It’s how the legislature dealt with their paramount duty in this economy. It’s also the title of a Sherlock Holmes story, Conan Doyle’s great fictional detective. It turns out that Holmes was addicted to a seven percent solution of cocaine. His drug-addled brain saw only one way to deal with the difficulties in life: a seven percent solution.

A simple solution to a complex problem. Simple solutions are often called silver bullets. They are supposed to kill werewolves and such. You know, complicated problems that defy resolution. In reality they don’t work. Silver bullets exist, they just don’t have any special abilities that a regular old lead bullet doesn’t have. But silver sounds so much better than lead, and costs more too. And the silver bullet seller has such high praise for how it is supposed to work — all the time.

Education, like most endeavors involving a broad cross-section of the community, is very complicated. Most people don’t like our complicated, nuanced answers to problems in education. We recognize that students are individuals with individual needs. Non-education “experts,” using a business model want to use the efficiency expert model to come up with the best curriculum and plug the students into a universal fit assembly line for a great education. Unfortunately for this model, students are not widgets. As H.L. Menken put it, “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

In other words, there is no silver bullet. No simple solution, no seven percent solution, nor even a 10 percent solution that really works. When Holmes was forced to overcome his addiction, he saw that rather than helping, the simple solution interfered with real progress toward a solution. If a fictional character can see it, maybe we can too.