Winning Policy Speeches for Losers

[peristaltor]

Lately, I've been working a bunch of overtime. My job doesn't grant me LJ access, to say the least. (We can, in fact, be fired for having a cell phone or MP3 player on our person that's actually on, but that's another can of silly

Comments

[albionwood]

What Americans most desperately need is the will to examine facts; curiosity and desire for truth. Most of them don't have it. This comes as a shock to people like you and I, who cannot quite understand why anyone would not want to learn the truth about things that affect us. But in fact, a very large proportion of our fellow Americans are genuinely uninterested in such things. They have never learned to question the world in which they live; the idea simply never occurs to them.

This perspective is brought to you courtesy of Joe Bageant, whose fascinating/horrifying/hilarious book Deer Hunting with Jesus I am currently reading. I'll try to write up a review, but in the meantime, I recommend it to you.

[peristaltor]

I've heard Joe speak about his book over at KMO's page and podcast. I'll bump Deer Hunting up the list a bit based on your kind appraisal.

They have never learned to question the world in which they live; the idea simply never occurs to them.

I stumbled across a pretty good theory about why that might be largely based on Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?, Thomas Geohgan (sp?). The author has an interesting observation about Germany; people there still read the newspapers, even though they have the telly, the radio and the intertubes just like we have here. He thinks their method of integrating workers into corporate boards (workers comprise 50 percent of the board in most large companies) creates a workforce that realizes the advantages of staying in command of the world around them.

By contrast, once out of school here in the states, workers wait for instruction and shut up. Why learn more? Without a daily need to think, people don't bother.

[albionwood]

They are in fact trained that way in school. It was bad enough before NCLB, but now, there is absolutely zero incentive for any teacher to make the extraordinary effort it takes to get kids to develop the habits of thinking (as opposed to memorizing).

Ah, The Chicken and the Egg

[peristaltor]

I am curious, though, to know which came first, the institutional schools as training for institutional workplaces, or institutional schools as reactions to the reality of institutional workplaces.

In WWII, for example, when a vast majority of our population still labored on farms, recruits entering the forces were often able to field repair equipment thanks to their long years turning wrenches on the farm. Remote from outside help, farms emphasize problem solving, not rote memorization.

As fewer and fewer could rely on a farm living, the schools probably just got the "Efficiency Now!" bug and started drilling the facts through the brain pan without regard for the most efficacious method of drilling.

So, as we re-ruralize (or downsize our cities), we might see a natural return to problem solving, and a just as natural retreat from the memorize the dictionary crowd. If this happens, we might then be ripe for making worker contribution inroads into management.