Carl Honore

Slow feedback?

Feedback is king these days. Wherever you go online, the pressure is on to pass judgement: Was this site useful? How do you rate this article? Please take a minute to fill in our user experience survey. In the same vein, gamers are forever monitoring their progress on leader boards.

The hunger for feedback is also starting to reshape the workplace. Many younger employees now expect a running commentary on their performance. Not for them the old annual or semi-annual review: they want to know how you think they did in this morning’s presentation, and they want to know now. You can even buy special software to create a round-the-clock feedback loop for staff and clients.

Yet this begs an obvious question:Is being constantly ranked, rated and evaluated a good thing?

True, there is much to be said for knowing what your colleagues and boss think of your work and to hear this more often than once or twice a year. Input from a wide range of people can also enrich many decisions and projects a principle known as the “wisdom of crowds“.

But there are limits. Otherwise the wisdom of crowds can start to resemble groupthink.

We are social animals, after all, so we have a natural desire to fit in, to please our peers – to earn good feedback. Research into online behaviour suggests that other people’s opinions can narrow our horizons. When visiting a site where movies, books, etc are rated, users tend to click on the items with the highest rating first.

It’s like buying a song on iTunes: if there are multiple versions available, which do you listen to first? I know I always click on the one with the highest popularity ranking. I follow the herd, in other words.

This raises the possibility that too much feedback too fast can close down avenues of inquiry and pull us away from the fertile soil of serendipity.

It may also hamper our creativity. Some acts of creation are intensely private. You cannot orchestrate them by committee. A person has to sit alone with his doubts, fears, frustrations, dreams and demons untangling, parsing and processing these at his own pace.

Many creative triumphs have come from someone toiling away alone, free from the tyranny of other people’s judgements. James Joyce wrote Ulysses without a daily critique from his editors; Mozart composed his Requiem and piano sonatas without hourly feedback from his patrons; Picasso only unveiled his paintings to the world when they were finished.

Would these giants have produced the same imaginative breakthroughs, the same revolutions in thought, if they had worked with a constant drip-feed of other people’s feedback? I’m not so sure.

Surely the answer is to strike a balance. Feedback at the right speed: sometimes fast, sometimes slow and sometimes no feedback at all.

It goes without saying that any feedback on this post is more than welcome…

In Praise of Snow…

Talk about climate change. Britain is grappling with the largest snowfall in nearly 20 years. London is buried under seven inches of the white stuff – and there are still flurries blowing around outside my window. The country has ground to a halt. In London, there are nobuses, no Tube, no school, nothing.

This is a huge inconvenience for many, but there is also a silver lining. To begin with, children are over the moon to have the day off school. Mine dashed outside in just their pajamas and boots this morning before breakfast. My son declared it the “best day of his life.”

Many Londoners know how he feels. The absence of traffic has changed the whole mood and feel of the city. Streets normally clogged with cars and buses are now full of children (and adults) building snowmen, throwing snowballs and even tobogganing. Neighbours who usually avoid eye-contact are stopping to chat about the weather. This is hardly surprising:Studies around the world show a direct correlation between cars and community: the less traffic that flows through an area (and the more slowly it flows) the more social contact among the residents.

I do not mean to demonize cars. I drive one myself. The trouble is that driving has gained too much ascendancy over walking. For decades, urban life has been haunted by the words of Georges Pompidou, a former president of France: We must adapt the city to the car, and not the other way round.

How wrong can someone be? The city of the future – a truly Slow city – must take a different tack. It must adapt not to the car but to the citizen, to the pedestrian, to human beings. And it shouldn’t wait around for a snowstorm to do so.

By coincidence, this snowfall has hit Britain on the day that alandmark studyon the statechildhood hit the headlines. The report sounds fascinating and flawed, and I will blog on it later once I’ve actually read it. But a quick comment now.

On the BBC this morning, one of the report’s authors blamed the unhappiness of modern British children on career-obsessed parents, competitive schooling, broken families, excessive consumerism etc. But he failed to mention our collective reluctance to let them run around and play outside on their own. If we want happy, healthy kids, then we need to redesign and rethink our cities so that they have plenty of outdoor space for play. And surely reclaiming the streets from traffic must be a first step to achieving that.

