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.

Hope or hopelessness?

I have been thinking a lot about leadership recently. I read about a study that found when groups are assigned a task, the people who speak up early and often are thought of as the group leaders whether or not their ideas help the group, or are even factually correct.

It took me back to Guyana and Jim Jones. At the time, we were amazed that he could brainwash hundreds of people into drinking poison just because he, as their leader, told them to do it. I think those people got so used to following his leadership, never bothering to critically evaluate whether his decisions were in the best interests of the group, that they were so unsure of what to do that they did the easy thing and followed his direction to drink the poison.

I often hear people say they voted for someone because he or she was willing to speak up. Was there an evaluation to see if the things they spoke up about built something, or just knocked down and destroyed, and made a lot of noise? It is far more work to build something than the reverse. So you can take a wild guess which path most “leaders” take.

Leadership in difficult times is where you see true leaders emerge. Almost anyone can step out front when things are going well. It’s when there are difficult decisions that need to be made that you find real leaders who are able to move people to turn in a new direction.

During difficult times a good leader offers hope and a plan to a better future because a good leader has vision. A less than good leader will have excuses like “there’s nothing we can do,” or “they are doing (fill in your favorite) to us,” without a plan on what we are going to do.

Some find opportunity in people’s pain. Others work to bring us together in order to help each other as we work to build a path toward positive results. Who do you want to be with? It’s your choice. Just listen to who talks about what can be done, and who talks about what can’t be done. Hope or hopelessness.