“But Why?” Analysis

Golf is known as a game for big business executives to make deals while they play? What are the things that make it a perfect game for such things? Navin Kabra identified these for all the other GenWise instructors and myself at the Clover Greens Golf Course last Tuesday.

First of all, it is a slow sport. You hit a ball hundreds of metres away and then walk to it. All this walking is enough time to negotiate a deal. Secondly, it has no requirements of athleticism. A player of any level of fitness can play. Thirdly, it costs a lot. This means you are guaranteed successful people, so interaction with people of a lower economic class will be limited. Fourth, and most importantly, you are scored, not on how you did that game, but how you did, compared to all your other games. The handicap rule makes it so that you are playing based on your average score.

However interesting this is, it is not the most important thing about this observation. For me, the way this observation has been gleaned is the important thing. This is something I like to call “But Why?” analysis. The answer is found by asking the question “But Why?”

Golf is a great sport for executive networking. But why? There are multiple answers. For each answer, you ask the question “but why?” until you cannot. In this way, you reach the most fundamental rules of the workings of the world.

The best example of this analysis, again pointed out by instructor Navin Kabra, was in the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. In it, Diamond attempts to find the reasons of European colonialism. European countries had the most colonies. But why? Because there was a European presence in a lot of different countries. But why? Because they went to more countries for trading. But why? Because they had better ships. But why? And so on. Diamond came to the conclusion that the shape of the continent contributed to the rise of colonialism there. The reason for that is very complicated, so I will not go into it. What I want to discuss is how vital this is in children.

No school is teaching this kind of analysis. They simply give the children books, and tell them that the book holds the truth. Instead, this kind of questioning should be taught in schools. They should be taught, not who discovered the Gene, and what the formula for finding the area of a cylinder is, but to ask the correct questions.

Students my age simply do not ask questions for fear of being wrong. They would rather not learn than make a mistake. They need to be taught that mistakes are okay. The only way this happens is by not punishing mistakes.

But if you can’t punish mistakes, what do you punish? What do you test your students on?

Test the students on what they do with information given to them. Teach them to find their own information. Test the students on how they use the information they get by having them write pieces about their own opinions. Do not check whether or not the opinion is correct, but whether it is clear, and uses all the information at their disposal. If you punish mistakes, the children would rather not learn than make the mistakes, and that is absolutely unacceptable. But Why? Analysis is a perfect method of learning. This can be tested by seeing how deep a student has gone.

Rather than seeing what a student knows, test what they do with the things they know. That is what the world does, and is that not what schools are? Aren’t schools a place where children are taught about the real world?