Should American Children Learn the Principles of Islam in History Class?

Even a fan of big brain central
planning like Isaac Asimov,
recognized the dangers of a
big bully wrecking the carefully
crafted central planning of society's
well-meaning mental superiors in
his "Foundation" sci-fi series. 

Todd Starnes over at Fox News has sparked a debate over the issue of whether kids should study Islam in public school, when he wrote a piece that documented parental outrage over their children being "forced" to learn the principles of Islam in a Tennessee public school. The Huffington Post shot back with a piece that pretty much distorted what Starnes actually said and glossed over the fact that the teacher in question had decided to "put off" the chapter on Christianity till the end of the school year as one parent claimed or told another parent that it was "against school policy" to discuss Christianity in school.

Starnes' point was that the teacher in question had a double standard where teaching about religions in a history class was concerned, not as HuffPo accused the Fox commentator, that Christianity should be taught in public schools and not Islam. Starnes, in his column, wasn't calling for Bible classes down at Thomas Jefferson Junior High School. As usual, liberals muddy up the issue, call conservative hypocrites and then declare themselves a moral victory, thus claiming an unearned moral high ground for themselves. Speaking of junior high school, does anyone else think that sounds suspiciously like "Nanny, nanny, boo, boo." I don't know about you, but the Huffing and Puffington Post piece feels just like one of those playground bully that used to smack down the littler kids and claim the kingship of the playground for himself on the basis of his being genetically larger than everyone else.

Look, as to the issue of teaching about Islam in a high school or junior high school history class, I've got no problem with that. I think an examination of Islam's fundamental beliefs by school children would be quite useful - at least as part of history class. 

"Know thy enemy," I always say. In reading T.H. Lawrence's (yes THAT Lawrence; the one from Arabia) "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" I came to an understanding of Islam that further convinced me that my "nutty" conservative political beliefs were dead on. Knowing the cultural background of Islam and the principles taught by Mohammed has made the Middle East all too frighteningly understandable. 

We have been trained to wonder after power and pomp.

Were I a teacher again, I would definitely introduce Islam's tenets to my students, in hopes that, with all else they know about history and their own culture, they might at least put up a token resistance to the "fundamental change" that's being foisted upon America. A thorough understanding not only of Islam, but also of Roman Catholicism, the Protestant Revolution and the doctrine of the divine right of kings, just might open young eyes to see the Euro-Marxist invaders who have co-opted our government and somehow convinced the citizens of the greatest nation in the world so far, that it should be ashamed of itself. 

A clear understanding of where this whole collectivism disease is all coming from, would, I hope, convince young Americans that we should NOT quietly recede from the world stage and join a homogeneous socialist proletariat under the rule of our mythical European/African/Asian/Latin American betters. As regular readers of my blog know, I blame Walt Disney. I love Uncle Walt as an entrepreneur, but he is also responsible for teaching generations of kids that hereditary princes and princesses are better suited to governing nations than the people themselves. 

They don't mean the Hapsburgs, those European wastrel monarchs that decimated Europe for generations with their wars and taxes and castle-building when the collectivists talk about the special class of rulers. They mean Darwin's smart, strong people - those who made it big and have joined the social elite by virtue of their genetic superiority. The leftist actors, politicians, corporate elites, wealthy billionaires and academicians are busily teaching us that we are all not equal but the same and should submit to central planning and guidance. The guidence, of course, they mean to come from themselves, since, of course, they, being smarter, know what is best for us after all.

Islamists have a similar system in place. It's best that our kids know that and recognize the danger, if those of us who believe, not in collectivism, but in individualism are going to put up any useful resistance. In America, the government draws its power from the people. In most of the rest of the world, people believe they draw their rights from the government - the ancient European way. Brits draw their rights, they believe, from the queen. 

Check out any "People's" republic or democratic-republic you care to name and the principle is the same, and it is the same in Islamic countries. Sir Robert Filmer, an opponent of John Locke whose philosophy guided the foundation of the United States, stated quite clearly the monarchist's philosophy or the so-called "divine right of kings". Filmer said flatly, that we are all born slaves and designed by God to serve that special few whom God ordained should be our sovereigns. Locke took apart Filmer's argument block by block through logic, reason and scripture. Locke was a notable theologian in his own right as it turns out, hammering Filmer's theory from Scripture. 