Big Brother watch?

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, a company unveiled a digital watch fitted with a GPS tracker device. Very James Bond. But the device was not designed for English spies with a penchant for Maseratis and martinis. No, the GPS watch its official name isNum8– is aimed at parents who want to keep track of their children.

The company that makes the watch insists that it is not just another nail in the coffin of children’s right to roam. “Only 20% of children are now allowed to go out and play, says the chief executive of Lok8u (get it?). It’s my profound hope that Num8 will help parents feel more comfortable about letting their children go out to play.”

But will it?

I’m not so sure. Maybe it will encourage some parents to let their children play more freely outside – though you might ask what kind of freedom involves constantly updating mum and dad with your exact location to within three metres. But I suspect the watch will just crank up the anxiety for others. For a start, it reinforces the feeling that the world is a horribly dangerous place full of kidnappers, paedophiles and child slavery rings when it is not.

Technology designed to bring peace of mind also has a tendency to do the very opposite. Just look at what happened with the mobile phone, aka the longest umbilical cord in history. Because we can reach our children anytime, anywhere, we do. And if the phone is switched off, or out of range, for a moment, we panic – our child must be in danger, something must be wrong. Then there is the peer pressure: if everyone else is in 24/7 phone contact with their kids, then I must be a bad parent for failing to do the same.

But can we really guarantee round-the-clock electronic monitoring of our children? The makers of Num8 think so. The watch uses satellite and mobile phone networks to track kids indoors and outdoors. It also sends alerts if the Num8 is removed without permission. But what if a child wanders into a black zone where coverage is blocked or weak? Or the network crashes? What happens then to the peace of mind promised in the Num8 advertising?

And even if we could guarantee constant GPS monitoring of our children, is that really a good thing? I don’t think so. Thanks to the modern obsession with eliminating all doubt and danger from our kids’ lives, something important is getting lost the time and space for children to explore the world on their own terms, to take risks, to be completely alone sometimes, to break away gradually from the mother ship. There is nothing quite like the rush of pride a child feels when taking his first steps out into the world on his own walking alone to a friend’s house, or cycling to school by himself. Yet that accomplishment is diminished when you know your parents are anxiously tracking your every move on the home computer. The Num8 also makes it harder to let children go in stages because it is an all-or-nothing device: you either know exactly where your kid is at all times, or you don’t. This presents parents with an agonizing decision: at what age do you allow your child to leave home alone without the Num8? At 10? 15? Or maybe 25?

The bottom line is that the world is nowhere near as dangerous as we think, or as the overheated media portrays it. Children do not need to be electronically tagged like criminals. We could all be a lot less anxious if we ditched the electronic leashes and let kids roam freely as they have throughout history.

A final thought: My guess is that the Num8 will lead to an epidemic of false alarms. It is just such a tempting target for pranksters and bullies just yank it off a child’s wrist in the playground and wait for his hysterical parents (followed by a SWAT team) to come charging to the rescue….

An international Slow Day?

Every movement for social change has an annual day of celebration or observance. Some have more than one. Think of Earth Day, International Women’s Day, Buy Nothing Day – the list goes on. So is it time for the Slow Movement to follow suit?

Well, actually, it already has. A number of groups around the world have been holding their own version of an annual Slow Day. One example is the Montréal-based Le Slow Mot. But the Slow Day with the most brio, imagination and international reach is organized by L’Arte del Vivere con Lentezza (The Art of Slow Living). Their firstWorld Day of Slow Livingwas held in 2007 in Milan. The next year it was New York. In 2009, the date is March 9^th and the host city is Tokyo, with other events going on around the world. Like any Slow festival worth its salt, the program for the Japanese capital is generously seasoned with humour. Highlights will include a team issuing speeding tickets to people judged to be walking too fast at Shinjuku, the crazy anthill of a train station in downtown Tokyo.

