Scene 1: Entry to a classroom building. With a deafening noise he revved up the two-cycle engine on a blower preparing to clean the leaves, paper, and cigarette butts that had accumulated in the entryway. He made considerable progress herding the debris away from the building and down the sidewalk until cigarette butts lodged in the seams in the concrete. Turning, he blasted the miscreant trash at right angles, but this only blew the debris onto the grass, posing still greater difficulties. Moving cigarette butts and bits of paper in an orderly fashion through grass is a challenge, even for a machine capable of generating gale-force winds. Then the apparatus stalled out—“down time,” it’s called. In that moment of sweet silence, I walked over and inquired whether he thought a broom or rake might do as well. “What’d you say?” he responded. “Can’t hear anything, my ears are still ringing!” I repeated the question. “S’pose so,” he said, “but they think I’m more productive with this piece of *&!@.” Perhaps he is more productive. I do not know how experts calculate efficiency in complex cases like this. If, however, the goal is to disrupt public serenity, burn scarce fossil fuels, create a large amount of blue smoke, damage lung tissue, purchase expensive and failureprone equipment, frazzle nerves, interrupt conversations, and improve the market for hearing aids, rakes and brooms cannot compete. When the technology and the task at hand are poorly matched, however, there is no real efficiency. In such cases the result, in Amory Lovins’s telling phrase, is rather like “cutting butter with a chain saw.” Scene 2: Committee meeting. I once served on what is called with some extravagance the Educational Plans and Policies Committee. It is a committee to which one is elected, or sentenced, depending on your view. In one meeting we were casually asked to pronounce our blessing on a plan to link the entire campus so that everyone would be able to communicate with everyone else via computer, 24 hours a day, without leaving dormitory rooms or offices. This, we were told, was what our competitor colleges were doing. We were assured that this was the future.
Action Oriented Research in Education