Speaker A
I'll let you have acne. I said reality does not consist of a problem or problems. Problems are to reality what atoms are to tables. You experience tables, not atoms. An atom is a concept which is obtained by abstraction from reality.
Russell Ackoff discusses the nature of problems, messes, and creativity in education, emphasizing systems thinking and real-world problem solving.
Key Takeaways
- Reality consists of interconnected problems (messes), not isolated problems.
- Education should teach how to manage messes, not just solve individual problems.
- Creativity is killed by expecting predetermined answers in education.
- Understanding and removing incorrect assumptions is key to solving puzzles and problems.
- Real-world problem solving requires a different methodology than traditional schooling.
Summary
- Problems are abstractions derived from reality, which consists of interconnected systems of problems called messes.
- Traditional education focuses on solving isolated problems rather than managing complex messes.
- Students are taught to answer questions with expected answers, which stifles creativity.
- Ackoff shares a personal story about helping his daughter with the nine-dot puzzle to illustrate problem-solving challenges.
- A puzzle is defined as a problem with an incorrectly assumed constraint that must be removed to find a solution.
- Real-world problem solving requires formulating and managing messes, not just answering questions.
- The educational system fails to teach mess management and creative problem solving.
- Ackoff critiques the way exams encourage students to find expected answers rather than think creatively.
- The nine-dot puzzle example highlights the importance of questioning assumptions to solve problems.
- Effective learning involves understanding the nature of problems and the context in which they exist.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Problem is an abstraction extracted from reality by analysis. What's reality? Reality are systems of problems, problems which are intimately interrelated and interacting. And therefore, if you take reality and by analysis separate it out into individual problems and then solve each
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problem taken separately, what do you know about what you've done? The reality you haven't treated as effectively as possible. What we have to do is learn how to treat systems of problems, not problems taken separately, and that's an entirely different
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methodology than what we teach in school. By the way, there's a technical term for a system of problems called a mess. Therefore, we ought to be teaching people how to engage in the management of messes or mess management.
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Do you have a school for that? Problems are abstractions and we don't let kids know that. We treat it as though the reality. So look at the sequence: reality is a mess, which is a system of problems. Abstract out of that
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the elements, we get a problem, so it's unreal. Now we take away from the problem the information needed to formulate it and give it to a kid and ask them to solve it. That's an exercise. Then you take away the reason for
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wanting to solve it. You don't tell them why it's important to do and just say it's a question. Answer it. And that becomes a question. What education is about is how to answer questions, not how to solve messes. But the real
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world is about how the hell to formulate a mess so you can do something about it, not how to answer questions. But even here we pull an abomination. When you got an examination in school and you read the questions,
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your first thing that you did was ask yourself a question. Do you remember the question that you asked yourself? You might not want to admit it. What answer does the examiner expect? Right? The question was, and what's the answer?
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The question is, what answer does the examiner expect? Now there's one thing you can be absolutely sure of: if you give somebody the answer they expect, it can't be creative because it's already known. We kill creativity by teaching kids to give the answer that
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we expect. Let me tell you one final story which got me so furious that I've been writing about it for the last 25 years. I have three children: the son is the oldest and two daughters. At a time when my middle daughter, who's
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now in her 30s, was 13 years old, I came home from work one night and she greeted me in the little family room that I came through from outside. And after that, I said, Daddy, I've got a problem for homework tonight, mathematics
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I can't solve. Do you think you could help me? Immediately after a class, after supper, I said sure. So after supper, I forgot all about it, went in my study, which was right next door to the family room with a connecting door.
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Door was closed and I went to work. After I've been working about a half hour, she came in and stood beside the desk and I looked up and I said, What's the matter, Karen? She said, Remember you said you're going
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to help me with the problem? I said, Oh yeah, I forgot all about it. Okay, get the problem and bring it in, showing my impatience. So she got nervous around the other room and she brought me a typewritten sheet of paper which had
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the nine-dot problem on it. Okay, it had the nine dots at the top of the paper. You must all remember this problem. And that typewritten instructions, it says, Take a pen or pencil and put it on one
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of the nine dots and without lifting your pen or pencil from the paper, draw four straight lines that will cover all nine dots. I look at it. Oh my God, Karen, I did this when I was a kid. She said, Fine, just show
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me the answer. I said, I don't remember the answer, but only take me a minute to find out. So I said, First I better find out what the problem is. I don't remember. So I said, One, two, three, four,
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and there's an uncovered dot. So I said, Well, it's got a trick. It must be that you have to have two diagonals. So I then got started with one diagonal, two diagonals, four, and now I made progress because I had two dots.
