For many people, the college entrance examination that just passed last week may be a sign of ending the standardized study of life.
No matter which school you go to, what kind of work you will do in the future. It seems that the era of judging a person's Excellence by absolute standardized scores has passed.
First of all, we should thank the average score of the college entrance examination and the standardized examination, which gave us more opportunities and resources. However, the next step is to challenge the "average standard".
But in fact, in modern society, graduating from high school does not mean bidding farewell to standardization.
From cradle to grave, we will compare with the average standard, how close or how much. In school, the daily performance is compared with that of ordinary students, so as to determine the score and ranking; When applying for a job, compare the work skills and industry experience with the general candidates, so as to decide whether to hire; After work, the annual assessment and performance are likely to be compared with ordinary employees at the same level to determine your position advantages, and so on.
Thinking habits have been kidnapped by "standardization" for a long time, which makes us do the same thing repeatedly every day: make ourselves a standard person.
However, in a standardized world, non-standardized learning can make you stand out.
This paper will take the book "The End of Average" as the starting point to tell you another method of lifelong learning.
Have you ever wondered why we are caught in the comparison with the average standard? Todros's book "The End of Average" will reveal the answer and try to completely liberate us from the invisible oppression of the average standard. (Note: This article is based on the contents and viewpoints of the original book, and specific demonstration cases can be found in the book. )
1
How is the average standard formed?
How does human society believe in "standard people"? This has to mention kettler and Gao Erdun, two talented slash youths.
The story behind the "standard man" began with 18 19 Belgian youth Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet. In the field of astronomy, in order to obtain convincing observation results, an average calculation method is created: all independent measurement results are added, and the average measurement value is obtained.
Advocates of this method believe that the average value is more accurate than any single data and can better reflect the real value of the research object. When kettler turned to the establishment of social physics, he made a key decision-applying the average calculation method to human research. It is this decision that has greatly changed the society's view of individuals.
When kettler explained the average value of human beings, he believed that every individual has defects, and only average people can represent real human beings. Everyone is a defective copy made according to some human standard template. This template is the "average standard person", a perfect representative and a model of nature.
In order to uncover the mystery of ordinary standard people, kettler began to calculate all the data that could be collected: calculate the average height, average weight and average skin color; Average age of marriage and average age of death; Average birth rate, average crime rate, average education level and even average annual suicide rate. Kettler Index, now called Body Mass Index (BMI), was created to calculate the BMI of men and women respectively to determine the average health status.
All these average figures represent the most perfect human characteristics of "average standard person".
The average standard created by kettler heralds the beginning of the average era, the average standard becomes the normal standard, individual differences are understood as mistakes, and the rigid model is marked with scientific imprint.
Then came Sir Francis Galton. (ps: Gao Erdun is Darwin's cousin, just like a child prodigy. He learned to read at the age of 2, used Greek and Latin fluently at the age of 5 and solved quadratic equations at the age of 8.
Gao Erdun objected to kettler's assertion that "it is wrong to deviate from the average standard", but agreed with kettler's view of type, holding that the excellent, the incompetent and the average respectively represent different types of people.
Gao Erdun divides people into 14 grades, from the lowest "imbecile" to the intermediate "ordinary person" and then to the highest "outstanding person".
Transforming the normal concept into the common concept is a milestone in the interpretation of the average standard meaning. Talented people are "above average" and incompetent people are "below average". The value of a person depends on how close it is to the average standard. The higher the average standard, the greater the value. At the same time, it is believed that if a person is excellent in one aspect, he is likely to be excellent in other aspects.
1883, Gao Erdun published "Research on Human Talent and Its Development", and put forward the social plan of replacing natural selection with human conscious selection for the first time. By means of "unnatural selection", the strongest, smartest and most suitable human beings are selected, and then these people are allowed to reproduce, so that they can catch up with the pace of nature for hundreds of millions of years in just a few decades, and thus the word eugenics is created.
