Return to the Brainsarefun
homepage
Go to the Brainsarefun index
100 REASONS TO KILL YOUR TELEVISION AND VIDEO GAMES (click here)
ENRON AND EDUCATION
by Rory Donaldson
The collapse of ENRON bears some striking similarities to the failure of American education, and to the Vietnam War. In the early 1960's President Kennedy sent a task force to Vietnam to "find out what was really going on." The reply he received was, in short, "Everything is just fine, we can win, no real problem, just give us some more money."
The President received this response, it appears, because no one wanted to be "the bearer of bad news." Everyone was in Cover Your Ass (CYA) mode, and even though the officers on the ground knew what trouble they were in, far be it for them to destroy their careers by bringing bad news to their bosses. The same CYA phenomenon (not to mention just plain greed, etc...) seems to have played a significant role in the fall of ENRON, no one wanted to be the bearer of bad news - not at Anderson, not anywhere... "Everything looks pretty good to me Boss. How about those Yankees! How about those stock prices."
In short, out of a fear of being perceived as someone who isn't
really a team player, most of us are very hesitant to bring significant
problems or concerns to our bosses. If we do, we always want to
accompany the bad news with a quick fix. The problem is, most
of our problems do not have
a quick fix. Far be it for me to bring my boss (let alone the
President of the United States) bad news. Where's that going to
get me? So we go on, perpetuating mediocrity in the hope that
we don't get discovered and that, if we are, we can find someone
else to blame. After all, all of us want to be thought of as good
people -- couldn't be our fault (just ask any of President Kennedy's
advisers, just ask any of the ENRON crooks, just ask any crook
in jail). We are all innocent.
I have often bemoaned that two parts of my education that were sorely lacking were the parts that dealt with power and money. A book I just finished, which really impressed me both for its content and its writing, was "The Ugly American" by Burdick and Lederer. The book speaks volumes about the uphill battle we are fighting to reform leadership -- in nearly all of our schools of education, and in most of our school systems. I recommend it to all of us in the trenches who could benefit from a little education about power and money.
Hope you have enjoyed the screed.
Thank you,
Rory Donaldson, chief brain (sometimes referred to as "The
BIG Brain")
www.brainsarefun.com
roryd@brainsarefun.com
P.S. Want to see one more example of useless pedagogy? Check out a college that asks the penetrating question, "Do you want to be yourself?" This, at a school that prides itself on training teachers. Jesus!
"All you need is love..."
-end-
Let's say you wanted to educate children, would you put the job into the hands of governments and unions? That is exactly what we've done, and if you think governments and unions have the lives of children foremost in their minds, you're nuts!
School can not change until teachers actually learn how to teach the fundamental behaviors associated with academic success (starting on time, staying on task, completing assignments), and the fundamental academic skills: reading, writing, listening, speaking, information organization, study skills and math. The current classroom, based on de facto "progressive," "constructivist," "post-modern" ideology, is chaotic, poorly managed, and not conducive to enough children experiencing enough academic success. The current commitment is to "self-inquiry," "self esteem," "learning styles," "diversity," and avoiding hard work at all costs. In short, the emperor has no clothes. We are frozen.
Far too many of our children are not learning the fundamental skills and behaviors (mentioned above). The light of learning is not being allowed to shine in the dark places. Far too many are being robbed of the opprtunity to learn the skills that will allow them to successfully continue their educations and hold jobs with a future. The result is that we have created a nation where the top 10 to 20% will achieve, the rest will be functionally illiterate. The top 10% will control 90% (plus) of the wealth. The remainder will have little opportunity. Not because they are fundamentally stupid, but because they have been taught to act stupidly. They have not been taught the skills they will need to succeed: how to read, write, listen, speak, organize information, study and do math. They have not been taught how to start on time, stay on task, complete their assignments. They have no body of shared knowledge. They equate reading with the sports page and comics. Far too much of their behavior has been learned by watching precocious children with cartoon behavior on television.
