32. Bad Character As A Management Tool: The Underground
History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Bad
Character As A Management Tool
A
large piece of the answer can be found by reading between the lines of an
article that appeared in the June 1998
issue of Foreign Affairs. Written by Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of U.S. News and World Report (and
other major publications), the essay praises
the American economy, characterizing its lead over Europe and Asia as so
structurally grounded no nation can
possibly catch up fori 00 years. American workers and the American managerial system are unique.
You
are intrigued, I hope. So was I. Unless you believe in master race biology,
our advantage can only have come from
training of the American young, in school and out, training which produces attitudes and
behavior useful to management. What might these
crucial determinants of business success be?
First, says Zuckerman, the American worker is
a pushover. That's my translation, not his,
but I think it's a fair take on what he means when he says the American
is indifferent to everything but a
paycheck. He doesn't try to tell the boss his job. By contrast, Europe suffers from a strong "steam age"
craft tradition where workers demand a large voice in decision-making. Asia is even worse off,
because even though the Asian worker is
silenced, tradition and government interfere with what business can
do.
Next, says Zuckerman, workers in America
live in constant panic; they know companies
here owe them nothing as fellow human beings. Fear is our secret
supercharger, giving management
flexibility no other country has. In 1996, after five years of record profitability, almost half of all Americans
in big business feared being laid off. This fear keeps a brake on wages.
Next, in the United States, human beings don't
make decisions, abstract formulas do;
management by mathematical rules makes the company manager-proof as well
as worker-proof
Finally,
our endless consumption completes the charmed circle, consumption driven
by non- stop addiction to novelty, a
habit which provides American business with the only reliable domestic market in the world.
Elsewhere, in hard times business dries up, but not here; here we shop till we drop, mortgaging
the future in bad times as well as good.
Can 't you feel in your bones Zuckerman is
right? I have little doubt the fantastic wealth
of American big business is psychologically and procedurally grounded in
our form of schooling. The training
field for these grotesque human qualities is the classroom. Schools train individuals to respond as a
mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy,
generally incomplete. A successful mass
production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small
farm economy like that of the Amish
requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a
managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious,
familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the
difference between Cheers and Seinfeld
is a subject worth arguing about.
The extreme wealth of American big business
is the direct result of school having trained
us in certain attitudes like a craving for novelty. That's what the
bells are for. They don't ring so much
as to say, "Now for something different."
No comments:
Post a Comment