In the era of average standards, if you want to succeed, you must strive to improve yourself, be above the average as much as possible, and avoid becoming a mediocre person in the eyes of others.
2
How is the world standardized?
How did egalitarianism change from an abstract assumption in the ivory tower of science to an organizational principle that enterprises and schools all over the world abide by? This is due to our "father of scientific management" Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Taylor believes that the core idea of equalitarianism can be used to systematically eliminate the phenomenon of low production efficiency of enterprises (just like equalitarianism eliminates mistakes).
Taylor said: "In the past, people came first. In the future, the system must be the first. " The egalitarian view holds that individuals are not important.
Taylor conducted his first standardization experiment at Midvale Steel Company. First of all, find out ways to improve the speed of every work in the factory, such as shoveling coal into the steelmaking furnace. Once a job is optimized to a satisfactory level, measure the average time required for workers to complete the job, even the standard action (for example, the optimal weight of a coal shovel is 265,438+0 pounds). Then, Taylor standardized the production process of the whole factory, so that every job had a fixed pattern and could not be changed.
Taylor said that the "best way"-and the only way-to complete any given program is the road to standardization. American factories accepted Taylor's standardization principle, posted working rules, printed standard operating procedure manuals and issued production guidance cards, all of which created a standard way to complete the work.
Who formulates and manages enterprise standards? Of course not a worker. Taylor believes that enterprises should take back all planning rights, control rights and decision-making rights from workers and hand them over to a new class-"planners" (that is, managers), who are responsible for supervising workers and deciding the best way to standardize organizations.
Taylor established the basic division of enterprise roles and quickly defined modern factories: managers in charge of production and operation and employees in charge of actual production.
Taylor wrote the idea of standardization and management into the book Principles of Scientific Management. Soon, this scientific management method, that is, "Taylor doctrine", quickly swept the whole world industry. (Asian collectivism culture is also applied to scientific management rules, which is more resolute and thorough than western countries)
"Today, in all industrialized countries, scientific management methods still occupy a dominant position in enterprise organizations. However, no company is willing to admit this, because in many cases, Taylor doctrine is as notorious as racism and gender discrimination. However, many of the largest and most successful companies in the world are still building their own organizational structures around the idea that employees' personalities are not important. "
Educational Factory under the Taylor Doctrine System
"A system full of ordinary standard workers is more efficient than a system full of geniuses."
Taylor educators claim that the new educational mission should be to train a large number of students to adapt to Taylor's economic and social work. In order to organize and train students to adapt to industrial production perfectly, the whole education system should be reformed according to the central law of scientific management (that is, everything should be standardized according to the average level).
Edward Thorndike fully supports the implementation of Taylor Doctrine in schools, and thinks that schools should classify young people according to their abilities, so that they can enter the proper position in society more effectively.
Thorndike believes that "quality is more important than equality", and it is more important to select excellent students and give them full support than to provide all students with equal educational opportunities. It is argued that scores should be a simple way to measure students' comprehensive ability, and universities should recruit students with high GPA and high scores in standard exams. According to Gao Erdun's hierarchical view, these students are not only most likely to succeed in college, but also most likely to succeed in any career in the future. (ps: I'm glad we won the standardized test)
Now our education system is just as Thorndike expected: starting from the lowest grade, we learn standardized courses designed according to the average level, and rank them in turn according to academic performance. Above-average students get rewards and opportunities, while below-average students are subject to various restrictions and contempt.
Review (highlight) the picture below.
three
Based on the average standard
Build a world of classification and grading
From the 1990s to the 40s, almost all social institutions began to compare individuals with average standards, and human society gradually became a world of classification and grading. It is undeniable that although the average standard suppressed individuality, it did promote the progress of that era and even the formation of the industrial age.
After the society fully accepted egalitarianism, enterprises flourished, consumers got affordable goods, the overall wage level of society improved, more people got rid of poverty, and nepotism and nepotism under standardized examinations decreased. Universal egalitarianism has undoubtedly helped the United States become a relatively stable and prosperous democracy.
