Cold Shower 17: Fall Out of Too Much, Too Many, Too Soon

Cold Shower The Fall Out of Too Much, Too Many, Too Soon
Volume I, Article XVII


Dr. Fisher, I am 16-years-old, a high school sophomore making good grades, but already getting anxious about my future. I have an older brother who graduated from college last year, and he still hasn’t gotten a job. My dad was laid-off after working twenty-five years for the same company. He just turned fifty and hasn’t been able to connect with another employer, although he has sent out more than 500 resumes. My mother works as a bookkeeper for a private school. She is the least educated member of the family, and the only one employed. My first question is what do you think I should be doing? Quite frankly, I am down on college, seeing what has happened to my dad and brother. My other question is what hope is there for them job wise in the future?


If you read my published works, then you know my approach to questions is non-specific, in other words, general, as I claim no faddish answers for the swift changes rocking our society. We experience life and react to situations primarily as we are conditioned or program to react.

The Genesis of the Problem

We are moving from an industrial to an information society. A provincial view of life is now being replaced by a more global view. The United States is no longer the center of the universe. It is now a country on a world stage of energetic competitors. America remains the dominant economic and military power, but other countries have advantages we never anticipated, such as qualified workers willing to work for far less than American workers are used to being paid.

When the industrial revolution took hold of the American economy in the early twentieth century, eight out of every ten workers were in farming or made their living supporting farmers.

By mid-twentieth century, or just after World War II, eight out of every ten workers were employed in factories. Only ten in one hundred workers were in farming. These factory workers were called “blue collar workers” because they wore blue denim shirts and coveralls.

Today, in the twenty-first century, only one in ten workers are employed in factories. Nearly nine of every ten workers are employed in Information Technology or jobs that have become called “white collar” or “service industry” jobs.

The irony here is that these jobs were initially designated as “white collar” because people dressed up for work as if going to a wedding. Many high tech employees today, however, dress as casually as if they plan a day at the beach. Still, the “white collar” designation still holds. These professionals have specialized skills developed after long preparatory academic careers. Only two in every one hundred workers are involved in farming or in support of farming.

The Industrial Revolution needed workers who could read, operate complex equipment and make elementary mathematical calculations. So, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was a massive drive to establish compulsory and free public education.

Public grammar school taught students the three “r’s” of reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithematic from kindergarten through eighth grade. Four years of high school followed for a much smaller population of those eligible to attend.

High school in the early twentieth century was more a classical educational program even in the farming states such as Iowa. It included German, Latin, mathematics, and four years of English, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, physiography, botany and zoology. There were no electives except a choice between German and Latin. Additions such as manual training, domestic science, commercial courses, and public speaking were added between 1910 and 1915, as was music. Sporadically, additional courses included agriculture, journalism, art, and mechanical drawing.1

Few college baccalaureate degree programs today can compare with this curriculum.

Besides the mandatory teaching of the three “r’s” in grammar school, there was social programming in student punctuality, obedience, politeness, passivity, submissiveness to authority, and discipline to abiding by the rules.

Today, more than one hundred years after the establishment of the Industrial Revolution, society is burdened with a constituency that because of this mandatory programming is passive, reactive, polite, obedient, and submissive to rules and regulations, policies and procedures that are in neither conducive to nor in the best interests of the public.

It took more than one hundred to program workers and citizens into this passive mindset, and it may take that long to program them out of it.

What complicates this picture further is that rhetoric and cosmetic changes are constantly instituted in denial of this reality.

The people who suffer most are the average Joe and Jane whose parents, and grandparents, and great grandparents thought they were behaving as they should: not questioning what they were taught in school; being safe hires on the job; and putting their lot in life in the hands of others to take care of them during and after their working careers. This is now blowing up in society’s face.



The Genesis of the Solution: Reality, Readiness, Response

You are too young to remember the impact on our society when the Russians surprised us by successfully launching Sputnik into space. Panic followed. Americans are good at reacting to crises, but not nearly as good at anticipating them. Therefore, panic is part of our established norm, and panic never solves anything.

Panic personified is a convenient scapegoat. We love scapegoats with the vigor of “true believers.” If we can put a face on “an issue,” it is half resolved with everything expected to fall into place. Then, we can go back into complacency until the next crisis.