I now need to work out what will be my contribution to the World Day of Slow Living. Somehow “taking the day off work” probably won’t cut it…

Snail mail in action

An amusing item on the BBC news today. Postal workers in Britain have complained of being forced to walk too fast -four miles an hour or 6.44 km/h – and that some have been fired for being too slow. The Royal Mail denies imposing a minimum walking speed but staff insist that the company’s new computer system forces them to rush through their rounds. One postman claimed his schedule did not take into account long driveways, bad weather or hostile dogs.I’ve blogged before about howwalking speedis a cultural barometer but this case underlines the folly of assuming that faster is always better.

What happens when postal workers are in a rush? Well, like everyone else, they make mistakes. Several times a week, we get mail delivered to our house in London that is addressed to the neighbours, or even to people several streets away. And lots of stuff sent to us never arrives. According to one estimate, the Royal Mail loses over a million letters and packages every month.

Something else gets lost when postal workers work race the clock – the banter on the doorstep, the friendly hello in the street, the watching out for the elderly neighbour, thehuman touch. The postman used to be part of the social glue of the community; now he’s just another service-provider hurrying to meet his targets. The idea of that the postman always rings twice now seems like a quaint memory from yesteryear. When our postman delivers a package, he rings only once, and even then you have to sprint to answer. Dilly dally for a few seconds and he’s already gone. Probably to deliver some of our mail to the neighbours…

Is golf too slow?

Golf is famously slow. Shooting a round on an 18-hole course can take three, four or more hours. Which is part of its charm. Fresh air, a bit of nature, some friendly banter and exercise a very relaxing way to while away an afternoon. And yet some people like nothing more than a bracing round of Speed Golf. I suppose the acceleration of golf is inevitable in a world with Speed yoga, Speed meditation and Speed Dating. Speed Golf is pretty simple: players carry only six clubs and sprint between shots, with the fastest rounds lasting about 45 minutes. I have to admit that this holds a certain appeal to me: I’ve given up golf because now that I have kids I don’t have time to be blowing off a whole afternoon on the course. Is squeezing a round into an hour the solution?

What I find most fascinating about Speed Golf is a comment from Christopher Smith, the sport’s world-record holder: “In Speed Golf you don’t have the option to think,” he says. “All you have time to do is size up the situation, look at the target and hit the shot. So golf becomes a reactive sport rather than a deliberative one. It’s more like tennis where you’re responding to the something coming at you.

This jibes with my own experience of golf – that dreadful, sinking moment when you think a shot to death. Once the second thoughts and self-doubt start to flow, you know you’re going to mess it up even before you swing. That is why I prefer faster sports. I love squash precisely because you have no time to mull over a shot.

Does that mean that golf is too slow? Or that we play it too slowly? While almost everything else in the world has accelerated over the last century, golf has been slowing down. The star players of yesteryear, like Ben Hogan and Sam Snead, played quickly. What changed was that golf became a TV spectator sport at exactly the same time that Jack Nicklaus was at his peak – and he was remarkably slow. The upshot: around the world, both amateurs and professionals began spending long, tortured minutes circling their ball, sizing up the path to the green, testing the wind, visualizing the perfect shot, regulating their breathing.

Whether this helps us to golf better is unclear. Smith finds that he often racks up a better score speed-golfing a course than when playing it more slowly. He recommends that we all experiment with acceleration try a few rounds with no practice swings, for instance, or take no more than 10 or 15 seconds to play a shot after pulling the club from your bag. Since I won’t be venturing onto the course any time soon, I’d be interested to hear if this acceleration works for any of you out there.

A final caveat, though: even the fastest golf player needs to make room for slowness. When Smith reaches the green, he always walks. The idea is to slow down his heart-rate so that he can putt smoothly, calmlyand accurately.