However, egalitarianism did cost us, and the average standard misled the public's cognitive concept and covered up the most important concept of individual.
How to win in the world of advocating standardization
The "standard" we compare every day is actually just an artificial imagination with no scientific basis at all.
For example, when we were born, we compared the baby's growth schedule. Ross pointed out that the so-called baby growth schedule is actually the average result of statistics used by people in the past. As early as 1998, someone tracked 28 children on the spot and found that these 28 children had 25 growth patterns from crawling to walking! These 25 models are all different. If you insist on an average, then this average model is the standard growth model-the fact is that no child meets the standard model.
The "standard man" was created by two European scientists a century ago to solve the social problems of their time, but now it is not the industrial age, and the problems we are facing now are also very different. We will look at the world from a new perspective-individuals are important.
1, the environment must adapt to the individual, not to the average standard.
In the late 1940s, the US Air Force encountered a very serious problem: pilots could not control their planes. At that time, the jet plane was just born. The speed of the plane is faster than before, and it is more difficult to fly. In order to solve this problem, officers turned their attention to the cockpit design.
As early as 1926, when designing the first cockpit, engineers measured the body sizes of hundreds of male pilots (no one thought that women could become pilots at that time), and then designed a standard-sized cockpit based on these data. In the next 30 years, the size and shape of the seat in the cockpit, the distance between the pedal and the joystick, the height of the windshield and even the shape of the helmet will be manufactured according to the driver's standard size 1926.
Then, the military engineer wondered, are the pilots bigger now than those in 1926? Subsequently, the US Air Force conducted the largest pilot research work in history, measured the body dimensions of more than 4,000 pilots, including thumb length, crotch height, the distance between eyes and ears, and even calculated the average values of various data.
Almost everyone thinks that mastering the average size of pilots will help to design a more suitable cockpit, thus reducing the accident rate.
However, Gilbert S. Daniels expressed doubts about this and opposed the military design concept that has been implemented for nearly 100 years. Daniels collected the data of 4063 pilots and calculated the average value of 10 human body parts commonly used in design, which constituted the scale of "standard pilots".
Then, Daniels compared all the pilots with the standard pilots one by one, and the final statistical results surprised everyone. None of the 4063 pilots met the average of all 10 sizes.
Daniels' discovery clearly shows that there is no standard pilot at all. If the cockpit is designed for standard pilots, then this cockpit is not suitable for anyone. He suggested a radical reform: the environment must adapt to the individual, not the average standard.
The US Air Force accepted his viewpoint, abandoned the average reference standard and formed a new guiding principle: the principle of individual application. Individuals are no longer required to adapt to the system, but the system is gradually adapted to individuals. Soon, adjustable seats appeared, and this technology has been widely used in automobile manufacturing.
2. Establish personal science to overthrow the average standard.
Other aspects of society also need to be changed, instead of being compared with a misguided model and paying attention to them as truly independent individuals. The individual is a high-dimensional system that changes with time and place.
Molenaer believes that the fatal weakness of egalitarianism lies in its contradictory premise: understanding individuals by ignoring them. And gave this mistake a name called "repeated turn". According to ergodicity theory, if a specific group meets these two conditions at the same time, the average value of the group can be used to predict individuals.
These two conditions are: 1, and every individual in the group is the same; 2. All individuals in this group will remain unchanged.
Two typical assumptions of egalitarianism:
The average standard is the ideal state, and the individual is the error (kettler)
If a person is good at one thing, he may be good at other things (Gao Erdun)
Individual science believes that:
Personality is very important;
Individuals are not mistakes;
Many important humanistic qualities (such as talent, intelligence, character and character) cannot be reduced to a score.
The main research method of egalitarianism is "gather first, then analyze": gather a lot of people first and find out the model of this group; Then these population patterns (such as average or other data) are used to analyze and model individuals.