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Now I fiddled around for about five minutes and I couldn't find the solution. Got impatient and I said, Look, you said it's an extra credit problem, so it's not important. I got a hell of a lot of work
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to do. Why don't you forget about it? She grabbed a sheet of paper out from in front of me, walked out indignantly in the room saying audibly as she left, "And you're supposed to be a university professor." She sat, went down into the next room, the
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family room with the connecting door open, and I went back to work. A few minutes later, I could hear her crying next door. Now it's very hard for me to work with a 13-year-old crying next door, so I got up
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and walked in and I said, What's the matter now, Karen? She said, I'm ashamed to go to school without a solution to that problem. And then I stopped and I realized how important it was to her. I said, Okay, I'm
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sorry. Come back and this time we'll make a real effort. Wow, she very skeptically got up with a sheet of paper sniffling. I took a sheet of paper with her, walked back into our room. I sat her down across the desk from
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me, stood up behind the desk, and cleared it ceremoniously to show her that I really meant it. I was standing here with this sheet of paper in my hand like this. I said, Karen, is this a puzzle or a
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problem? She said, I think it's a puzzle. I said, That's right, it is a puzzle. So what's the difference between a puzzle and a problem? She said, I don't know. I said, Well, try. She said, A puzzle is harder than a problem. I said,
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No. So there are lots of problems we can't solve and nothing is harder than that. So it's not hardness. She said, Well, maybe it's a puzzle has only one answer and a problem... A puzzle has only one answer
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and problems have lots of votes. I said, No, there are many puzzles that have lots of answers and many problems that have only one. She shook herself a little bit and said, Well, I guess I don't know.
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I said, Okay, it's one of the few things I do know. A puzzle is a problem that you cannot solve because of something that you incorrectly assume. That's why a puzzle always has a trick. The trick is to recognize the
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incorrectly imposed constraint, remove it, and the solution is obvious. That's why when you're shown the solution to a puzzle you couldn't solve, you always feel like a fool, right? So I'm standing there waving this sheet of paper. I said, The reason I can't solve this
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thing is I'm making some stupid assumption. I looked at my hand. I said, Oh my God, okay, Karen, here's the solution. I took this sheet of paper and did this to it. Let me put this down. Okay, I'm doing it roughly here so you can get
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an idea, like a felt-tip tone. She was delighted. Okay, she grabbed for the... She said, Wait a minute. She said, What's the matter? I said, We can do it with one line. She said, No, no, no, the problem is four
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lines. I said, Now look, you made me stop my work to show you how to do a four line, so you stop your work while I show you how to do it with one. Well, she showed no interest, but she stood there and I took
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the sheet and now I did this. Okay, then drew one line across and of course what came out was this. She grabbed the sheet and ran off before I tried anything else. I got back to work and that was the end
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of that. Now the next night when I came home, I came in through the same room and by sure chance she was there alone again. My other two kids were out. This time she didn't look up and she
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didn't say hello to me. I knew something was wrong, so I said there a minute. I said, Hello, Karen. And she grunted at me without looking up. I said, What's the matter? She said, Nothing. I said, All right, come on, tell me what
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happened in class. She said, With what? I said, With the nine-dot problem. Oh, she said, I don't want to talk about it. I said, Why not? She said, You're gonna get mad. I said, Yep, I probably will,
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but I won't m...
