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

The False Premise

Progressives love to start an argument with a false premise.  "Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Yes or no?"  Rigged questions are the tools of the con man and flim-flam artist.  Take the argument against the existence of God, for instance.

The Argument Begins

"You can show me no direct proof that God exists, therefore, God does not exist!"

This statement depends entirely on the false premise that a thing cannot exist unless it can be seen and touched or directly observed.  Plenty of things we know to exist based on indirect observation.  Black holes, for instance, cannot be seen, but only inferred from theories about gravity and astro-physics and by their effect on nearby objects in space.

It is almost axiomatic in the news media that the health care system in America is badly broken. I believe this to be a false premise.  From this false premise, the left makes the Socratic argument that "If the health care system is badly broken, then we must fix it and that if we must fix it, the government is the only entity that can do the job.

The flaw in that argument is three-fold.  (1) The US health care system is not broken, only oppressed by too much government regulation and interference.  (2) We must NOT fix it because attempts by central planners to fix things like health care only results in disaster again and again.  (3) The government is NOT the only entity that can fix the problem.  Government is, in fact, THE PROBLEM ITSELF.  Government diddling through Medicaid and Medicare is largely responsible for the bureaucratic tangle the health care system faces.

Then there is the cry for a national energy policy.  Why?  Have we not messed up our energy delivery system already.  We killed nuclear power plants - an excellent source of clean energy by regulating it to death. We have hamstrung oil, gas and coal producers so they cannot even prospect for oil off our own shores, but must give way to China and Brazil and the like. I can give you an energy policy.  Do not let the government diddle with energy production!

We must save the planet!  Another false premise.  Who says.  For one thing, we do not have the ability to save the planet and there is precious little evidence that we are the reason it is heating up anyway. Jupiter, Venus and Mars are all heating up too.  I don't think humans had anything to do with that. Besides, if we bankrupt ourselves, turn the US into a third world country and destroy Western civilization, we aren't going to make more than a fraction of a degree's impact on the world's temperature anyway.  And who says putting San Francisco and New York underwater is such a bad thing anyway?

Sometimes what we MUST do to fix problems is to stop meddling.  An ancient proverb says too many cooks spoil the stew. That applies to governments.  Why do we need endless task forces and select committees aided by battalions of politicians and legions of bureaucrats to do what we can do individually in our own communities, quite without help from the feds?

When I had a wound that had scabbed over, my Mom always told me "Don't pick at it or it will never heal!"

Good advice for the current administration and congress when faced with a bad economy.  Leave it alone or it will never heal.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King - Flint, TX

Prepare for the Worst

What's going to happen on February 12 and why should we worry about it? President Ahmadenijad, the wild-haired president of Iran has announced that they are going to deal a blow to the evil old west on that .

Not sure what he's up to, but it's never anything good. A mushroom cloud rising over the desert will not be a good thing if that's what he's up to. I figure if that happens we'll have a window of about 30 minutes before the current administration starts blaming ourselves for the problem and gets so wrapped up in trying to figure out how to prove it's own leftist ideology really works that they'll dither till it's too late to stop the explosion of a nuclear device somewhere within the continental United States.  I look for such an event sometime with the next few years. I hope the Israelis make the "go" decision and do what needs to be done and the heck with what the US does.  I also hope US fighter pilots are prepared to disobey orders from the White House to shoot down Israeli bombers.

The Pres just got through telling us he was going to freeze spending and be fiscally responsible, but then he glossed over the part where he said, "but not till next year" and proceeded to plop a spending bill for this year that overspends in one month by more than what George Bush did in a whole year at the height of the Iran War.

I can't afford to pay my electric bill now and the President is talking about a Cap and Trade bill that will, according to him, “.....necessarily cause electric prices to skyrocket.” I'm quoting here.

Probably need to prepare for life in a post-electricity world.

I can't find a job in my chosen field. The President has sucked billions of dollars out of the pockets of wealthy philanthropists and caused a nationwide funding shortage among the smaller nonprofits that provide the services and supports our communities need that fall into the gaps with massive government and big nonprofit programs. When the President decided to take 170 billion dollars out of the philanthropists' pockets through taxation, he assumed that they would just find those dollars elsewhere. Instead grantmakers pulled in their tent stakes and largely stopped funding new programs for new and smaller nonprofits and cut their funding for their regular charities.

In case that might happen, the President put about 25 or 30 million in the budget for “emergency support” for nonprofits.

A friend of mine attempted to track down where the local stimulus money was going and how to get some for their nonprofit program Turns out that before the ink was dry on Obama's signature, the county judge had prepared a list of who would get the dollars from the stimulus – a rogue's list of campaign contributors, old buddies and family members all lined up for lucrative contracts to supply materials and carry out contracts. Any wonder the 750 billion dollar stimulus is evaporating as fast as checks can be written -curling skyward in thin wisps of steam.

Those clouds you see floating by – they're our children's futures because they will be the ones who have to pay for those clouds.

And those are some mighty expensive clouds.

Prepare to bunch up with your kinfolk to be able to afford to go on eating regularly. Maybe plant a garden or something.. My church is planting a communal vegetable garden this year. I figure we'll need it.

Keep your head down and your powder dry.

Tom