When Locke's principles were inculcated into the US Constitution, monarchy and the idea of a divinely appointed hereditary "nobility" took a heavy blow. America appeared to enjoy the blessings of the Almighty rather than his curses. Meanwhile the divine kings and princes back in Europe were "governing" themselves into an inevitable decline thanks to their unceasing wars and wasteful spending. 

But thanks to Charles Darwin and the idea of evolution by natural selection or "Survival of the Fittest" as it came to be known, the ruling class found a new ally that supported the divine right of elites to rule.  According to Darwin, those who had clawed their way to the top of society, were, the simplistic argument went, the hereditary "fittest" and therefore, an elite class of humans fit to meddle in the affairs of "the lower classes" or as Marx called the unwashed rabble - the proletariat. 

Under Marx's vision, the world should return to a two-class system and the troublesome bourgeouise middle class would be conveniently absorbed into harmlessness as part of the new collectivism. There they would serve the state - meaning those who are already running things, instead of selfishly looking out for themselves and their families. The only problem (and the fat cats, for some reason, never see it coming), there's always some megalomaniac lunatic out there ready to seize the machinery of collectivism and proceed to exploit the "everybody serves the state" mentality that's been created by the well-meaning social elites. Then said strongman merely redefines the state to mean "myself" and then robs, rapes and murders the intelligentsia that gave him his power in the first place. 

Individualists do not last long under the "divine right" of the elites system at whatever stage it happens to be at. That said, there is also the law of unintended consequences at play here. The argument is always made that socialism or communism or monarchism or whatever it calls itself, didn't work before because "we didn't have the right leader". They assure us with great fanfare and lots of symbols and logos that this latest version of the "Dear Leader" will give us the hope and change utopia we all long for. The trouble is that if you give any state that much power over the so-called masses, it is inevitably run by some class of bully. 

Those who represent the bully state may, in-fact be well-meaning bullies, but any time bullies demand that everybody submit their will to themselves, the all-powerful state thus created is always vulnerable to the rise of a bigger, more dangerous bully. Isaac Asimov, who was actually a fan of letting the smart guys plan everyone's future, recognized that an unforeseen big bully might wreck even the carefully laid plans of well-meaning smart people when he introduced "The Mule" character into his "Foundation" series. He recognized that vast centralized power can be a dangerous thing, even in the hands of nice guys and that the best-laid plans, as Scots poet Robert Burns aptly put it, "Oft-times gang agley."  They can, and probably will, given the lust for power that runs in the human race

That's why, I think that learning about how a bully like Mohamed took over the Arab culture via the drumming of a set of fundamental beliefs into the minds of his people, is a useful educational exercise. I think an honest study of comparative religions could be a very instructive for what Rush Limbaugh calls "young skulls full of mush".  Don't get me wrong, I also think that comparative study should be America-centric. I don't mind investigating where Christianity went wrong while you're at it. The governmentalization of faith under the Roman church was a huge mistake and one that seems it is trying to repeat. There were good reasons for the Protestant rebellion. Those should be studied too, because the inform the history that followed, from the Spanish Armada, the bloody history of South and Central America to the reasons for the American Revolution. All these help us understand why the rise of the United States became the most earth-shaking thing to hit history since the Flood.

The brilliance of our founding fathers was in their structuring of the government of the new nation into three equal branches, each of which acts as a balance to the other, preventing any one branch from getting too big for its britches. It makes for a woefully inefficient system of government with a whole set of problems all its own, but if you paid any attention in history class when you were a kid, you realize that an "efficient" government is usually most efficient at murdering dissenters among the people it "serves".  

And when I talk about history class, I don't mean the revisionist double-think version of history our leftist academia has foisted upon an unsuspecting generation of young Americans. I mean history - the kind you dig out of books written by those that history actually happened to. History unvarnished and uninterpreted for you. That's the sort of dangerous thing Huffpo and other liberal pundits would like to see eliminated. It's dangerous to allow kids to learn from source material. It requires them to learn to think for themselves. And that threatens the Progressive movement to no end, for without the proper interpretation of history by those in authority, kids might not realize that they are naturally born to slavery and to serve their betters as part of a collectivist state.

