Every now and again, more often than I would like, I bump into situations that are totally nonsensical, at least to me. And I probably spend more time than I should trying to make sense of them.
One obvious example of this sort of thing starts with Arthur Fiedler. Allow me to explain:
Throughout my lengthy career in the classical music business, I have run into hundreds of conductors.
Now maybe I am making a big presumption here, but I always presume that most people want to be successful in life. After all, it doesn’t really make much sense that people would want to fail. So I think it is reasonable to assume that the average conductor wants to be successful at their business. But here’s what doesn’t make sense to me: there is not one single conductor on planet Earth (at least, none that I’m aware of) who emulates Arthur Fiedler.
Arthur Fiedler was the most famous and most successful conductor in history. And you would think that there would be at least one young conductor somewhere who would want to emulate that success. But no. I’ve never seen it.
Along this same line of “stuff that is hard to understand,” every once in awhile I will see Bill Gates on some major network talking about how American public schools can be improved. This is a noble and laudable goal of course, but here’s what doesn’t make sense to me: when compared to the schools of other nations, American public schools are, well, frankly, not the best. You’ve seen those ads by Exxon talking about how American students are way behind students in other countries? On our best day, we rank somewhere around number 15.
Now on those same tests, we have an obvious first-place winner here, and that a winner is… Finland. Year after year, they are consistently beating, not just United States, but everybody else, at least in terms of whatever it is that these tests measure. It’s not a fluke.
So here’s my question: instead of studying and tinkering with American classrooms, which have proven themselves to be second rate, why aren’t we using that research money to comprehend what Finland is doing to be number one? Why study losers when there is an obvious winner to be studied?
Well, I actually know the answer. I know why these young conductors and the Bill Gates foundation don’t emulate the winners. It is an issue of conflicting cultures.
Young conductors and American education (which, by the way, creates all these young conductors) are very much immersed in a Henry Ford mechanical approach. As long as we try to look at the job of the teacher as a mechanical task that can be boiled down to a few simple fundamentals, and we look at teachers as a plentiful generic commodity that can be trained to do this task, we doom ourselves to be second rate. When I look at the schools in Finland, I immediately recognize major orchestra culture at work. They find people who are talented, skilled, and passionate about the work. They pay them well. They give them respect. And they don’t micromanage them.
This idea that we can take anyone off the street and turn them into experts by putting them through a training process makes sense from a factory perspective, but teaching, like conducting, is an art. This is what Finland understands, and what we don’t.
If you want to learn more about how to run your organization with an artistic rather than factory approach, I can help you.
© Justin Locke