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this problem she said about six of us raised our hands so she called on one of the other girls in the class and there should come in front of the room and show the class the solution and what the other girl did was this
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[Applause] she showed me one two three one two three i said oh my god that's a solution i used to know when i was a kid you see the assumption is you can't go outside the square i didn't tell you you
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couldn't anymore i told you you couldn't fold the paper the fact later when i told my six-year-old daughter about this she said why don't you get a great big fat pen and do it with a dot so i said what happened she said the
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teacher congratulated the girl said that's right and told her to sit down and started to talk about something else i said what'd you do she said i raised my hand and the teacher stopped and said what's the matter karen
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and i said i have a different solution to that problem he just said don't be silly karen there's only one solution you've seen it now don't interrupt the class so i said what'd you do she said i waited a minute i raised my hand again
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the teacher said karen are you going to talk about that problem anymore because if you are i'm going to punish you i said what'd you do she said i said miss so-and-so i'm really very sorry i don't want to make you married but i
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really do have a different solution to the problem and i know i do because my father showed it to me and he's a university professor teacher said karen i don't care who your father is that problem has one solution have you
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seen it now you stop interfering if you do it again i'm going to put you out of the room so i said what did you do karen she said i waited a minute and raised my hand teacher stopped she said she was really
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mad she said what is it now karen and i said miss don so i really am very sorry but i really do have another solution and furthermore i can do it with one line well at this point the class came apart
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because now the kids couldn't believe it the kids were involved one line the teacher was embarrassed she didn't know what to do the kids obviously wanted to see this thing so the teacher said all right karen if you want to make
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a fool of yourself come to the front of the room and show the class the solution on the blackboard my daughter said i'm sorry miss so-and-so i can't do it on a blackboard i need an easel and a pad of paper and
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the teacher said why she said i can't explain to you but if you let me have an easel and a pad i'll show you teacher was furious went to the closet got an easel and pad brought it out and
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my daughter got in front of it very carefully through the nine dots then she took the paper up like this just like this you got in the fall wait a minute what are you doing she said i'm folding the paper
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teacher said you can't do that my daughter said why not the instructions didn't say i couldn't and then the teacher said i don't care what the instructions said that's what i meant now you sit down and incredible that daughter
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that year gave me a birthday present it was a book called 1010 solutions to the nine dot problem [Music] god have you ever read jules henry culture against man he talks about the massacre of infants in the school system how through
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education we destroy the capacity of people to think what we teach them he said is to think the way we want them to think not to think we destroy creativity every once in a while it breaks through and is just marvelous i had a wonderful
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experience this year i got tired of reading lousy handwriting so in my introductory course at the graduate level this year i gave them a typewritten set of instructions and when your paper comes in this year i want a double-spaced
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on a typewriter double spaced typing on eight and a half by eleven clear white paper with margins of one inch on all sides plus or minus no more than an eighth of an inch i said is that clear they said yes
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the papers came in they were all exactly what i wanted except one one of them came in tight this way [Music] the end of the paper he said aha i got you didn't i i gave that kid an a in the course and
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told him he could skip the rest of it but i told the rest of the class you try it your flunk because it's no longer creative okay have a shot at it go ahead i can go on talking about education
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indefinitely but uh what happens if the tuition keeps on going higher and higher how can we accommodate a small group of people and educate a small group level to get away from this mass production method aren't we constrained economically
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spending practically now ideally we should all go to a very small group and and do the kind of things that you indicated but how how are we going to see the assumption is we start with the normal arithmetic
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you got a teacher for every 20 students now now you're talking about small groups of 8 to 10 students so you need twice as many teachers but just look at the assumptions that are based in that first of all you're
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assuming that a teacher is always present right i don't mean use particularly because this is a very common question that a teacher has a fixed teaching load and you have a whole set of assumptions which if you turn over removes the
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problem right in our program we have no courses and no curriculum every student designs his own education when he comes in and he has to get approval by a faculty committee but he designs it okay we determine when he's ready
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to get the degree by what he has done not by examination he organizes cells he can learn on his own he can attend courses you can do it any way he wants to he can put together any combination of
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pedagogical tools he wants to we have the highest ratio of students to faculty of any graduate department in the school and the largest phd program at the university of pennsylvania it's not a matter of ratios it's a matter of structuring the system
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i spend three quarters of my time in research it's research done under contract with the university of pennsylvania and i have 30 students working on that research with me they learn a hell of a lot more out of working with me on those problems
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they do out of classes they fight to get the right to do that i don't have to have them in a course for them to learn something let me tell you a story an absolutely true story i had a student about five
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years a little more than five years ago bob court brightest holy hell we had just completed some work on alcoholism we have developed a theory a psychodynamic theory to explain alcoholism and for its treatment we had tested it and it worked
