Month: March 2016

Everybody’s either read or heard of the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. But what many people might not know or remember is that Carnegie was teaching those lessons as a course for about 20 years before writing the book. The course is still being taught over a hundred years later.

A few weeks ago I took part in the three day intensive version of the course. I had read the book casually in the past and I knew basically what to expect. Nevertheless, my expectations were far exceeded. It’s one of the best things I’ve done and I highly recommend it to anybody.

It occurred to me afterwards that I had probably learnt more in three days than I had learned in entire semesters, maybe even years of school and university education. So, I sat down and wrote a list of the things that set the course apart and then reflected on how traditional high school and university education differed. Here’s the list I came up with. I’ll expand more on each point below.  (Disclaimer: It’s been over a decade since I was in formal education so my perspective on that could be out of date. From what I have heard, however, probably not).

Carnegie Course	Traditional Education
Keep energy up	Energy almost always suppressed
Engage the student. Make it personal	Keep it objective
Work the body as well as the mind	Restrain the body
Encourage people to go out of their comfort zone	Standardisation of learning
Focus on building skills	Focus on regurgitating content
Teachers model behaviour, class follows	Teachers explain, class does
Only give positive reinforcement and guidance	Grading relative to fixed standard
Empirical approach	Rationalist/Authoritarian approach
Listen and share with fellow students	Compete with fellow students

Keep energy up: There are literally no down times in the Carnegie course. No time for the mind to wander or drift off.  While you are in the room, you are doing something. Any pauses that are required for logistical reasons (eg. tallying results) are filled by engaging in a group activity that gets everybody laughing. Then you get straight into the next activity in high spirits. Far from being vacuous or a waste of time, this is a great pedagogical technique.  Management of energy levels is, in my opinion, key to person success but also key in group dynamics.  Carnegie demonstrated for me how to do that flawlessly.

Engage the student: Our education system is based on the idea of objectivity. Reality stays true whether or not you believe in it. That’s probably true of reality but not true of how people’s attention and motivation works. As the saying goes “if you want people to build a boat, tell them a story about the sea”. Engage people first and they will do most of the learning by themselves. A central tenet of the Carnegie style is that you should attempt to frame your communication in terms that other people can intuitively grasp. If you do that, you will win people’s attention. The same goes for students. Get them engaged first and they will learn what you have to teach.

Work the body as well as the mind: One of the memorisation techniques introduce in the Carnegie course involves the use of body movements. This works incredibly well. It’s amazing what unrelated material you can commit to memory using this method. Weeks after the course, I can still bring those mnemonics to mind. That’s a pretty good return on investment. As for traditional education, just ask yourself what information you actually retained from all those textbooks you read in school/university?

Encourage people to go out of their comfort zone: In the Carnegie course you really get to choose your own level of intensity. Different personality types naturally respond to different exercises. People who are slightly uncomfortable with some activities are gently encouraged to push through but never criticised or made to feel they didn’t measure up to some standard. Individual differences are respected. By contrast, the traditional educational model is graded, planned out in advance, evened out so as not to leave behind the stragglers but also not flexible enough to continue to encourage those who have the aptitude to push ahead.  Everybody must conform to the standard measure rather than allow each to find their own breakthroughs and milestones.

Focus on building skills: Of course the Carnegie course has the famous book to use as a textbook. How many times is it referred to in the course? Zero! Powerpoint slides are used to introduce the basic concepts. They are shown for seconds at a time and then switched off. You get to your feet, get the body working, learn the concept and then immediately put it into action.  You spend the majority of the course exercising the skills and watching your fellow students do the same.  At the end you walk out knowing exactly what those skills are, how you can use them and what the results will be.  You have actual techniques you can begin to apply immediately in your life.

Teachers model behaviour, class follows: The teachers in the Carnegie course demonstrate the skills they are teaching and they do so to a very high standard. The students then enact those same skills. This gives you a reference point for excellence. A gauge you can use to compare your performance to.  And that gauge is another human being, not some abstract theory or part of a syllabus.