Blinding them with science…

At breakfast this morning, I heard an alarming report on theBBCabout falling standards in science in UK schools. The Royal Society of Chemistry says that the obsession with exam scores means that even the brightest pupils are being “taught the test”rather than how tosolve problems, think critically or apply mathematics in science. The RSC spokesman argued that exams now mainly reward students for regurgitating facts instead of for using their imagination to think a problem through in stages. A similar lament is heard from universities who now spend a fortune on remedial maths and science courses for pupils, and from businesses who are snowed under with graduates who boast luminous exam scores but lack basic science skills. And the problem is not confined to science. Imposing a rigid curriculum and then making exam scores the only barometer of academic success narrows horizons in the humanities, too.One couple I know have been asked by their seventeen-year-old son not to talk to him about any literature, history, or art that is not on the syllabus at his school in London. He’s worried it will get in the way for his exams, says his father. Part of me admires his focus, but it’s also pretty depressing that education has become so tunnel-vision.It’s not all bad news. Today’s students are very good at finding and manipulating information, and at analyzing visual data, but other skills seem to have fallen by the wayside.University professors complain that students now balk at reading whole books, preferring much shorter excerpts and articles. They also seem impatient with ambiguity, demanding instant answers that are black and white. The reasons for this are complex, but the obsession with test scores plays a role.A century and a half ago, England tried paying teachers according to how well their pupils answered questions asked by visiting inspectors. Schools, in response, put more energy into rote learning and began encouraging weaker pupils to play hooky on inspection days. Today, with so much kudos and cash riding on test scores, educators around the world have been caught doing the same or worse. A fourth-grade teacher in Spokane, Washington, recently gave her pupils answers to the mathematics portion of a state exam in advance and allowed some to swap answers during the test itself. Investigators reported that, in the section where students were asked to show their work, one had written, My techre [sic] told me. In England, the headmaster of a primary school was caught helping pupils cheat on science and math SATs. Not long ago, Japan was rocked by the revelation that hundreds of its schools allowed pupils to skip entire courses to allot more time to studying for the country’s notoriously competitive university entrance exams.

And let’s not forget the basic drawback of exams: the one thing they measure better than anything else is how good a child is at taking exams. Is that really what we need in the New Economy? In the future, the biggest rewards will go not to the yes-men who know how to serve up an oven-ready answer but to the creatives, the nimble-minded innovators who can think across disciplines, delve into a problem for the sheer hell of it, and relish the challenge of learning throughout their lives. These are the people who will come up with the next Google, invent an alternative fuel, or devise a plan to slay poverty in Africa. The problem is that relentless pressure, scrutiny and measuring can make children less creative: rather than take chances or push the boundaries, they play safe, opting for the answer that earns the gold star.

Where do we go from here? The UK government says there is nothing to worry about because science test scores have risen, which seems to misses the point entirely. Part of the problem here is that exam scores have become an end in themselves. But change is coming, even from those most resistant to it. A few weeks ago the UK government abolished all SATs (national standardized exams) for 14-year-olds.

School’s out…side

When I speak in public about Under Pressure, I often ask the audience what they remember most vividly about their childhood. The answers usually break down along the same generational lines. Anyone over the age of about 25 remembers playing outdoors, usually with no adults around. The younger members of the audience recall being indoors, with grown-ups hovering nearby and often with an electronic screen involved. Over the last generation, the way children play has changed profoundly. So much play is now managed, supervised, organized, structured, benchmarked, expensive. It’s no longer enough for children to kick a ball around with their friends in the park or on the street, like Pelé, Maradona and Bobby Charlton did; they have to join a soccer team and play in uniforms with referees, coaches and parents screaming themselves hoarse on the sidelines. It’s not enough for them to mess around with twigs, weeds and dirt in the garden; they have to sit indoors with an electronic educational toy farm. So much play now occurs indoors in sterile environments created by risk-management consultants and bureaucrats from the health and safety department. Or it happens in the home, where anxious parents are desperate to insulate their kids from the perils of outside world. The net effect is that a lot of children nowadays lead very cloistered lives. They seldom go outdoors alone to explore, to take risks, to get lost or get into trouble, to play. Under Pressure examines the price we pay, starting with rising obesity, for treating children like battery hens, but it also investigates the solutions. One of the most promising is outdoor schooling, which has long been popular in Scandinavia but is now gaining ground around the world. The idea is simple: take kids out of the classroom and set them free in Nature. This works particularly well for pre-schools. For Under Pressure, I visited one outdoor pre-school, theSecret Gardenin Fife, Scotland, where three-year-olds spend their time in a forest negotiating harsh weather, open camp-fires and poisonous fungi. I saw more than one of the children break a piece of ice off the top of a muddy puddle and suck on it like a popsicle. In other words, outdoor pre-schools are the stuff of nightmares for a risk-averse society. But they work fabulously well. Sure, the children suffer the odd scratch or burn, but they arrive at kindergarten happier, more confident and less prone to illness and allergies than do their indoor peers. They are eager, motivated learners. They also have a strong feel for the natural world, which is essential if we’re going to save the environment. I’m writing about this now because Canada’s first outdoor pre-school is about to open. It’s set in 77 hectares of woodland on the outskirts of the capital, Ottawa, and is called theCarp Ridge Forest Preschool. As a Canadian myself, I’ll be interested to see how this experiment plays out. What about the notoriously cold winter in the Great White North? Well, the kids will play outdoors all year round, but the organizers are not extremists. When the thermometer dips below 10C, the children will move indoors. My feeling is that the kids could probably carry on playing happily at even colder temperatures but you have to draw the line somewhere. And you have to think of the teachers’ comfort too.