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we were very excited he came in he said damn he said that's marvelous stuff he said you know i think it would work on narcotics i said yeah that's interesting i think it would too but it would need some
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adaptation on drugs he said is it all right if i try to develop a project in that area i said well huh what are you going to do see the our work in alcoholism was supported by a company that makes alcoholic
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beverages he said well i'd like to try to write a proposal of some kind and submit it to the government i said fine that's great but what's the problem he said i don't know anything about narcotics i said well how
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long do you think it'll take you he said a couple of months so we got enough money around i'll support you for three months so for three months he disappeared i didn't see him came back three months later with a
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proposal that he had written it was submitted to nih national institute of health and he got a 350 000 grant to do the study the student but that's not the interesting part the medical school invited him to give a
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course to doctors on a treatment of narcotic addiction three months he was a leading expert on the subject in the university nobody had told him a damn thing god we just don't exploit the capacity of people to learn we insist on teaching
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them that sometimes you have to i'm not saying you never teach but you only teach when somebody feels he needs it it really is an inefficient way of learning students get a grade you actually give a hard grade to a
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student at the end they don't get a grade in the normal sense they are graded by the other students by how good a teacher they are as i told you yeah when a guy makes a transfer from the
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university of pennsylvania for whatever reason into the south side that doesn't happen at the doctoral level do you have in any university credits at the doctoral level are non-transferable so it's not you've got the different kind of students out there you've got the ones
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that are self-starters thank you for asking somebody always says yeah you're the ivy league you have real bright students and so on we have done this in rural villages of mexico with illiterates and it works are they motivated
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i wish there were time to tell you but let me just tell you a little bit about mexico okay uh the last secretary of education in mexico fernandes salon is a very close personal friend we have worked together
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for many years he used to be secretary of the national university where i worked and then he moved into government and went up to various stages and became secretary of education when he became secretary of education he came out and we spent several days
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together and he said i really want to do something about education in mexico i don't know how i can do it he said let me describe the problem he said the mexican constitution guarantees an education of at least five
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years to every child in mexico he said only 50 percent of them get it he said i'm obligated to provide it to the other 50 but he said i don't have the money to build the schools and hire the teachers
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to go into some 15 000 villages that have no educational facilities and what can i do i said the first thing i do is stop thinking about conventional education because you can't do it you just told me you can
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so first of all let's eliminate a school right we're not going to have any school we'll use any space we can find the sakura which is the open square in the middle of town i happen to know i said most of these
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towns have unused jails why don't we use the jail or the town hall in every village has had a huge entrance lobby it's always bigger than the rest of the building so why don't we put classroom in the lobby
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of the building we don't care anywhere doesn't make a difference where we put it he said okay if we do that he said where are we going to get the teachers i said why don't you get a kid who's
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graduated from a high school in the nearest village bring him in and give him the job of teaching the kids in that village now what do you offer me sir i can't pay him very much he said well
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you pay him enough to live on but you guarantee him a college of ed education when he's done which is free in mexico so what you will do is provide him with a stipend so he can go to any university
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of mexico of his choice and have enough money to live until he gets his degree he teaches two years and then goes to university he said that's a hell of an interesting idea i'm gonna try it so he took 1 000 villages
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and he announced his intention of doing this thing he put out an ad and he got kids applying in the you know thousands the teachers got a hold of him the teacher's unit said what the hell are you trying to do
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and he had a national strike on his hand now that was a devastating strike because fernando solano would be president of mexico today if it hadn't been over that strike it's the largest union in mexico and they went out to get them because
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they said you're trying to destroy our profession he said to them if you're willing to go to those villages and teach for the amount that i'm going to pay those kids i'll be happy to use you and of course
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they refused he refused to give in and he eventually broke the strike he put the system in 1 000 villages now everybody was out to show that it was nonsense after two years the educational testing service was brought in
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and they gave standard aptitude tests to the kids in these 1 000 village schools against the kids at the same level in the school system in mexico city guadalajara monterey and silver there was no significant difference in their performance absolutely not
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today it's in 15 000 mexican villages we gotta break the bonds of our conception of how you have to do it you have to have a teacher hell now that one kid from high school comes into a village with a group of 30 students at
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all age levels he doesn't sit there lecturing to them he just helps them learn they provide them with materials and he's a resource that they use as they see fit yes are you encouraged by the partnerships in education that are screening up
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business not very much no the most encouraging thing i see is a very small number of corporations a number of them european that have gotten interested in education because of the recognition of the fact that they can no longer depend on