Individual science is "analysis first, then assembly": first find the internal model of each individual, and then assemble the individual model in a suitable way for group observation.
Three principles of individual science:
Sawtooth principle: people's thinking habits always naturally tend to think about complex human characteristics in a one-dimensional way. The average standard strengthens this habit and naturally allows us to compare people's values with a single number.
But once it comes to the characteristics of any actual individual, the one-dimensional way of thinking is no longer applicable, such as physical characteristics and mental ability are uneven. The ability of any individual can not be measured by the comparison of one-dimensional data. Only by realizing and paying attention to everyone's uneven characteristics can we truly identify and cultivate outstanding talents.
Situational principle: everyone must have done various personality tests, and the test scores divide people into different personality characteristics. Through this essentialist thinking, we believe that if we know someone's personality characteristics, we can classify him as a certain type; Knowing which specific type a person belongs to can judge his character and behavior.
However, when it is necessary to predict the behavior of an individual rather than the general behavior of a group of people, personality characteristics actually do not work. For example, an introvert in life is very extroverted in his field of work. Man's behavior is determined by himself and his environment, and there is no such thing as man's "essence".
Situational principle holds that it is impossible to explain and predict individual behavior without a specific environment, and it is impossible to determine the influence of the environment without an individual in that environment.
Behavior is not determined by characteristics or environment, but by the unique interaction between them. It was born in Taylor's human resources industry. It employs standard employees to fill standardized jobs based on essentialist thinking, ignoring the conditional characteristics of talents and situations. Getting rid of the bondage of essentialism and gradually realizing the conditional characteristics in the situation will help us to better understand and develop ourselves.
Path principle: the standardized thinking caused by egalitarianism makes us believe that there are normal educational paths, career paths and even life paths. This is like an invisible benchmark, which regulates our personal and professional life and urges us to constantly compare with the average standard process.
In fact, there is no single and normal way for any kind of human development, including physical, psychological, moral or professional development. The principle of mode puts forward two important propositions:
First of all, in all aspects of our lives, for any given goal, we can achieve the same goal through many different effective methods; All roads lead to Rome, why should we take the old path of others?
Second, the way that suits you best depends on your personality. Only your feet know whether the shoes fit or not.
There is no universal fixed order for human development, and there is no fixed stage for all people to grow, learn and achieve their goals. The only way to judge whether we are on the right path is to judge whether this path suits our individual characteristics. We must believe that each of us is a special case.
3. Get rid of the mentality of industrial products
Wan Weigang read this book in his personal column "Wan Weigang Elite Day Class" and put forward the view that people are not industrial products. In the past century, one of the secrets of the success of industrialization is also a general trend of the development of the whole society, that is, turning people into industrial products. (The so-called industrial products here are standardized products mass-produced according to fixed specifications. )
We are a part of enterprise cooperation and a screw of social development. We want to know what a "standard person" looks like, and then compare ourselves. Once you can't compare yourself, you feel that something is wrong. How old should you be promoted to the middle level of the company and what title should you get? If you find yourself behind the so-called average, you think your career is a failure. In fact, this is the mentality of industrial products.
As can be seen from the changes in the production line, standard workers are constantly being replaced by more standard machines, and the development of the times no longer requires so much industrialized labor. Those industrialized people who have made great contributions to the development of industrial society will be eliminated first.
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This article is very long. It doesn't matter if you forget the previous one. It is important to remember the following points:
1, don't blindly compare with a misled model, but treat yourself as a truly independent individual and respect your personality;
2. Standards are necessary, but there should be standards, not standardization;
"Rules can establish and maintain high standards of performance and enable everyone to share some people's experiences. But if the rules are too strict, too detailed and too complicated, it is rigid, counterproductive and even destructive. "
3. Everyone's growth, study and life goals have no fixed order and development stage, and it is most important to suit their own personality characteristics.
The hardest thing is not to master new ideas, but to give up old ones. I hope the above sharing will help everyone.