And we wouldn't want them to be squeamish about shooting individualists when the revolution comes, would we?*

Tom King - © 2015
* That was sarcasm by the way - for those of you from San Francisco, Rio Linda and any writers at the Huffington Post.

Still Training Our Kids for the Arms Factories

Only in an obsessive-compulsive nation could you get
this many people to stand it neat lines waiting to be killed.

© 2014 by Tom King

Does it bother anyone else that, after nearly a century of evidence that it isn't working very well, we continue to educate our children in a school system designed by the same folk who gave the world extermination camps that conducted a ludicrously rigid accounting of every comb, button and gold tooth of every human being they murdered?

In the early 20th century, we, in the United States, adopted the German graded education system with division into classes by age, not by ability and standardized testing and number grades instead of measures of skills mastery.

The German Kindergarten system was designed to teach kids to show up on time, sit down, shut up, do repetitive work, conform and obey orders. Perfect if you are training future workers for the Krupwerks Munition Factories. Not so perfect for training the children of America, most of whose parents left their countries of origin in the first place in order to avoid raising their kids in just such societies. It's little wonder our kids are still having trouble learning a hundred years later. We've got a generation of restless, independent, genetically ADD American children crammed into a school system originally designed by obsessive compulsive Prussians to insure their own children understood what obsessive compulsive behaviors were expected of them.

And care to guess which nation does more scientific studies than any other on the subject of what to do to make ADD kids settle down and conform?

Yup. the Germans!

Just sayin'

Tom King

What’s Wrong With New Ideas in Education?

(c) 2012 by Tom King



Anyone?   Anyone?


Trick question. The answer is, “Nothing” or maybe “It’s about time we got some!”


When we built the US education system around the German model back at the beginning of the 20th century, we were in essence trying to fit a round peg in a square hole (the square hole being the German education system). The United States was settled by waves of people seeking opportunities outside the ancient and "ossified" societies of Europe. An unpopular Harvard sociologist once wrote a treatise suggesting that people with ADHD tended to migrate to the US at higher rates and because there is a genetic component, we, therefore, inherited a nation with an inordinate number of restless, high energy people in it. It accounts for the impulse people had to load up creaky Contestogas and move away from the more settled East Coast to the Wild West, which probably explains why the west was so wild in the first place. 

All these hyper people, goes the theory, continued percolating westward till they hit the Pacific Ocean where they piled up on the beach and invented California. (It explains a lot - this theory). So after filling up this country with people who didn’t fit in the Old World’s rigidly classed societies, what to 19th century progressive education theorists do?  They run right back to the Europeans and adopt an education system designed specifically for that stratified European culture. It seemed like a good idea at the time. We were, after all, entering an industrial boom at the time and needed lots of well-mannered factory workers and the Germans did have the ideal education system for that.

The German graded system was designed specifically to teach kids to show up on time, sit still and do repetitive work all day while their supervisors kept up a steady monitoring of their production. In essence, the graded school system was designed as a production line to produce production line workers.  Great if you are training future workers for arms factories and munitions plants (which, as it turns out, was what the Germans were up to). Not so great for the kind of kids we have in great abundance in America. Don’t get me wrong. Some kids do quite well in a graded setting. I, myself, made good grades, but was bored to distraction and never quite found a job that matched my training.

So I gave teaching a shot.

I once taught at a one teacher school in New Mexico where I had 14 kids in 6 grades on 7 reading levels and at least 8 of them were diagnosable with ADHD. This is not uncommon, especially in rural areas, or at least that was my experience. When I started the kids were an average 3 grade levels behind. Their previous teacher was a rigid, old school teacher, much loved by the school's board of directors (4 of the five of whom were retired or former teachers). The parents, on the other hand, did NOT like the teacher and had demanded a new teacher, threatening to pull their kids out of the school en masse because they hated school and were learning nothing. I took the job because my previous school let me go. I was the last hired, so I was the first to go when the school lost a lot of kids at once. I needed a job. They needed a teacher.