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universities in the public school system to provide the people they need in the future we now have in the united states the first two for-profit universities businesses that are set up as corporations and they're going to have to
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account for themselves they're going to have to be effective and productive in order to survive they are surviving very well right now the fact is that you know educational system just doesn't have to account for itself as i mentioned to you before the
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university professor in a major university teaches six hours a week it's incredible to consider that a workload especially when the course is the one he's taught 10 15 times before it's ridiculous our whole concept of work that's why i
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say a university is created to provide the faculty with the quality of work life at once it has nothing to do with the education of the students we arrange the student for our convenience just look at the scheduling
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of classes at the university you have more than 50 percent of the classes in the university are given on monday and wednesday less than five percent on friday and the rest tuesday thursday why is that got something to do with education
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hell no professors want to be able to take a long weekend that simple and on and on and on you can go show all the decisions that are made for the convenience of the faculty member i sat for a full year through faculty
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meetings and kept the record i recorded the meetings at the end of the year i pointed out that in eight faculty meetings the word student had never been mentioned not once i sat in meetings in the college of
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engineering of which i'm an adjunct member it's not my college is wharton for a whole year and kept a record they spent the whole year arguing about the details of required courses in the first year in my farewell session as a member of
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the faculty i got up and pointed out to them that the carnegie foundation report has shown that 65 percent of the graduate engineers do not practice engineering within five years of graduation what the hell were they arguing about what was required
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in a first course i said furthermore the carnegie report says the 50 of what they learn is no longer valid within five years after they graduate that it's nonsense to talk about what a student ought to learn what education ought to be about is the
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student learning how to learn and being motivated to do so what he learns is irrelevant it's going to be out of uh use i had a student ask me the other day he said dr a coffee said what was the
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last time you taught a course in the subject that you had when you were a student you know i hadn't thought about that one before and i had to think about you know what the answer turned out to be
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1951 34 years everything i have taught didn't exist when i was a student just didn't exist it's our capacity to learn that's important not what we learn but we keep acting as oh my god you really do have
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to know how to take the derivative of an equation mechanical no understanding we are in a process of incinerating brains just it's awful did you comment on teacher competency it's a big topic in alabama and florida well you say it's the wrong question
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we shouldn't have teachers so what's the point of talking about how competent they are i don't want to know how competent a person is as a teacher i want to know how confident he is as a facilitator of
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learning they're not the same thing they aren't the same thing at all i don't believe in teachers so all this stuff about rewarding for competency and teaching i would like to see rewards for competency and enabling people to learn
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there are some exciting schools there are marvelous experiments going around but the trouble is that nobody pays attention to them because it requires fundamental change in what they do if you look for example the american school in london what an incredible
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place eight classrooms one big area each one at a different level the kid in the fifth level is having a trouble with the problem he's just as likely to walk to a kid in the sixth level and ask him how to do it as he is
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to go to a teacher teachers sit in a little cell in the middle with these class groups around here the kids wandering all over the damn place learning like mad and excited and having a marvelous time while they do it and
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i've never walked into that room and seen a teacher at the front of the class telling them something but they're constantly learning the oak lane day school in philadelphia run by a friend of mine and after listening to me go on this way
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decide in one year to have the second grade students teach the first the third grade students teach the second and so on up to the top had a marvelous year the kids thought it was the greatest year they've ever had
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and then they got a new headmaster and they changed it all because they were afraid they wouldn't get accredited by doing it that way in fact the kids were learning didn't matter yes please the idea of the people in mexico sending
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them to the university i'm sorry going the people that spent two years in mexico teaching you know i mean constructing facility whatever you said the reward the reward was they would be supported while they went to a university now they
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don't have to pay tuition to the university so you don't have to offer them that but the kids from the village couldn't afford to live in the city in which the university was located so what he got was a a subsidy for
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living a stipend otherwise he couldn't have gone to a college so is the university and that those terms treated still as a source of storage of knowledge well you know university is the worst of all well because they want to the fact is
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that going to the university doesn't educate them but it gives them access to situations in which they can get educated in which they can learn can i tell you a little story about university design yeah when echovaria was president of mexico
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when he was inaugurated he made a promise to the mexican public that by the end of his presidency which is six years every graduate of high school in mexico would have an opportunity to go to a university that was his commitment
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uh about one year before the end of his term only about 50 percent of the applicants from high school graduates were getting into universities there wasn't enough room now the university of mexico the national university of mexico is
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actually the national autonomous university of mexico uno is the second largest university in the world 125 000 students it's in mexico city he called director of the university was a man by the name of soberan at the time
