How much can you remove from the school curriculum before the Jenga tower collapses

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 101

In the age of Google you don't need to know things any more, supposedly. Why memorise facts when you can google them? However, removing the memorising of knowledge from the school curriculum (and cancelling homework) is like playing Jenga Towers: how many bricks/blocks can you remove before it all collapses?

Clearly some Jenga towers with symmetrical holes are airy and beautiful. While solid siloed blocks without variation of the vertical layout pattern are unstable (rote learning). Yet, unless you start using an entirely different and novel material (e.g. composite or carbon fibre), you cannot reduce the number of bricks by more than 50%.

Woe betide those who learn too little, as their Jenga tower is bound to collapse. While the Tower of Babel collapsed because there was too much in it (diversity of languages), the Jenga of knowledge collapses when there is too little in it.

Jenga Tower (Source: Wikipedia)

Stealth mode among companies and animals: Crickets and spiders learn to lie low

Crickets give up chirping, spiders disguise as bird poo, companies slip under the radar to avoid corporate predators.
By George ILIEV

Two recent science stories exemplify the evolutionary importance of disguise:

1. Crickets vs. Killer flies
Crickets in Hawaii have lost their ability to chirp in order to avoid attracting the attention of killer flies, their North American predator, BBC Science reports. In less than 20 generations, a mutation in their wings (the chirp-producing organ) has spread to more than 90% of the crickets on the island of Kauai. As a result, the crickets are now unable to rub their wings and produce chirping sounds but in return they survive unnoticed by the killer flies.

2. Spiders vs. Wasps
Spiders in Taiwan have learnt to disguise themselves in a decor resembling bird excrement, Discovery News reports. The spiders drag onto their web a pile of desiccated insect bodies, eggs and plant detritus to make themselves resemble bird droppings and thus avoid the attention of predator wasps.

3. Stealth mode in the corporate world
Companies of all sizes use disguise to avoid the attention of powerful competitors. Apple and Google develop new products under code names and in secretive locations, while startups often spend years in "stealth mode" to slip under the radar of large competitors. The most fascinating recent example is Google X: Google's semi-secret facility in California where at least eight new technologies are being developed.

There is only one thing Google hasn't thought of: covering up the facility in bird poo.

The Google Campus in Mountain View, California 

(Photo: Wikipedia)