Schools as Restaurants. Yum. (Bolman and Dean)

If you want to know what Harvard Graduate school of Education is like, read my blog.  Many insights or articles I share are directly from or related to the course work I am currently involved in at Harvard.

One book we're reading this year is called Reframing Organizations:  Artistry, Choice, and Leadership by Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal.  The book explains the four 'frames' people use to understand organizations.  Any organization.  A fortune 500 company, a restaurant, a publishing house, a homeless shelter, or a school.  The four frames are structural, human resources, political, and symbolic.  I want to focus on the latter for a moment: the symbolic frame.

Last night I was watching Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, and he was visiting the world's former best restaurant.  El Bulli.  It's an avant guarde place on the coast of Spain, miles and miles from any major city.  Yet its notoriety is unmatched.  I watched the show as Anthony sat down, and ate a meal with the owner; Anthony's eyes rolling into the back of his skull each time he took a bite or a slurp of one of the exquisitely prepared tapas.  When the meal was over, Anthony pronounced that he had just finished the best meal of his life.

But was it?

How can someone compare one meal to another so definitively?  Different chefs prefer cooking with different ingredients, and preparing completely different varieties of food.  How can El Bulli's boiled baby octopus be conclusively superior to Memphis' Central BBQ pork nachos?  They're two irreconcilably differing dishes.  Both are delicious in their own right, in their own venue.

Likewise, looking at schools through the symbolic framework of a restaurant (Bolman and Deal's 'symbolic lens') we see something similar.  Teachers are the chefs.  Kids are meals the chef's create.  Each meal is going to be unique, incomparable (mostly) from one dish to the next, depending on the restaurant's specialty.  Should then a patron come to my restaurant, order a foie gras plate and make a declarative comparison between it to the general tso's chicken she ate yesterday in China Town?  That wouldn't really make sense.  You're talking about two different meals. 

This symbolic framework, of looking at children like meals (I know...it sounds bad.  Little too Hannibalish) makes a lot of sense in a society that basically compares all kids using one test.  Alternatives should be provided.  Some kids are Chinese (metaphorically speaking), and some are Cajun (again, metaphorically speaking).  They are prepared with different ingredients, and serve a unique purpose.