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it said i'm in a hole i've only got a year to go and i've made this commitment i'm getting political pressure only what i want you to do within the next six months is build and open five new campuses
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each one to accommodate thirty thousand students how do you like that for a job build from scratch on open fields five new university campuses each to accommodate 30 000 students that's bigger than the university of pennsylvania or harvard or yale
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five of them now it turned out to be marvelous why we only had five months to do it in total there wasn't time to consult the faculty so sober on declared an emergency set up a planning group and said you go ahead
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and we gotta do it however it comes out and that's an incredible circumstance we didn't have to get faculty approval on anything show you what was done he said lewis i've only got one educational idea i want to impose on a
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design i want to get rid of disciplines departments he said i want to organize knowledge in the four categories he said the language of humanities and science two categories the message of the humanities and services then he took us through all the
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subjects normally taught and showed us how he fell in these categories for example statistics will be part of the methods of science uh learning uh history would be a part historiography would be the methods of humanities and so on
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so that's the only thing i went on now let me show you the university that was designed it was a three-year curriculum because that's what it takes to get a bachelor's degree in mexico and each semester a student takes
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one course from each of these four areas plus a fifth course that i'll explain in a moment the university was designed in the following way there's a block of offices you enter this room here and there were five offices one two
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three four five and each one in this office was one member of the faculty from the language of the humanities and this one one from the language of science and so on so there are four faculty members one from
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each of the four divisions another secretary in the middle and this is a conference room on each side of this room is a classroom and that classroom belongs to those four instructors okay now what a student did is he signed up
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with the seller for faculty members they took the courses that they gave and the fifth thing was he took a seminar from the four of them jointly working on a problem of national development that was real so every curriculum every
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year consisted of five courses one in each of the four divisions plus the one on a real development problem in mexico this turned out to be a perfect balance two classrooms from one group of four and that belonged to
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them that was their space for the year this group of faculty could reorganize himself at the end of each year it wasn't a permanent arrangement there were no departments five of these cells constituted an administrative unit or 20 people
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and they had a chairman and they were simply grouped now there was something called the physics department but i had nothing to do with any of this it was a club the physicists who wanted to get together and talk
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physics could but it had no relationship to the curriculum or anything else well next thing in mexico they run the school system like we do two semesters and the summer off why because we do why do we do it
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because the summer is hot and it's a nice time to vacation so we give the summer often have the kids go to school during the lousy time of the year remember university started in the northeast not out in the sun belt
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so we said that's nonsense the weather is absolutely uniform through most of the year in mexico so let's divide the year into trimesters first trimester second and third let's take first year second year and third year okay we said a student will come into this
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university they'll take classes the first semester classes is semes second semester and then he'll go into work in a organization government or private that's related to the field of his interests so he's going to work out here in a company it's a cooperative program
Speaker A
in the second year we'll take classes work and take classes third year he will work take classes and classes now two very important things happen first of all we could go out to government agencies and companies and say we want you to take
Speaker A
ex-students to work here but unlike any other cooperative program you will always have the same number of students here you're not going to have a bunch during the summer and then the rest of the time furthermore you won't have to waste any
Speaker A
time training them because we'll have the second year students train the first year students we'll have the third year students train the second year students and that way they'll really learn what they're doing i had no trouble getting these
Speaker A
cooperative programs but something much more important happened how many students will be in the university at a time two-thirds therefore we built facilities that are third less the cost than they expected to pay because we built it for
Speaker A
only two-thirds of students those five campuses exist today and the university of mexico considers it to be their their stars well it was done under a great rush under tremendous pressure in the rest of it but i only give it to you to give an
Speaker A
indication of how unbound we really are by the existing system if we don't depart from it very much is because we don't want to or we're afraid to not because it can't be done any other questions well if not i'd like to bring it to a
Speaker A
close by telling you a story about one of my other children my son when he was about seven years old i got home one night and my wife said to me you're gonna have to talk to alan and punish him i said oh
Speaker A
my god what did he do now she said he hit karen karen is our daughter who was 17 months younger than my son and we're supposed to be a non-violent family and so that's a no-no and so i had to punish him this was a
Speaker A
division of labor between my wife and me she would find out what they did wrong and i would punish so i found him around i said alan i want to see you right after stop supper in my study
Speaker A
and he said okay he knew what it was about so after supper he came in and he sat across there wasn't taking it very seriously well i started to give him hell explain that violence is not a desirable thing
Speaker A
particularly against the weaker sex i had a lot of trouble extending this out because i had a great deal of sympathy with what he had done and after a little bit i paused and that was a serious mistake
Speaker A
because when i paused he immediately broke in and he asked me a question he said daddy do you know what the one skeleton in the closet said to the other now any parent with any sense would have ignored that and going on giving him
Speaker A
hell but i didn't what i said is no and he said the skeleton said if we had any guts we'd get out of here
Topics:Russell Ackoffsystems thinkingproblem solvingeducation critiquecreativitymessesnine-dot puzzlelearning methodologythinkingunderstanding