Only give positive reinforcement and guidance:  In addition to modelling the skill for you, the teachers in the Carnegie course guide you while you are performing a skill. Where the student is not pushing hard enough or not carrying out the skill correctly, they are gently guided in the right direction.  This is the kind of instant feedback that most of us only ever got with sports training but it works just as well with any skill. At the end, everybody applauds your effort. This has the effect of encouraging the student to make mistakes. You realise that holding back is counterproductive.  You want to push on and try your best.  By contrast, the traditional education system encourages a conservative approach by the student.  What you’re after is high grades and you get those by not making mistakes.

Empirical approach: The Carnegie course tells you the theory and then gets you to put it into action in real life. You see, hear and feel the results. Traditional education takes a rationalist and frankly authoritarian approach. Learn the right answers and then regurgitate them at the right time. In that system, it is possible to get good grades without ever learning the first principles. With Carnegie, you learn the first principles and then trial the ways in which you can implement them. Learning becomes a kind of exploration.  You’re exploring the space in which you can effectively implement the principle.  In doing so, you get to develop and express your own style.  Of course, no standardised test ever gives credit for the style in which you carried out a principle.

Listen and share with fellow students: The Carnegie course requires you to put into use the skills you are learning and then report back to the class on how it went. This serves to reinforce the principle because you get to hear the different ways that others put it into action. In addition, many of the exercises allow people to incorporate their personal experiences. In fact, this is encouraged as a way to make an idea more understandable.  The result is to allow individual personalities to shine through which builds group solidarity and creates a sense of trust.  By contrast, students in traditional education don’t get to see each others work for fear of copying.  The system is actually a competitive one in which students are fighting each other over grades. This approach does not encourage the understanding of first principles and obviously doesn’t allow for much individual expression.

Having seen the Carnegie style of pedagogy, I can’t help but reflect on how many of us have been shaped by the alternative style that was dominant in our school education.  For example, I see a lot of people in my line of work who don’t seem to understand the first principles of what they are doing.  Many people don’t spend time developing skills but just learning what is the latest trend (the latest, “correct” answer to a question you might get asked in a job interview).  And there is a distinct lack of true teachers and true leaders.  People who model behaviour and who let the results speak for themselves.

I think the best part about the Carnegie course though is that everybody else in the class will have a different list of things they learned.  That variety of perspective, understanding and trying to appreciate what makes others tick was just another bonus of the course.  You learn to appreciate the things that make us different and unique while also understanding the core things that unite us.  Almost like a yin-yang combination of objectivity and subjectivity in one.

“We live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work [sic] hard, and earned it.”

This quote comes from a well-off person annoyed at the inconvenience of having homeless people show their faces in public. As I read those lines I couldn’t help but notice that the language mirrors the fictional accounts I have described in this mini-series of posts: It is the attitude of the Salary Class towards the Wage Class but in a more advanced state. It’s the natural progression of the mentality which arises when a group finds itself in a position of superiority relative to another.

The quote is taken from the moving story of a member of the Wage Class trying desperately not to slide into outright poverty in the US and is well worth reading in its entirety.

Such stories are not uncommon these days. They describe very accurately the plight of the Wage Class as a group. There is no shortage of statistics to back up these accounts. Even using the official figures, which are systematically distorted to make the results look as good as possible for the government, the middle and lower class has been going backwards for at least two or three decades in the US. The bailout following the GFC further exacerbated this and the failure of the US government to reign in the excesses of the banks has seen income disparity get steadily worse and worse. Couple this with the loss of manufacturing, increasing automation, the increase in part-time work etc. and there is absolutely no doubt that the standard of living of many millions of people has gotten worse. Even life expectancy in certain demographics is falling for the first time in generations.

Given these facts, the rise of a “populist” like Donald Trump doesn’t seem very surprising. In fact, it seems overdue. But it certainly has come as a big surprise to many elites. Jeb Bush’s feeble campaign is one of the great examples of a man who woke up one day in a world that bore no resemblance to the one he knew. I suspect a similar revelation is waiting around the corner for Hillary Clinton. But elites are very far removed from the realities of everyday life and their ignorance is not all that surprising. What is more noteworthy is the reaction of one of the groups relevant to my theme: the Salary Class. Their attitude to Trump could best be described as irrational loathing. Trump has managed to trigger a deep emotional response from the best educated and supposedly most rational group in society. Why is this so?