Throwing more money at these classrooms, throwing more technology, throwing more teachers who have not been trained, will not succeed. Current efforts are doomed to failure, yet we accept the current configuration of our schools as a given. You can travel the length and breadth of our country, from pre-school through post-graduate university, and you will find only a handful of exceptions - they all look pretty much the same.
Look into virtually any classroom, any subject, and the model repeats itself: the teacher is standing in front of the classroom yak, yak, yakking while (the well behaved) students sit passively - no writing, no speaking (except for the top 10%, or so, who do 90% of all the talking), no listening, no reading. The floors are littered with trash, the students don't have their materials, they are dressed like slobs, they are allowed to act out in any way they "feel," and the entire discipline program is based on negative reaction.
None of this will change as long as the progressive thread that permeates our culture is dominantly hip-hop, psychotherapeutic, enabling, and encouraging people to have a million excuses, blame their parents, deride all bureaucracy, disavow all history, make all their decisions based on "feelings," spend their time "honoring their inner child," expressing cynicism about any and all truth, rather than living up to their responsibilities as adults and actually accepting responsibility for their children.
I find myself a product of an unfinished education. Flung into a life I don't quite grasp, I set out to remedy my inadequacies. An attack like the one I'm writing here is an excellent remedy while waiting for death to overtake me.
There is very little placed by God in this country more wasted than human life, intellect, potential (this is the great ecological opportunity). To overcome this waste there is only one choice: to, in the words of Lloyd George, "Build a country fit for heroes." A vigorous community of young men and women who have the academic skills and behaviors required to succeed in our perilous future. No matter what else they learn, teach them to read. They must learn to write. They must learn to listen. They must learn to speak. They must learn to organize information. They must learn math. They must learn how to start on time, stay on task, complete their assignments. They must learn how to earn their way. And we must learn how to teach.
Educational Reform can not occur for the same reasons that no reform can occur: schools are so integrally tied in with the rest of society and, for the most part, no one really wants change (lest we forget, the cry after 9/11 was for a "return to normalcy.") We are uncomfortable enough without more change unnerving us even further. We are stark naked, totally fearful of being discovered. We say we want a voice, but most of us don't really want much of a voice. A loud mouth, yes! A voice (implying that one really has something to say), not really.
America is totally organic. That is, integrated. One part relies on the dynamic synthesis of the rest. There is no changing one part while leaving the rest alone, and it is for this reason that John Gatto [www.wtp.org/radio/synopses/syn970325.html] is correct: forget the schools, go home, home school, take responsibility for your own children. Stop seeing right through your children as though they were invisible.
Except, this won't work either. Most parents don't want more time with their children, they want less. "Put them in day care. Put them in school. Put them in extended care. Get a baby sitter, I've got to get back to work. I've got to play golf. As long as it's some big government program it looks o.k. to me, but don't ask me to read to my children, teach them how to write, play with them, accept responsibility for them. Hey that's the school's job. Or, government's."
To quote General Douglas MacArthur, "The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual breakout, an improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature, and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh."
"A spiritual breakout" I am sure we need. But a spiritual breakout is not going to occur for people who can't read. These people are more appropriately doomed to a "poverty breakout," a breakout that the fortunate fifth can watch on television, and discuss with compassion, as they bemoan their inability to get good help and wait for the disaster that shall follow just as sure as day follows night.
Do you want to help? Teach children to read. Don't get bogged down in child development, cognitive psychology, developmental stages, special education, emotional intelligences... Learn how to teach the basic skills and behaviors to mastery. Learn about how to really manage a classroom and how to supervise. Learn about Direct Instruction, Positive Discipline, Accelerated Learning /Study Skills.
What we really want is a low common denominator where everyone has a nice cubicle and a nice computer and lives a "normal" life that's perfectly acceptable to his or her employer's view of productivity. We are frozen, and we are frightened to death that we shall be discovered for what we are.
"We must rise," in the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era." "No one on earth has any other way left but - upward."
This is poetic, perhaps true, but we can not rise in a "spiritual blaze," upward! until we are able to plant our feet on bed rock, and we have not yet reached bottom.
