A Master Class with Pixar, Part 4 - Hindsight is Not 20-20

We've heard it a thousand times.  Hindsight is 20-20.

Edwin Catmull.  Photo by Deborah Coleman, Pixar

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, disagrees.  "Hindsight is not 20-20.  Not even close.  Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future" (2014, p. 177).

Catmull describes the cat who no longer sits on a hot stove - but no longer sits on a cold one either.  We tend to over-generalize our learning experiences.  We also have selective memories.  "And we do not always make the right selections.  We build our story - our model of the past - as best we can.  We may seek out other people's memories and examine our own limited records to come up with a better model.  Even then, it is still only a model - not reality" (Catmull, 2014, p. 178).

How many times have we defended the Professional Learning Community process against the past?  Education does have a reputation for being a swinging pendulum.  However, I think Catmull is right in that we keep the memories that reinforce our story. 

I was talking to a veteran teacher about SMART goals, and she made a reference to how "we were doing this thirty years ago."  Her model of reality is that of the reform-weary veteran.  I do not agree with her assessment.  Goals and objectives might date back to Madeline Hunter, if not earlier, but education was famous for having a fixed-time paradigm rather than a fixed-learning one.  Phil Schelecty said that "it used to be that dropouts weren't a problem.  They were a solution.  School ran fine if the right kids dropped out."  Perhaps my hindsight is faulty, but I don't recall that once upon a time, schools were committed to all kids learning at high levels, and provided time and opportunity if they didn't hit the mark right away.

We also suffer from poor hindsight in matters of student discipline.  I often find that punishment proponents have a "heads I win, tails you lose" approach to evaluating the effectiveness of punishment.  If a student is punished, and behavior improves, the cause is attributed to punishment.  If the student doesn't improve, the cause is rarely attributed to the failure of punishment - it is usually attributed to the stubbornness of the student.

What if we took Catmull at his word and acknowledged that our hindsight is faulty?  Wouldn't that change the tone of our school improvement discussions?  Imagine a school improvement presentation that opened with the power of the magician.  Illusions work because our brains fill in the gaps.  We do the same thing with hindsight.  When we acknowledge that everybody's hindsight is faulty, we can have productive conversations about the good old days.  Better yet, we can put the good old days to rest, because we are not moving backward in time.  Today's students don't need yesterday's solutions, and we don't know what tomorrow's solutions are.  All we can do is tap everybody's ideas to maximize creativity, because the future hasn't been made yet.

References
Catmull, E. and Wallace, A. (2014). Creativity, inc.: Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. New York, NY: Random House