I enjoyed the challenge of my new school. My classroom was a moveable feast. I had to keep the kids going all the time. Our recesses were sometimes rather long to allow the kids to blow off steam. We did a lot of cross-grade mentoring in the classes with older kids helping younger kids with their work. I must have done something right. That year my class reached grade level on average on their achievement tests - some exceeded it. My parents were meeting in their homes for prayer groups at the end of the year, praying I would stay. The school board, meanwhile, asked me to leave. Apparently my school room didn't look like a school room was supposed to.  What I learned was that "old school" was more about appearance than results.

Yesterday I wrote about the objections being floated about corporate foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funding new ideas like those proposed by groups like Teach For America and Students First. I think Gates' support for these new education entrepreneurs is admirable. The children of America are not square pegs. They come in a beautiful array of shapes, sizes and learning styles. We need some fresh ideas in education that utilize new technologies and capabilities. Computers, as it turns out, really work with ADHD kids. Maybe that’s Gates’ angle – teach the kids to use computers to educate themselves, so Microsoft will have more customers. I want to know what the heck is wrong with that?  All opponents can give me is either that it threatens the teacher unions or that the funders might make a profit doing it.

Education that makes a profit?  How cool would that be?

What was it Alvin Toffler said? “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” The tools being offered by the Gates Foundation and others are just the tools that kids need to learn, unlearn and relearn throughout their careers.

If Gates sells a few extra copies of Windows or Apple sells a few more Macs as a result of their investments in education, I can live with that. If they make it possible for young education entrepreneurs, freed from the shackles of teacher’s unions and politically polarized school systems, to figure out more effective ways to teach kids, I say, “Good on ‘em.”

The old fossils in the education establishment, however, are really gonna hate it.

Tom King

Defending the Phrog Farm - Education "Experts" Opine on Gates Foundation 'Meddling' in Education

Diane Ravitch is puzzled by the Gates Foundation.  Apparently Diane thinks " their efforts to “reform” education are woefully mistaken."  It seems, to Ms. Ravitch's horror, the Gates Foundation is funding "astroturf” groups of young teachers who insist that they don’t want any job protections, don’t want to be rewarded for their experience (of which they have little) or for any additional degrees, and certainly don’t want to be represented by a collective bargaining unit.

And there is the key to Diane's anger with Gates. His foundation supports "non-unionized" groups.

(insert gasp of collective horror)

Also, apparently, Diane can't get a meeting with Bill to tell him her opinion and she seems more than a little upset about that.

Rick Cohen over at Nonprofit Quarterly is also righteously indignant and pulls together a lot of supporting commentary in his article, opining that the Gates Foundation is promoting an anti-teacher, anti-public education agenda in state after state.

I understand Rick and Diane's concern. Education is a frustrating issue, whichever side of the fence you sit on. If you're on the blindly pro-union side, however, all that loose money, uncontrolled by some "collective bargaining unit", must make them nervous. Some schools might take the money and be 'corrupted'.

Diane seems most worried, about the supposed deleterious effects of the Gates Foundation's support for a non-unionized, dare I say, free market approach to education. As soon as anyone funds a group that is even looking at an approach that rewards performance rather than time served, the pro-union crowd rises up with pitchforks and torches.

Myself, I've watched too many outstanding teachers over the years fired because they rocked the union boat, made other teachers look bad, taught in ways that upset their colleagues or drifted outside the holy curriculum. One of my favorite teachers, Marva Collins, left the public school system and started a private school in a garage that quickly filled up with kids who had been kicked out of the Chicago Public School system. I've met some of those kids and they are miles ahead of their peers. Marva could never have taught like she did in the unionized public school system. Her teaching methods would not long have been tolerated.

What the Gates Foundation's support of non-unionized teachers does is add a competitive element to education. (And, yes, Virginia, there are teachers who don't want to be in teacher's unions.) How that having a place in education for nonunion teachers profits Microsoft is something of a mystery to me.

Any school that doesn't want Gates' money is, of course, free to not take it and go ahead and do what they want, just as my own alma mater chose not to accept government education grants and the strings that come with them.

Let's face it, the public school system is in dismal shape in much of America. Even the kids know it and are rebelling even more than we were back in the 60s. What's wrong with trying something different?