A slow prayer…

The other day I gave a talk in the chambers beneath St. Peter’s churchin Vienna, Austria. It was the first time the crypt had been used for a secular event in nearly a thousand years. With the dim lighting, ancient altarpieces and faint whiff of incense, and with the stone walls blocking out all mobile phone reception, it was the perfect setting for an evening devoted to Slow. My hosts were the Austrian chapter of the Young Presidents’ Organization– high-flying businesspeople, in other words – but the monsignor in charge of the church was there, too. I felt a bit uneasy seeing him in the front row, but in the end he laughed along at the more risqué jokes. Afterwards, he came up to me with a confession. You know, as I was listening to you, I suddenly realized how easy it is to do things in the wrong way, he said. Lately I have been praying too fast.

Homework – enough is enough

Some good news from the front line in the battle against academic overload. The Toronto School Board has voted to roll back the homework juggernaut. In Canada’s largest city, children will no longer be assigned work over Christmas, Spring Break and other important holidays. Kindergarten pupils will not face any more take-home assignments apart from reading or chatting to parents. Up to Grade 2, homework will largely consist of playing games and family activities such as baking. There are also strict limits in the later years. Kids in Grade 7 and 8 will get no more than one hour a day across all subjects, high-schoolers a maximum of two. The Toronto School Board’s aim is to shift the emphasis from quantity to quality. As well as cutting the hours, that means making sure homework assignments are clear, purposeful and engaging rather than just box-ticking busy-work.

There is much to applaud here. In schools around the world, homework has become a millstone slung around the neck of teachers, pupils and parents. Yet research shows that it is of limited value up to the age of 11. Even for older children homework is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Some experts think is should be abolished altogether. If it is to have any hope of being useful, homework must be assigned in reasonable amounts to avoid crowding out time for rest, play, and socializing. It also needs a clear purpose beyond keeping kids busy. More and more books are making this point. One of the most compelling isThe Case Against Homework, by Sara Bennett, who writes a splendid blog that has become a lightning rod in this debate. I also devote a chapter to homework in Under Pressure.

Much of that chapter explores how schools across the world are taking steps to free children from the tyranny of too much of the wrong kind of homework and finding that they learn better as a result. The bold change of heart in Toronto is just part of a larger trend that includes a recent decision by the Education Board of Shanghai, China to abolish homework for all first and second graders.

Of course, beyond the academic reasons for keeping homework on a tight rein lies the deeper question of what childhood is for. If we want it to be a time of play, freedom, and wonder, then piling on the homework is not the way to go about it. What are your happiest memories of childhood? I’ll bet they don’t involve slogging through pages of fractions and spelling lists. Mine are of long afternoons playing road hockey with friends in our driveway, and leaving the garage doors covered in a permanent Jackson Pollock of tennis-ball marks. Or war games in the backyard with elastic-band guns made from scraps of wood and bent coat hangers. Or playing Maze Craze, a battle game that we invented using Lego and marbles. Many of the boys with whom I shared those afternoons are still friends today. None of us can remember a single homework assignment.