What they don't teach you at the Australian Cricket Academy

A point worth making when it is obvious, because it will be quickly forgotten.

Cricket schools, and more generally, cricket systems, don't produce great cricket teams. They do produce good teams. The vital gap between good and great is, unfortunately, something that can't be taught at school.

The reason this is worth remembering is that the Australian cricket system, including the Australian Cricket Academy, got a lot of credit for Australia's domination of world cricket through the 90s and the early 2000s. Even at this dark moment for Australia, when the talent cupboard is looking bare, the system is working as well as it ever was.

The system - the ACA, the first class structure, grade cricket, schools cricket, talent scouts, sports science, the whole shebang - just ensures that Australian cricket is competitive, that standards never go into free fall like in the Windies. The Aussie system is very good, but not fundamentally different from the cricket systems in England, India or South Africa.

What made the Border-Taylor-Waugh cricketing dynasty was not the Aussie system, but a bunch of exceptional players.

What is right about Indian education?

My friends and family in India are in a state of perpetual despair about our education system. The system does not even attempt to develop creativity, or critical reasoning, or the love of learning, or emotional intelligence. These are things we all want. Some good friends of mine are doing superb work to try and invigourate the system. But the fact remains that the system teaches students to learn by rote, to "crack" exams.

Yet, despite this depressing unidimensional approach, one can't help but notice that the products of this flawed system generally do OK. Certainly, compared the products of other national systems, and better than the prevailing despair might suggest. Why?

Lord William Henry Beveridge, born in Rangpur, Bengal, to an ICS officer in 1879, quoted here here in the Times, may have a clue. In his report on Social Insurance and Allied Services, submitted to the Government of Winston Churchill in 1942, he notes that:

“Most men who have once gained the habit of work would rather work... than be idle... "

Extrapolating a bit, teenagers who have worked their tails off to get 97% in their board exams have surely gained the habit of hard work. Ditto for the brutally competitive entrance exams which serve as gatekeepers to most walks of Indian life. The same habit of hard work has been installed in ten times that number who slaved away for assorted entrance exams and didn't get accepted. They Indian educational system may be very good at giving kids a tough work ethic.

This may also provide a clue to another puzzle. Why do jocks, serious sportsmen, do much better than their CGPAs suggest? Maybe because they have developed a tough work ethic?

What's special about Cambridge?

"My classmates from Cambridge believed the sky was their limit. And they were willing to work their tails off to reach that limit. My classmates from the University of Birmingham believed they would get what they deserved. And they waited for their just rewards to come to them."

This comment by a colleague who attended undergraduate programs at both Cambridge and the U of Birmingham. The context was a bunch of friends from work at the pub on a summer evening talking about what they got out of an education.

This comment cuts deep. I heard it last summer and it's still in easy-access memory. The start of the recruiting season just brought it to the top of my mind.

The most talked about and researched aspects of an elite education are selection, training and access. Yet, quite possibly, the most important value derived from an education is in shaping these deeply-held, pre-cognitive notions of identity and destiny. These deeply-held notions of self are what shape behaviour, and therefore learning, and therefore achievement.

A sense of one's identity and destiny need not come from education. But the only equally powerful source of that sense of self, of that source of integrity, is probably family.

Structured Thinking and Writing Resources

Reference books I want on the desk of every person who attends my class on Structured Thinking and Writing:

1. The Pyramid Principle, by Barbard Minto
2. The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White
3. How to Lie With Charts, by Gerald Everett Jones
4. Say it With Presentations, by Gene Zelazny
5. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte.

When does real learning happen?

Should reference books be in libraries? Or should they be lying around on desk tops and cabinets, within casual stretching distance of where people sit when they work?

I'm debating this exact point with the HR department of the company I work for. I teach a course of business writing. I want my students to leave my class with a set of reference books that they can dip into when wrestling with a complex story. My belief is that this is when the real learning will happen.

HR wants me to put these books in the corporate library. Of course, a student who is serious about writing well could go to the library and check the book out. But the likelihood that a student will do this when wrestling with a real problem is low. So even the serious student will check the book out, flip through it, and put it back in the library without really internalizing any learning.

There's a pretty deep point here. People are receptive to learning at those moments when they most need to the information. The task of the teacher is make that information accessible at those moments. And ideally, to create those precious high-pressure moments when the student is receptive to learning.