The school research lead : Do you work in a 'stupid' school?

The school research lead and do you work in a ‘stupid’ school?

Schools are full of bright people.  Unfortunately, many of our schools have become vehicles for stupidity.  Bright teachers stop thinking and start doing really stupid things, such as they stop asking challenging questions.  Now, this might make perfect sense for the individual teacher and make the school a tolerable working environment, though in the long-term will be a complete disaster for both the individual teacher and the school.  So in this post we will look at the work of(Alvesson and Spicer, 2016) and examine what is meant by the term ‘functional stupidity’.  We will then briefly go onto examine how functional stupidity comes about.  Finally, we will consider what you as an evidence-based school leader can do to counter the development of functional stupidity within your school.

What do we mean by functional stupidity?

(Alvesson and Spicer, 2016) states:

Functional stupidity is the inclination to reduce one’s scope of thinking and focus only on the narrow technical aspects of the job.  You do the job correctly, but without reflecting on the purpose or the wider context.  Functional stupidity is an organised attempt to stop people thinking seriously about what they do at work.  When people are seized by functional stupidity, they remain capable of doing the job, but they stop asking searching questions about their work.  In place of rigorous reflection, they become obsessed with superficial appearances.  Instead of asking questions, they start to obey commands.  Rather than thinking about outcomes, they focus on techniques for getting things done.  And the thing to be done is to create the right impression. Someone in the thrall of functional stupidity is great at doing things that looks good (p8-9)

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