Kids and parents both want education that teaches our young-uns to do something valuable, something marketable so they have good jobs when they grow up and don't have to live in our basements. Companies (including the evil corporations) want trained workers too. So why is it so bad to teach kids more of the kinds of things that get them good jobs and start successful careers? Foundations wanting to fund innovation in education shouldn't damage the unionized education system if, as the unions claim, their system is better. If kids aren't getting a good education, parents will simply refuse to pay for it and send their kids back to class with a suitably reliable union teacher.

Why not, let's try something new and see if it works better before we summarily pitch out the bath without checking if the baby is still in there? The biggest complaint parents like me have with education is that the teachers unions protect bad teachers, reward them with steady raises and benefits no matter what sort of miserable teacher they prove themselves to be. All they have to do is mark time and not do anything spectacular.

I'm wondering why paying teachers by how well their kids learn isn't a good idea. So what if some students are poorly motivated, poorly disciplined and troubled. Shouldn't we as parents be willing to pay teachers who have the ability to handle those tough kids, motivate them and inspire them. And I'm tired of hearing teachers whine about the poor quality of their students.

I worked with multi-diagnosis emotionally disturbed kids. They came from horrific homes. I did things with my kids that people said couldn't be done. My kids struggled; a few let me down, but for the most part, they made me proud to be their teacher. I worked outside the teacher's unions and the education system. Our kids had the best outcomes records in the state next to other treatment centers and we were hated by our colleagues and our government supervisors for showing them up.

I'm tired of the teacher's unions complaining that we are teaching children to be good test takers and yet quote the results of those same tests to prove that we need to spend more money (largely on union teacher salaries and dues) ostensibly to enable our kids able to pass those same tests with as good a grades as their Japanese or Europeans counterparts.

Little secret here - that's going to take more than a little "teaching to the test" to kick up those test scores and prove that all that money was well spent.

The problem with governments and unions and even schools is that they mistake sameness for fairness. If they could make us all "C" students, I think they might be happy.  They know damned good and well they're not going to make "A" students out of all of them. 

In so-called "progressive" societies and organizations, if you do too well, if you stick your head above the crowd, the rest of the group WILL lop your head right off for making the rest of them look bad.  It's well known that at Harvard and other progressive Ivy league schools that the quickest way to not get tenure is to win the teacher of the year award. Unions all meant well in the beginning, but, especially in the field of education, they've turned schools into swamps.

Management guru, Dr. Jerry Harvey, once pointed out in his insightful 1977 paper, "Organizations as Phrog Farms" that:

"The Job of most swamp managers is to maintain and enhance the swamp, not to drain it.... The purpose of swamp consultants—in the eyes of swamp managers—is to help the swamp operate more effectively."

Simply substitute "school superintendents" for "swamp managers" and "teacher's unions"  for "swamp consultants".

You should read professor's Harvey's wonderfully subversive book: The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Management.  It explains what happened to education and why many big corporations, especially the ones that are "too big to fail" aren't much better off.

Dr. Harvey's paper "The Abilene Paradox" explains as well as any book on management I've ever read, why groups of people try to make good decisions about what to do and with the best of intentions, manage to decide to do what nobody wants to do and make themselves miserable in the process.  I recommend reading the book curled up in a chair with no distractions.  You can get the two key articles at the above links in a pdf file, but be warned:  there is a danger of spewing coffee all over your computer monitor.  Just so you know the risk.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King

Supreme Court to Rule on Tax Credit Scholarships and the Establishment Clause

Just after the November election, the US Supreme Court is set to hear an Arizona case challenging an Arizona law that opponents say violates the Constitution's Establishment Clause. The law allows individuals and corporations to receive a tax credit for donations to nonprofits that provide scholarships to public school students to pay for private school tuition. The tax credit applies equally to organizations that provide tuition to non-religious and those that exclusively fund religious private school tuition.

The argument is that the Arizona law is an establishment of religion by the government because some of the nonprofit scholarship programs only award scholarships to religious schools.

I hope the Supreme Court continues to view the separation of church and state in the same light that the framers of the constitution intended – not as a prohibition against religion, but as a safeguard of religion. The law allows scholarship organizations to donate to any private school they want to, religious or not. This seems to me to cover the spirit and letter of the “Establishment” Clause, so long as the government does not specify a specific religious denomination or limit scholarships to specific faiths. Limiting scholarship agencies to non-religious schools, a practice with which the plaintiffs in this case don't seem to have a problem, would, for all practical purpose be an establishment of non-religious institutions in the same way that limiting government tax credits only to a specific religion would be a violation of the establishment clause.