Experts pointed to education as the cause of the Russian surprise. An immediate overhaul in the teaching of science commenced with “the new math.” Now, children had trouble with fractions and simple division.

A crisis represents a pattern, “a syndrome,” or set of symptoms, which involves too much radical change, too many specific solutions, too disruptive an approach to the problem, and all happening too soon to be appropriately absorbed in the new reality. Why is this?

We are a solution driven culture. We look for problems to match our solutions, as we are far more interested in solving the problem than defining it. Defining problems is hard work. Besides, solutions are more fun. It takes time, patience, persistence, and many false steps to identify a problem, whereas there is always a cadre of experts at the ready to provide answers so desperately sought.

For instance, obesity, AIDS, drug abuse, alcoholism, pollution and many other societal problems see solutions in genetics, miracle drugs, surgery, talking cures, and technology. Few are interested in defining these problems in terms of lifestyle choices.

In a culture of too much, too many, too soon, we would define “poverty” in terms that half the population of the world would see as a high standard of living. Many in South America, Africa and South East Asia don’t make in a year what an average American worker makes in a week. Visit one of these countries on your vacation. From your luxury hotel balcony, you will see miles of squalor below. Go into the bush in Africa, and you will say, “How can people live like this?” They can and do because this is all they have ever known, and for generations.

Our poor relatives in the world can no longer be ignored because they are on our television screen as we eat our sumptuous meals. This is reality. This is the world of the twenty-first century. This is your world and that of your brother, father and mother.

To deal with this world calls for readiness. What do I mean by readiness? Readiness involves being aware of the world we live in, a world that may be quite different than the world we first entered. Each generation lives in a different time, a different culture, and is exposed to different stresses and strains, and different demands.

Your father is what has come to be called a “baby-boomer,” that is, he was born after World War II. Today, a baby-boomer turns your father’s age of 50 every 7.5 seconds, not minutes, not hours, not days, not weeks, but every 7.5 seconds.

Meanwhile, people like this writer are living and working longer, which puts pressure on those maturing to 50 in a more competitive bind. Add to this that technology has changed drastically even in the working career years of your father. Additionally, technology workers in India, for example, are willing to work for far less than American workers of comparable technological skills. Complicating the picture even further, American providers of cheap products, such as Wal-Mart, that you and I enjoy as purchasers, have forced these providers to relocate to China to manufacturer their products, where workers make only a fraction a day of what their counterparts in America are used to receiving per hour.

It doesn’t stop there. The color of the color of workers has changed from blue to white, from manual to mental labor, from a specific place of employment to working out of the home or on the road with a lap top and cell phone. Companies heavy in real estate, plants and equipment with rigid payrolls and stifling benefit programs are being forced to relocate to cheaper labor markets, or into bankruptcy, or out of business at an alarming rate. This is reality. People like your father are caught in this maelstrom.

The American answer to this is crisis management. Management awards executives good at managing crises. The stock market crash of 1929, the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 by the Imperial Forces of Japan, the launching of Sputnik in October 1957, the economic surge of Japan in the late 1960s, and the Twin Tower terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 were failures of anticipation, indicators of a lack of readiness.

These crises made heroes of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression, American management in the conduct of the war, NASA and President Kennedy in the space program, the application of quality engineering of Peter Drucker, W. Edwards Deming and J. M. Juran in answer to the Japanese economic threat, and the leadership of the New York City mayor, and the heroics of police, firefighters and rescue teams to the Twin Towers’ disaster.

Yet, in each instance, there evidence existed to anticipate if not foil these crises. It was partly a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing, and partly the programming of a century of reacting rather than anticipating crises.

Reality was denied, readiness was not evident, and so response in all cases, at least at first, fell short of the mark. The hubris of America is that its hat full of tricks is inexhaustible. As colossal the error, suitable correction is always assured. No more.

People must be reprogrammed in awareness, the first step in readiness. They must expect sacrifice, inconvenience, the loss of luxury, and the experience of pain to assimilate change. If that sounds like a mouthful for one so young, it is. Put simply, to bring people on board – that means children, students and parents, workers and retired citizens – everyone must be considered part of the problem to arrive at a real solution. The days of waiting for orders from headquarters are over. Passé.