In previous posts, I have explained how both the economic winners (Salary Class) and losers (Wage Class) make up stories to explain their relative positions. I tried to show how the stories of both groups have their roots in the attempt to overcome the cognitive dissonance felt when there is an unanswered question of economic justice. In this post, I will refer to a set of related stories: the stories that make up the wider political discussion in society. I see these stories as a natural extension of the stories told at the individual level.

One of the most important of these is the State of the Union address. I recall one that Obama delivered a few years ago which had as its core message the idea that America was back on track. The GFC was history. Just a little blip on the radar. Everything was returning to “normal”. The middle class was back on its feet. The economic numbers were going in the right direction. A big deal was made about how the US was still making forays into space and was even seeing a resurgence in fossil fuel extraction as the fracking boom kicked into gear. In a strange way, it was a big song and dance trying convince the public that it was the early 80s all over again. This kind of story is the one that has become generally accepted in the public discourse in the years since the GFC.

The Salary Class had no problem with the story. It pretty much described their condition. Maybe a few bankers lost their jobs for a while after the GFC. Maybe there were some layoffs in other professional services, but they quickly bounced back. It was indeed business as usual.

For the Wage Class it was very different. Their jobs did not bounce back. Their conditions did not recover. Reality for them just continued the same downward slide that they had known for decades.

Not only had the economic reality steadily declined for the Wage Class but the offical public discourse had ceased to discuss their problems. It is not hard to see how this state of affairs would exacerbate an already increasingly tense situation. Levels of anxiety, anger and resentment among the Wage Class grew as they not only saw their life prospects get worse but were told by politicians and the media that everything was just as it should be. As more and more people found themselves in precarious economic straits, the number of people disenfranchised by this state of affairs grew.

The same dynamic caused a hardening of attitudes among the Salary Class. As the Salary Class find themselves better off relative to the Wage Class, it’s natural that they explain this in the same way they explained their original ascendance: by reference to intrinsic merit. As income inequality increases, the Salary Class feel themselves more entitled. If the reason they got ahead in the first place was because they were smarter and more hard working, it logically follows that the further ahead they get, the more smarter and hard working they must be. The flip side of the equation is that the Wage Class must be getting stupider and lazier. So stupid and lazy, in fact, that they lost their jobs altogether. The official discourse further reinforces these attitudes. If everything is just as it should be in society, then the people who cannot get by must have something wrong with them.

It is for these reasons that the number one sneer by the Salary Class against Donald Trump and his supporters is that they are stupid. That attitude does not come out of nowhere. It has been around in some form for a long time and a few decades of rising inequality has strengthened it. The relationship between economic reality and the official narrative created a positive feedback loop whereby the latent and not so latent differences between the two classes become further hardened and entrenched.  This is the natural outcome when both the economic reality and the offical discourse are skewed in favour of the Salary Class (or any class for that matter).

It is the self-serving and self-reinforcing nature of this dynamic that led to the inability of both the elites and the Salary Class to see what was coming. Because the official story happened to suit their economic interests, they never questioned it.  It never occurred to them that the same discourse was progressively alienating a large proportion of the voting public. When Trump came along and so expertly manoeuvred into the sweet spot where the beliefs of millions of disenfranchised people lay, they were simply not ready for what happened next.

Of course, it is no coincidence that the stories of the different classes happen to align with their economic interests. These narratives are just post hoc rationalisations of reality and not actual attempts to understand or predict reality. The difference is that the Wage Class has been increasingly disenfranchised while the Salary Class and elites have been happy to sit back and allow that to happen so long as their piece of the pie did not contract. When all’s said and done, it’s still just the economy, stupid.

What we are seeing in this election campaign is exactly what democracy is supposed to achieve. When the direction of the country no longer works in the interests of the majority of the citizens, those citizens should be able to choose a new direction. This is not a bug in the system, it is a feature.  It’s a feature that Donald Trump is currently exercising to maximal effect. It’s because of this feature that democracies tend to last longer than the alternatives. If democracy were not allowed to right the course of the country, some other release valve would need to be found for these grievances. The most educated members of society appear to be unable to see that. They appear to be unable to see beyond their short-term economic interest. That is the spectacle that Trump has given us and it is a valuable one to understand.