A workshop presented at ACCS 2024
Show Outline with LinksIntroduction
When Christians are encouraged to “budget for” sin as they build institutions, we often think that the only threat we are talking about would be overt moral failures. A teacher is found to have a real porn problem, or you discover that the bookkeeper has been skimming some of the proceeds for herself. Now that kind of thing is obviously an issue, and you should certainly budget for it. There should be policies at the ready.
But if the doctrine of the fall informs us in all our institutional endeavors, we must also budget for other downstream consequences of the fall. It is not just evil we are contending with, but also stupidity. Now by this I mean morally culpable stupidity . . . the kind of stupidity that likes to think of itself as wise.
So you are not trying to establish a classical Christian school in a cave full of orcs, and that is good. But you may discover that you are attempting to do it on an island filled with Dufflepuds. And who knows? Perhaps you are the Chief Dufflepud. Always budget for that possibility as well.
The Third Law
We must always keep in mind the wisdom to be found in Robert Conquest’s third law—“the simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”
As you structure your school, whether it is at the board level, board/admin relations, or the admin and faculty, you need to leave room in the budget for overt sin, as just mentioned, and also for stupidity, and sometimes for both.
Just so you have the context, allow me to give you all three of Robert Conquest’s laws.
The first is: “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”
The second states: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”
And the third tells us this: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organizations is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”
Serious Send-Up Books
So I want to spend my time with you here commending a few books. They are satires, or send-up books, but they all have a serious point. If you take these serious points to heart, you are going to be well ahead of the game when it comes to managing your gang.
If your school is successful at all, it will grow. When it grows, it will become more complex. As it grows more complex, the need for organization, administration, and “systems” will become manifestly obvious.
Now because I am about to say some negative things about the temptations involved in all of this, I should begin by saying that there is nothing sinful about having your act together. There are people who are so disorganized that they couldn’t put together a two-car funeral, and that is certainly regrettable. And the Bible does speak positively about “administration,” so there must be a good way of doing it.
“And God has appointed these in the church: first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, administrations, varieties of tongues” (1 Corinthians 12:28).
And by “a good way of doing it,” I mean a way of proceeding that doesn’t ruin everything. This brings me in mind of a principle advanced by my son, Nate, who has maintained that in any meeting that goes for more than twenty minutes, someone will propose something which, if implemented, will wreck everything. And this also brings me in mind of Thomas Sowell’s great observation, which was that “people who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.”
One more quote, returning to where we began, and then I will get on to the theme promised in the title. Robert Conquest’s third law again:
“The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”
If this all seems pretty cynical, then allow me to recommend three books that will help keep this kind of cynicism flowing. You need to keep your cynicism limber. There is a kind of cynicism that is bitter and ungodly, and so of course I am not commending that. But there is another kind of cynicism that is bright and sunny, and is simply the result of having eyes in your head. If you are responsible for the governance of a school, these books represent realities that you will have to deal with on a daily basis.
The three books are written in a satiric voice, in the form of a spoof, but all of them merit and will repay serious reflection as well. If you mediate on them deeply, they will spare you a lot of grief.
The first is Parkinson’s Law, a bracingly cynical foray into management realities. The basic law is that work expands to fill the time allotted for it. In any large organization—which now includes your school, correct?—a distinction must be made between the work to be done, and the tasks which are not necessarily connected to the work to be done. These tasks burn as much daylight as any other work, but they do not contribute to the end result that the school exists to foster. Teaching kids math in a math class would be an example of the work to be done. A committee report submitted to the superintendent and which sits on his desk for two years, and took one year for the math faculty to produce would be an example of a disconnected task. Sometimes the people who are given the disconnected tasks are frustrated by it, but other times they find that this kind of work is kind of cozy. And the work expands to fill the time allotted for it. What was the deadline again?
Another place where this principle can be seen in action would be in board meetings that are three hours longer than they needed to be. If you budget four hours, you are going to fill up four hours. Discussion and debate fill up the time allotted, and sometimes a good deal more.
The second book is The Peter Principle, by Laurence Peter. This is the principle that shows how, with any organization that has promotions along a hierarchical structure, the end result will be individuals who get promoted past their level of competence. “In a hierarchy, every employee rises to the level of their own incompetence.”
A guy begins work at the company, and he does well. He is promoted out of the mail room. He does a good job there for a year or two, and is then promoted again. He will continue to be promoted—because he does a good job—until he is promoted into a slot where he is no longer able to do good work. He has been promoted past his level of competence. And of course, because he is no longer doing a good job, the promotions cease, and there he sits for the next twenty years. If he were promoted two or three times again, the results might be so disastrous that he gets fired. But what usually happens is that he stalls out into a tenured mediocrity. This is one of the ways entire organizations sink into mediocrity.
The third book is The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. Written by an Italian economist, Carlo Cipolla, it was published originally in English decades ago as sort of a stunt for friends and family. After a time, it was published in various languages elsewhere, and was only recently published again in English, the language it was originally published in. It has been an international bestseller for some time, as apparently a lot of people have needed to understand what was happening around them all the time.
The first law is that “always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.”
The second is: “The probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.” This is important for educators to keep in mind because the cohort you are hiring from is that of educated persons. This makes no difference. You are not thereby protected.
The third law gets to a definition. It says, “a stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.”
The fourth law states: “Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.”
The fifth and final law says that “a stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.” The reason for this, and for the previous law, is that there are no real defenses.
Going back to the third law, Cipolla breaks the options into four basic categories—an intelligent person, a helpless person, a bandit and a stupid person. The ones to watch out for would be the bandit and the stupid, but the first, fourth, and fifth laws say that you really need to be on your guard against the stupid primarily. This is because the bandit is at least following a plan and can be anticipated somewhat. His behavior is sinful, but there is a pattern to it. But there is no telling what the stupid person is going to do.
Conclusion
If you drop a book in a Christian school, it will fall to the floor in the same way as it would in a government school—at 9.8 meters per second squared. The difference between the schools does not lie how gravity works. In a Christian school, the students are taught that Jesus rose from the dead, and in the government school, they are not taught this. A key difference does lie there.
Do these books refer to the first scenario, or to the second? Do the principles promoted in these books only occur in schools run by non-believers? Does work expand to fill the time allotted for it in a Christian school? Yes, it does. Can a Christian school teacher get promoted to a point where he is in over his head? Well, yes. And, unfortunately, does the fact that it is a classical Christian school prevent the hiring of a stupid person? Alas, no. Look at the second law again.