The Red Ink of the Scribes

An Egyptian tablet with corrections in red ink inspires a reflection on assessing, training, and reassessing.

The red ink of the scribes

Series: What history already knew about talent · 4/6 · Upskilling and reskilling

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there is a wooden Egyptian tablet dating back nearly four thousand years. It is a writing tablet from the Middle Kingdom, dated between 1981 and 1802 BC, with the surface prepared with a layer of white plaster for writing on. The museum's record identifies it with the number 28.9.4 and explains what it contains: a model letter copied by a student, with the errors corrected in red ink, which the museum attributes to the teacher.

There are two more details in that record that I find extraordinary. The first is that the plaster surface could be whitened again to reuse the tablet, and that it retains remnants of a previous text beneath the current one. The second is that we do not know exactly where it comes from: the museum mentions Thebes or Akhmim.

That is all that the piece allows us to affirm. We do not know how long it took that student to improve, nor what he copied the next day, nor if he became a scribe. What we can see, with our own eyes and in a display case, is the exercise of a learner and the intervention of someone on his specific mistakes. Black and red.

Practice and correction

The tablet is not an isolated case. Centuries later, in Deir el-Medina, the village of the workers who excavated the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, thousands of fragments of limestone and pottery with texts have been found, the ostraca, and among them many school exercises. Annie Gasse's catalog of the literary ostraca from Deir el-Medina describes exercises of different levels, copies of classical texts such as the Kemit and the Instructions, and corrections that can be from the teacher or the student themselves.

With what we know, the training of an Egyptian scribe looked something like this: copying established texts, being corrected on the precise error, and copying again. The Satire of the Trades, a school text that lists the hardships of being a blacksmith, potter, barber, or farmer to conclude that there is no better profession than that of a scribe, humorously suggests that it was also necessary to convince the apprentices that the effort was worth it. Learning from their own highlighted mistakes is what the red ink documents. What it does not document, and I will not pretend that it does, is how the progress of each student was tracked over time or what criteria were used to decide that they were ready.

And yet, the minimum structure that the tablet shows is already more than what most corporate training plans have.

How we train

Look at how training is decided in most organizations.

At some point in the year, a plan is made. Managers are asked what their people need, and they respond with what they remember. People are asked what interests them, and they respond with what they feel like. It is crossed with the supplier's catalog and the budget, and a plan emerges: so many hours of this, so many of that, for everyone. It is executed. And at the end of the year, it is reported how many people have completed how many hours and what grade they gave the course.

In that circuit, there is no red ink.

There is no initial exercise: training occurs without knowing what sign each person is tracing incorrectly. There is no correction on the specific error: the same course for everyone, regardless of what each person lacks. And there is no second copy: attendance and satisfaction are recorded, which are the easiest to count and the least relevant. The Egyptian student of the tablet knew exactly where they had gone wrong. The employee who leaves a course, many times, does not.

The result is the phrase I hear most often in conversations with people directors: "we invest in training without knowing if it is having an impact." And the one that follows when the budget tightens: "I don’t know how to justify it."

What I propose

What follows is no longer Egypt. It is what I believe the red ink, taken to its consequence, demands from training in a company.

First, the text that must be copied: what the business will require in the coming months, from which roles, and what specific skills are behind it. Not in general; for this role, this level of this and that. Often the change comes from outside: a new product, an operation that is being digitized, a regulation that comes into effect.

Second, the first copy: where each person stands in relation to that, measured, not asked. Here appears the usual surprise. The real distance looks little like what managers had estimated. There are people who already master what was going to be included in the plan and people with gaps that no one had seen.

Third, the red: training in what is lacking for those who lack it. Not the same course for the entire staff, but the correction of the specific error. When the gap is concrete, training can be short: a good part of the skills that companies need to reinforce can be closed with well-directed hours, not with weeks.

And fourth, what the Metropolitan tablet only hints at with its whitened plaster and its previous text underneath: the second copy. Measure again with the same method. The only proof that someone has learned is that they now know how to do what they didn’t know before. That turns the training report into something else: not "we did four thousand hours," but "the team moved from this level to that one in these five skills, and these three people have not progressed and we need to see why."

What the stone cannot say

I would like to be able to say that the Egyptian scribes kept records of each student's exercises to track their progress. I cannot, because the sources do not say so: many ostraca from Deir el-Medina have been found in landfills, and a piece that has survived four thousand years does not prove that anyone kept it for that purpose.

But I can say what happens in companies: what someone learns in training stays in their head and, hopefully, in a certificate in their file. When the person changes positions or leaves, the knowledge goes with them and no one even knows what it was. Measuring after training is not only useful to justify the investment. It serves for the organization to know what it knows, and that map is what allows for movement, promotion, and planning.

At The Wise Skill, we build training like this: a gap opens when evidence shows a distance from the position, each gap comes with what closes it, and it only closes with evidence of the same type. Black, red, black again. But the question that changes everything needs no tools, just ask it the next time the training plan arrives.

Where is the red ink?

If there is a change in your team that requires capabilities they do not yet have, a new product, a changing operation, a regulation, message me directly and let's see where to start.

Next delivery: Aristotle imagines the tool that works by itself.

Sources. Writing tablet, Middle Kingdom (c. 1981-1802 B.C.), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 28.9.4; probable provenance Thebes or Akhmim according to the museum. Annie Gasse, Catalogue des ostraca littéraires de Deir al-Medîna, vol. V, IFAO, 2006, on school exercises and corrections. Kathlyn M. Cooney, "Apprenticeship and Figured Ostraca from the Ancient Egyptian Village of Deir el-Medina", on the context of the ostraca findings. The method of measuring, forming, and re-measuring is a proposal by the author for current organizations, not a documented practice in Egyptian schools.