Scientific Revolution, Fitness Revolution...Education Revolution?

CrossFit founder Greg Glassman made some waves (and enemies, no doubt) when he wrote about his befuddlement at Outside magazine calling Mark Allen, then the world's best triathlete, the fittest man alive and putting him on its cover.

Glassman argued that the cover's claim was absurd. Instead, he averred, Simon Poelman, a seven-time New Zealand national decathlon champion, was fitter. Glassman thought that Poelman was a better model for fitness because he, like Allen, had plenty of endurance and stamina "yet crushes Mr. Allen in any comparison that includes strength, power, speed, and coordination.”

brian mackenzie

brian mackenzie on Fitness

Author and noted CrossFitter brian mackenzie recently had the opportunity to interview Mark Allen and wrote this about the exchange, "FWIW, Mark Allen says he makes sure he is surfing and in the gym every week, lifting, not logging miles. Let that resonate if it bothers you before you defensively react to it. Mark Allen prefers to lift now rather than log miles for health and fitness. Mark Allen."

So, now, even the guy who was the paragon of long distances is mixing things up. That's what Thomas Kuhn's acolytes (and MBAs who were fed his ideas 30 years later) would call a paradigm shift.

Ben Franklin on Education

Long before Kuhn wrote his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Benjamin Franklin wrote a pamphlet that ushered in an even more impressive change in people's practice. 

Ben Franklin's Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania.

Franklin's treatise Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania was revolutionary. Franklin had a simple thought: why not teach people the stuff they'd need to do the jobs they'd get upon graduation: "Things that are likely to be the most useful and most ornamental, Regard being had to the several Professions for which they are intended."

Doesn't seem groundbreaking, much less revolutionary. In fact, it seems obvious. But Franklin's pragmatism was a significant departure from the education then offered. So significant, in fact, that the guy who ran the university Franklin founded quit doing it! Here's how the University of Pennsylvania's current website explains it:

Franklin's educational aims –- to train young people for leadership in business, government and public service -– were innovative for the time. In the 1750s, the other Colonial American colleges educated young men for the Christian ministry, but Franklin's proposed program of study was much more like the modern liberal arts curriculum. His fellow trustees were unwilling to implement most of his ideas, and Penn's first provost, the Rev. Dr. William Smith, soon turned the curriculum back into traditional channels. 

Franklin's picture adorns the $100 bill. Coincidence?

Charlie Munger on Multidisciplinary Education

Charlie Munger loves Ben Franklin. And he has adopted and amplified his hero's call for a multidisciplinary education. He argues against the intellectual specialist in favor of a broader, more general cognitive fitness or general intellectual preparedness. Munger's brand of thinking produces cognitive decathletes rather than triathletes.  

He thinks that to be smart, one must have models in her head. And one isn't enough, because reality requires more. That why we make fun of the guy who can bench press 500 pounds but can't run 500 meters or throw a baseball 50 feet. Munger cites the old addage: "To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." 

He thinks that much education is insufficiently multidisciplinary, and the result is that we produce the cognitive equivalent of chiropractors instead of doctors. Just as Glassman thinks traditional fitness routines had been producing too many triathletes and not enough decathletes.

And Munger thinks that's a "perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world." So, just as CrossFit requires people to be able to perform across a broad range of physical activities, Munger requires people to be able to think using multiple mental models. 

"And the models have to come from multiple disciplines—because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That's why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don't have enough models in their heads. So you've got to have models across a fair array of disciplines." 

Did Ben Franklin Invent CrossFit?

Franklin in his 1749 treatise, by the way, not only provides a nice template for Munger's multidisciplinary 'mental models' approach to education, but a template for Glassman's functional fitness program as well. One of the most important, and my favorite, parts of the CrossFit charter is this: regularly learn and play new sports. Here's Franklin circa 1749:

Ben Franklin: Founding Father...of CrossFit?