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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MrLucky who wrote (14994)	3/24/2006 2:11:20 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541099

"But policy should not be made on the exceptional instance. " John Translation: Exceptional is bad or not policy worthy. Mediocrity is good or must be accepted. Mr Lucky .................... you really think that's a translation of what John said? If you base policy on the exceptional, you will probably build a profoundly unworkable system. If I tool my machinery expecting everyone to be ambidextrous, I'm probably going to run in to some ergonomic problems down the road in production. And "exceptional is bad"? I mean really. Clearly much of the time we twist the words of people we do not agree with, but this was such a pretzel I think it deserves comment.

To: MrLucky who wrote (14994)	3/24/2006 2:58:53 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541099

But policy should not be made on the exceptional instance. Translation: Exceptional is bad or not policy worthy. Mediocrity is good or must be accepted. Not at all. Much more complicated. You can find exceptional folk in any organization but if you create policy out of their experiences you will fail. Exceptional means rare, unusual; and all organizations are filled with folk of varying skills, temperament, etc. But sometimes you will find that the exceptional folk aggregate in some structural way. As in the Central Park East illustration I offered in an earlier post. Then you can try to replicate those structural conditions in a variety of instances, hoping that you attract more exceptional folk to those situations and/or you find that others can move to those levels if the conditions are correct. But, in general, that will mean providing much more resources than are offered at present. But to argue that the California public school system can be solved by multiplying the Jaime Escalantes simply won't work.