After all, what is a religion except a system of beliefs. Atheism or systematic avoidance of religion is in fact a system of belief. It presupposes that a certain set of facts or ideas are of value and that others are not or, at least, should be avoided.

So long as the Arizona law does not specify what type of private school the tuition may apply to, I see no “establishment of religion” in a law that seeks to provide public school students access to alternative educational opportunities. Under this law, any group could specify what schools they wish to fund. Muslims could fund Muslim schools. Buddhists could provide scholarships to Buddhist schools. Atheists could fund scholarships to schools which teach categorically that there is no God. The level of funding is immaterial. If Christian schools receive the lion's share of these tax-credits, it is because there are more citizens who wish to fund those tax-credits up front – probably because there are more Christians in Arizona than any of the other groups.

So what? The Establishment Clause is about freedom to choose, not about making sure every group receives the same dollar amount. It's not about “fair” in the sense you meant it when you were 8 years old. It's about free.

You see, freedom is truly fair in the sense that fully mature grownups understand it. Freedom of choice means that if you have a good argument, you may win the debate. You may attract more followers. It means that the majority of us may celebrate Christmas and not spend much energy or cash on Ramadan or Hanukah celebrations. That's okay and fair. The Establishment Clause merely guarantees that if you wish to celebrate Ramadan, Hanuka, Kwanzaa or the Winter Solstice, your right to do so is protected by the government – but not funded by it.

In this case, a tax-credit program for a specific purpose – promoting high quality education beyond the level of public schools – allows scholarship agencies to provide scholarships to any private school whatsover. It is not appropriate that the government should limit which types of schools may receive those scholarships and which may not. THAT would be an “Establishment” indeed.

I just hope the Supreme Court sees it that way.

Tom King – Tyler, TX

Education's Role in the Coming Crisis (it's not what you think)!

Chris Brogan's blog this morning pointed out the importance of focusing on goals and not on process.  It generated a lot of defensive comments from people who love their process and are really nervous about stepping outside the methodologies carved into their very souls by their years of public education.

Chris's point is well taken. I've come to believe the problem started when the United States adopted the German scheme of education at the close of the 19th century. I think it was a mistake. Americans, by and large, are not like Germans.  The German-inspired system teaches method almost exclusively. Of course, it was designed to.  The point of the graded, class level system was to produce Kruppwerks factory workers who could sit down, shut up, do repetitive work and produce what someone instructed them to produce in a manner virtually identical to the person next to them. We have taken a stab over the past three decades at retasking our education system, but, so far, all I can see that we have accomplished is an abortive attempt to take away the grades and the classes while still focusing on method with disastrous results.

Chris made a passing mention of an individual with ADD who struggled unsuccessfully in a series of "process" jobs, something for which he was constitutionally unsuited.  He's right that we're not suited for "method" work. Americans need clear goals or we pretty much diddle around doing nothing.  We have the highest percentage of ADD people of virtually any country in the world. That's because this country was settled and pioneered by ADD people who were kicked out of every "civilized" country in the world. We became great because, once in America all these ADD folks found a goal. That goal was to insure long-lasting freedom and to create something new and better than the regimented, liberty impaired societies from which they came. They carved out homes in the wilderness, built cities and tamed the wilderness. Sadly, the Old World eventually followed on their heels, landing in New York (once the ADD people had cleared the forests, built nice towns and made it safe for them to come here).  They began marching from the East to the West, like locusts, putting as much of America as they could into little tick off boxes as they went. They gave us the IRS, the department of motor vehicles and now health care reform.

And while they were at it, they created an education system that is almost hostile to ADD kids. Not surprising since the Germans do more intensive ADD research than almost any other country. They seemed obsessed with curing or eliminating this noxious condition in their own country. AND they have sympathizers in America's education system - ready with tubs of Ritalin, tens of thousands of tight-skirted school psychologists and "special" education programs designed to make them sit still, shut up and do repetitive work like everyone else.

Before you get all defensive of teachers, I know there are teachers who aren't like this at all.  They teach children to think, to discover and to excel.  The school system fires them in droves every year.