In education, statistics are generated to show American students near the bottom of advanced technological nations in math and language skills. Every time an educational problem is identified a new curriculum is proffered with several experts in the wings looking for problems on which to attach their solutions. The problem is wider, deeper and more pervasive than an educational shortfall.

We have become a commodity driven society. We believe you can package values, or enlightenment, as if our educational institutions were factories producing marketable products.

Employers believe in this same packaging. To compete, they upgrade the educational requirements of new hires by demanding they be college graduates. There is an assumption here that college graduates are more able, when in fact they often aren’t.

The education factory is now producing high school and college students who frequently possess a sheepskin, but can hardly read, write, or think. Educator Ivan Illich writes:

A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Such a system would require the application of constitutional guarantees to education. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support, through a regressive taxation, a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings, which in fact restricts the public’s chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market. It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.2

This was written more than a quarter century ago admonishing educators to be more responsive to changing times. It apparently fell on deaf ears. Studies have shown that high school and college curriculums have had inflation in grading and deflation in basic skills learned. Consequently, employers are often forced to retrain workers in basic reading, writing, calculating and reasoning skills to do specific jobs.3 The fall out of this deficiency has been that the United States has to import more than a million skilled workers a year to meet industrial technical requirements.

Your personal response to all this can start by identifying what you really enjoy doing. Learn your basic skills in school and follow your passions. Consider what you like to do in your free time. Make a summary of what you value, and what interests you. Don’t let how much money you might make in the future be a determining factor. Your world is opening up to you. It is not the same world as your father or your brother. It would appear your mother has made the most of her world. You should expect nothing less of your father and brother.

A college education is not necessarily the answer. College is not for everyone, and therefore not everyone needs a college education. One of the most brilliant thinkers I know never finished high school. He has written several books and is self-taught in philosophy and the arts.4

Value added skills in a wide variety of occupations are always in demand. I know of a young woman, who became involved in a program in high school called “distributor education.” She liked “doing hair” and took this program, spending part-time working for a cosmetologist, and part-time going to high school her junior and senior year. She now makes more than $100,000 a year as a cosmetologist in Florida.

A young man I know, who was actually down on education, and even down on high school, became involved in the same program. He started out as a laborer in a small sign company with gross sales of less than $1 million and fifteen employees. Twenty-five years later, he is still with the same sign company. Gross sales now are in excess of $35 million with more than 100 employees, and he is managing the place. With bonuses, he is making in excess of $100,000.

A third person I might mention passed only one course in two years of junior college. He received a tennis scholarship to a four-year-college, where he was number one on the tennis team all four years. He still failed to graduate falling three hours short, taking a position as a professional with a tennis club before the end of his last semester. He has over the past twenty-seven years gone to increasingly prestigious tennis & racquet clubs. Last year, he earned nearly $300,000 working for a club with forty courts and a staff of twenty teaching professionals.

In each instance, there was trauma before settling securely in their respective career paths. None of these career paths were conventional. Some might say they got lucky and stumbled into fortuitous situations. I know otherwise because I am their father. They did what they loved. Excelling in the job was rewarded accordingly. The job was the love, not the end.

My suggestion to you is that you don’t listen to experts. Listen to your own heart. Follow your own head.

Your father should do the same. For perhaps the first time in his life, he can do what he wants to do, not what he has to do; being let go has given him permission. He should forget sending out resumes. They are a waste of time.

Your brother’s situation is slightly more complicated. He feels betrayed. He followed the rules, got his degree, sacrificed his time, money, energy, and emotions going to school those many years, and now he wonders, “for what?” He must let go of his anger. Chalk it up to experience, and get on with his life. No one owes anyone else a living, but everyone is owed a second chance. The darkest hour is when the brightest light shines through if we are prepared to see it.

Finally, a word about your mother. I understand she is a self-taught bookkeeper with a bubbly disposition. She knows the secret already. She made herself useful in the service of others. Talk as a family. This will help each of you get started on your own private road to fulfillment. The rest will follow.

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Copyright (1996) James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.