The anarchists have argued that the best course is to hasten this cycle downward through a blatant disregard of laws and standards. I am not able to support this nihilistic view - no matter how often I may find myself in sympathy - because of the enormous pain that is brought to the unsuspecting, naive, and naked.
Nor am I able to close my eyes and attempt a return to normalcy when I believe that business as usual is bankrupt. Solzhenitsyn again, "destructive and irresponsible freedom have been granted boundless space." We do not know which way to turn in all this space.
It is my observation that most of us live our lives as though we have no control over our future. Look at the food we eat; look at our exercise habits; look at what we throw in the landfill; look at our overweight guts. And we always have an excuse - often boiling down to: "I want someone else to do it for me." "What I do makes no difference." "When you're going to die you're going do die." With this kind of fatalistic, nihilistic attitude, there is no appeal to logic, only to ad homonym [emotional] [Aristotelian] argument. Where once the rationality of the Renaissance was heralded, it has been defrocked by post-modernism: de-construction, constructivism, nuclear proliferation, global pollution, over population, federal and local anti-psychonaut laws and the eradication of community. The collapse of community puts the emphasis exactly where most of us want it, on: "me, me, me."
However, with all this cynicism and darkness it is important to remind ourselves of a view championed by H.L. Mencken, We live in a land of abounding quackeries, and if we do not learn how to laugh we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the race of viewers-with-alarm... In no other country known to me is life as safe and agreeable, taking one day with another, as it is in These States. Even in a great Depression few if any starve, and even in a great war the number who suffer by it is vastly surpassed by the number who fatten on it and enjoy it. Thus my view of my country is predominantly tolerant and amiable. I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.
Am I willing to accept responsibility for the well being of another human being? Am I willing to accept responsibility for the happiness of others? Am I willing to take a moment to decipher what happiness means at all? Am I prepared to learn how to teach a child to read?
Mencken described the problem this way, "No observant person, indeed, can come into close contact with the general run of business and professional men...without marveling at their intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness, their appalling lack of ordinary sense." This coincides with my general observation. I am very disappointed with the ways in which most of us [and I include myself here] have matured. We are intellectually lethargic, incurably ingenuous and show and appalling lack of common sense. Sometime during the last sixties most society gave up, and we have become incredibly bored with who we have become ever since. Even Hollywood can't overcome our boredom.
The mass of men have no appreciation for the labor required to build nations and societies, or the commitment required to sustain them. Most of us appear to have little or no appreciation for this effort, and consider our place in the world to be an entitlement rather than something that must be earned.
Our lack of appreciation is an old-fashioned riddle. How many of us consider our goods, services and access to intellectual and monetary capital -- much less our political rights -- as value that we must constantly struggle to preserve?
How many of us take the time to consider the societies in which we live as dynamic, organic entities that must be studied and understood if we are to appreciate their worth?
How often do we undertake even a cursory analysis of the routes
we have taken to get to where we are today, with an eye toward
seriously reforming that which needs changing while preserving
that which makes society strong?
Will modern men and women accept a radical commitment to building society?
How many feel a sense or urgency? How many have the ability
to sustain the effort? This is the failure of our democracy:
society must be always mastered by the vote of the ill-advised
majority instead of being lead by a meritorious elite. Why? Because
the meritorious elite keep ending up as Stalins and ENRON executives
who believe that any means justifies the end, that brains are
all that count; that wit and money places one above the law.
The problem is so much older than the first philosophique: how to find happiness? How to deal with loneliness, fatigue, isolation, despair, monotony, illness, death, sex? So much has been spoken, yet what has been learned? What has crossed my path that makes sense for me to carry around in my head? What do I carry around in my head? How do I see the little bit that I see? To what can I lend language?
How can I best teach children to read? I think all the great
revolutionaries knew how to read - maybe even Christ!