Yes, ADD kids have a tough time in school.  But I would argue that school has precious little to do with real life.  Having high energy levels and a restless spirit as ADD folks do, doesn't mean you cannot succeed in the real world. Many do so brilliantly.  It's about goals. When we set ourselves clear goals (defeat the Nazis, build an Interstate Highway System or go to the Moon), we Americans have proved we can accomplish anything. Why?  Because we are adept at using the methodological skills we have learned to get what we want.  In those cases where the goals are clear, we're very effective.  When the goals our leaders set for us become about administration and maintenance rather than about exploration and achievement, we inevitably stagnate. 

Our education system's fault lies not in that they have taught us to be socialists. It's that they were too lazy to teach us more than dry methodologies - enough so that it seems like socialism is the answer to all our problems. We missed out on learning how to choose a goal and marshal our resources to achieve that goal.  It's as though they taught us to identify all the crayons in the box, the technique for applying the colors to paper, but left out the part about how to decide why we would want to use crayons in the first place - as thought crayons were the end unto themselves.

Is it any wonder that so many of us run around trying to find uses for crayons instead of looking for crayons to put to good use in accomplishing worthwhile goals and striving toward grand visions?  We have raised a generation with wonderful tools, but without anything to build with them.  Instead we look for ways to number, catalog and store our tools so that we don't use or damage them. Inevitably, we begin to restrict access to those tools.

Too often we develop goals as a reason to use the methodologies we have perfected. We get so enamored with our ability to put everything into boxes with our computers, for instance, that we go looking for a task that lets us use our favorite software instead of looking for software to help us accomplish our task. We don't always ask whether the money and expense we put into developing those applications is well spent. It explains why so many government sponsored projects become dead ends. It's inevitably because some process-obsessed bunch of bureaucrats were looking for a task that gave them an excuse for some process they liked.

Case in point:  Every day, modern retail giants can tell you in detail how much they sold that day by the stroke of midnight after close. They can generate figures for how sales are going this week, this month and this quarter with projections of future sales. They can tell you how many widgets sold and which colors sold best. As a result management often becomes so focused on tweaking the "bottom line", the short term reward or the daily sales numbers that it seems unable to lift its head from the charts and graphs on the computer monitor and look really deep into the future. They become obsessed with the question, how much is my very expensive accounting and inventory control system telling me that I am making and what can I do to tweak those numbers to improve them. They should be thinking, what do I want my company to be in the future?  Is this where we want to go?

To steal a fire department metaphor, are we wandering all over putting out small fires to show off our skills at extinguishing fires instead of getting in front of the big one to cut fire breaks and soak down the trees with flame retardant.

Folks who are enslaved to method tend to focus more closely on immediate outcomes and not on long term goals. The banking industry took itself to collapse because legions of vice-presidents were given loan approval goals that encouraged the approval of high risk loans in order to satisfy a mandate under the Community Reinvestment Act to meet arbitrary target numbers of loans in specific communities and populations with no regard for the consequences of churning out that many risky loans. To keep the numbers high, so that the efficacy of the method might be validated, the loans were guaranteed to quell worries about long term risk.That's how you get Barney Franks and Maxine Waters extolling the virtues of the very programs that were to collapse the housing market within mere months. They were focused on the data they were collecting that showed the programs were accomplishing the Congress's objective, not on whether or not the program was sustainable or, in the long run, good for the country. They were more interested in numbers that would make specific voting blocks happy and that would support their own reelection campaigns.


Such tunnel vision makes it inevitable that such a system should collapse. It's like driving a car while looking out the side window or down at the instrument panel only. If you can't see where you are going, you're going to hit something hard that will bring you to a halt.  Of course, you'll never convince the people who focus on method rather than goal. They think we're all nuts and want to cure us with Ritalin and re-education.

Time to buckle up folks.  I do believe the folks in the drivers seat are more worried about the color of the upholstery and making sure we don't exceed optimal RPM's than they are about where we all are going.

As Dr. Jerry Harvey, author of the brilliant article, "Organizations as Phrog Farms" once described it something like this.  To many organizations spend all their energy in maintaining the swamp, forgetting that their original purpose was to drain it.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King