The Kremlinology of Education

Just because a thing exists, doesn’t mean it has to.

I caught this recent episode of the “Every Little Thing” podcast which covered the mysterious numbers that live on pasta boxes. What is the meaning of these denotations?

For a moment, try to avoid listening and see if you can think up a possible list of reasons for these universal pasta box accoutrements. It shouldn’t be hard to come up with 3–5 possible meanings off the top of your head. If you want bonus points, try to get more then 10. Then, when you’re ready, listen to the episode, or scroll down below to find out the real reason.

Spoiler Below. Proceed with Caution

You have been fairly warned

The real answer is…nothing. There is no significance to the numbers on pasta boxes outside of historical precedence, product design habit, and the whims of pasta-mongers. They could disappear tomorrow, and your cavatappi would remain unchanged.

But I bet you came up with plenty of reasons other than the real one.

This tendency to come up with reasons for things when they might not actually exist has a few different names. If you want to be fancy about it, it’s a type of false-cause fallacy. If you’d prefer to go with something a bit more snappy, it’s similar to the Kremlinology that was common during the Cold War wherein the relative positions of Soviet leadership in publicity photos was a significant “information” source for determining what was occurring within the Russian government*. Whatever you want to call it, there’s a lot of it in education.

Fundamentally this type of flawed reasoning results from disparities in the information available to stakeholders at different levels of the organization. Administrative decisions that seem suboptimal or even arbitrary to a teacher might appear that way just because the teacher does not have access to all of the information that went into making the decision. This is similar to the warped perceptions of teaching that are seen among students**. Your brain has evolved to do the best it can with the information available to it. But that doesn’t mean that its best is going to be all that good if it is operating on a shortage of data. Philosophically, we should acknowledge that this is an inescapable part of existing as a part of a complex system. Practically, it means that we should always be careful when forming conclusions. Even if you are fortunate enough to have a relatively full, accurate picture of the information-scape informing a decision, you should always be mindful that you can never have all of the information.

Cautions noted, it would be disingenuous to pretend like there are not plenty of things in schools that are not the equivalents of the numbers on pasta boxes: Things without reasons. Things that exist just because they always have. When you find these things, and you verify that they are, in fact, these things, it’s a good idea to explicitly identify them as such. Not so much because they need to be done away with, but because if you keep them to yourself, you might well wind up contributing to the very type of false-cause thinking that you are trying to avoid (I assume here that you are interested in trying to avoid false-cause thinking). If you don’t take the time to delineate the things that have rationales from those that don’t, you risk moving away from a place of reason, into a realm of superstition and cargo cults. That doesn’t seem like a place where educators should want to be. You’re not selling pasta, you’re teaching kids.

* I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that this type of analysis had decidedly mixed results for determining the actual reality of Soviet policy.

** There are so many lovely examples of this kind of thinking by students: Teachers sleeping at school. Teachers not having lives. The faculty room as a place of comfort and luxury. The list goes on and on.

Thanks for reading. Do you have any interesting examples of Kremlinology from your own experience? Maybe you want to take a stand for tradition for its own sake? Drop me a line if you’d like to let me know your thoughts. If you’ve found something of value here, consider supporting the site.