FIVE SUGGESTIONS ON HOW TO AVOID WAR WHILE REVITALIZING THE AMERICAN ECONOMY AND ADVANCING THE DON IMUS RADIO SHOW
from Rory Donaldson (690 words)
January 29, 2003
Before we go to war, occupying rogue states that appear to defy occupation, risking the lives of American soldiers, I would like to see ambassadors of our great government consider how we might really win, at a fraction of the cost, crushing the enemy like a millstone crushes an egg:
1) Initiate a massive smuggling operation of personal computers, printers and modems into, among others, Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Load these computers with all the standard productivity software designed to handle the language of choice. This would improve communications and fuel an active underground - a tyrant's worst enemy. All of these computers could be loaded with a self destructing virus that would render the hardware and software inoperable should six months pass without us issuing an update key.
I wouldn't make this smuggling effort too surreptitious. Rather, I would be aggressive in the publicity surrounding the endeavor.
2) Concurrently, hook up as many of these smuggled computers to the Internet as possible. The rational is self-evident.
3) At the same time, flood our enemies with as many blue jeans, boom boxes and rock and roll CD's as possible. Same argument as above.
4) In addition, pull out of South Korea. The worst scenario I can imagine is that the North would then overrun the South and immediately become co-opted by the South. I don't suggest that these efforts would succeed without repression, but that the repression would be far more self-immolating to them and less deleterious to us than going to war. Russia, China and Japan would no longer be awarded a free ride by American foreign policy.
5) Finally: Load cargo planes with millions of 8.5 by 11, four color photographs of naked men and women and drop them from the skies over selected Islamic locations. This would cost virtually nothing and would throw the men, particularly but not exclusively, into massive paroxysm. While I imagine certain American citizens being offended by such vulgarity, little is more vulgar than incinerating soldiers and citizens.
Since our goal is to win, as it must be, I cannot imagine a more effective way to mobilize victory than to exercise the above scenarios. Had we taken a similar approach with Cuba, years ago, Castro would be a dim historical reference today.
I conclude with a direct appeal to Don Imus: Don, please consider the benefits of championing these ideas:
1) You have the forum that is required for a free and open exchange about these, and other, non-traditional approaches to some of our most serious problems. Are these ideas the right ideas? I do not know. But they need to be actively debated and currently they are, for all practical purposes, not even mentioned.
2) You would yield some truly interesting, meaningful and politically relevant discussions. I suggest that you keep asking these questions, over and over, of all your guests. Why aren't these good ideas? What suggestions do they have? How do we flesh these and other "departure from the norm" ideas out to make them more effective and relevant?
3) Don, if I may be so arrogant, your effort would insure a great legacy, advancing specific alternatives that could:
- save the lives of many soldiers;
- reduce untold suffering;
- save millions and millions of American tax dollars;
- put the threat of war behind us (a pre-condition for a revitalization of the national and global economy);
- create new jobs and revitalize the tech industry with the export of a million new computers (a cost that is trivial compared to running one aircraft carrier out to the Persian Gulf);
- improve the living standards and democratic tendencies of our enemies;
- take a unique approach (totally untouched by any politician, celebrity or spokesperson with whom I am familiar);
- add unique relevancy to one of America's premiere radio voices.
In times like these it is imperative to approach our problems with ju-jitsu, creativity and alacrity. Are these the right ideas? It's too early to insure, but the same old approaches are far too perilous and profligate.
In short, crush the enemy like a millstone crushes an egg.
Thank you.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: EDITORIALS © January 2002 by Rory Donaldson. All rights reserved. In order to help reverse the tide of academic failure and optimize success, individuals may copy brainsarefun solutions for non-commercial use at no charge. Contents may not be sold or repackaged in any manner without the written permission of Rory Donaldson. Since all material is copyrighted, please ensure that this entire copyright notice and contact information continues to be attached to each article you download. Mr. Donaldson appreciates the feedback. Additional solutions may be viewed and downloaded at no charge by logging on to brainsarefun.com. New titles are being added regularly. To view most recently added titles you may click here.
Suggestions and comments encouraged, email: roryd@brainsarefun.com.
This document may be printed directly from your browser
or cut into your word processor for additional formatting.