HAPPINESS & FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES ACCORDING TO DR. FISHER!

HAPPINESS & FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES ACCORDING TO DR. FISHER!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 8, 2009

"The secret of happiness is freedom; the secret of freedom, courage."

Thucydides (460 - 400 BC), Greek historian

A WRITER WRITES:

I read your "A Time to Pause," which was forwarded to me. I understand it is from your new book, Confident Thinking, which I'd like to read. Where can I get a copy? I do have a concern. This essay makes several claims against our national fabric. Are these covered in the book? I am curious why so much on happiness. You do dance about.

You seem to be down on our society without specifics, which I find disturbing. Again, I hope these are covered.

I'm an educator, and you seem to imply -- again without saying it -- that we in education have the Herculean task to right society. If society is out to lunch, then why single us out? What can we do about it? I mean no disrespect but it would seem you're throwing cherry bombs over the transit. I don't find that too constructive.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

First of all, the book is still in manuscript form. It doesn't as yet have a publisher. Should it be published, it would not be published until 2010. Regarding your unease, I make no apologies for its construction or directness. The book elaborates on ten steps to bring about Confident Thinking.

Confident Thinking is the process. Happiness, which is so ambiguously defined in our culture, is an outcome. You don't seek happiness. You choose to be happy or you choose to be unhappy. Happiness is not a thing. Happiness is a state of mind. Once you attempt to define it, you lose it. That may sound simplistic, but there you have it.

The book is about the freedom to make choices, and the courage to do so. It also deals with the consequences of being in a society dominated by reactive tendencies. We are all products of that inclination.

Otherwise, you perceive me correctly. I see a total breakdown of society, which is attempting to restore its integrity and economic stability with the same thinking that tore it down. Our cultural wheel spins around and lands on the same scandals over and over again. Today, we have Bernard Madoff, who ripped off investors in a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. He now shares Rogues Gallery with such characters of yesterday as Jeffrey Skilling of Enron Corporation and Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom.

The crimes of greed and irrationality remain the same even if the cost to employees and investors continues to appreciate. We are stuck not only in avarice but a kind of thinking that produces these straw men. We are not only afraid to grow up. We don't know how to grow up.

I am an "old timer," and old timers can be ignored or disregarded, as they are essentially invisible. That is the essence of "A Time To Pause." We live in the moment; we ignore history, and hope for the best, only to wonder after the fact if moderation might have been a better idea.

THE FOURTH WAVE?

Alvin Toffler in "The Third Wave" (1980) considered the changes in man's history as wave like phenomena. "The First Wave" of change found most of us living in small migratory groups and fed ourselves by foraging for food, fishing, hunting and herding.

Roughly 10,000 years ago, the "Agricultural Revolution" crept slowly across the planet, as man as nomad gave up this wandering, settled on a place, established a village, cultivated the land, and commenced a whole new way of life. Today tribal nomads can be found in only a few places in South America and New Guinea.

"The Second Wave" took hold as craftsmanship at home grew into small guilds of manufacturing. North America and Europe scrambled to build factories during the "Industrial Revolution," leading to the creation of cities with massive shifts in population. The American Civil War spiked this population explosion, as it became the first war of factory-type production, producing sophisticated weapons, including armored ships and even submarines.

In 1900, to register a sense of "The Second Wave," the population of the agricultural state of Iowa was larger than California and Florida combined. Today, both these states have populations in the double-digit millions while Iowa remains roughly 4 million.

More than 80 percent of Americans in 1900 were in farming. Today, less than 3 percent are in agriculture, feeding a nation of more than 300 percent larger than it was in 1900, while incredibly, farm products still lead the nation in exports.

The American genius has never been into making things, but into growing things, and no nation has ever surpassed it in that genius. One might add this has been in no small way due to creative thinking. Iowa farmers, for example, were early on the best educated and most innovated in agriculture in the country. Iowa's literacy rate has remained close to 100 percent since early in the last century.

"The Third Wave" is the "Electronic Revolution," as it moves across cyberspace connecting us into a global village. While The First Wave is largely extinct, The Second Wave is still critical to our survival, but has changed drastically from family farms to corporate farms, from allowing nature to nature to radically changing it with pesticides and fertilizers as well as with hybrid technology.

"The Third Wave" has made astonishing progress while dislodging us from our roots, from the rhythms of our lives, from living within our means, and indeed, from maintaining our comfortable identity.

"The Third Wave" has explored diverse subjects such as the gyrating economy, virtual reality, the "blip culture," the post nuclear family, the "electronic cottage," and the idea of a nation-state and a national religion. There has been a tentative shift from obsolete politics in government, obsolete management in the workplace, and obsolete concepts and ideologies from socialism to communism, from capitalism to democracy.

"The Third Wave" is challenging the power elite in education, industry, economics, religion and government. Nothing is sacred anymore. That said people remain like rag dolls in the wind or dangling participles in a grammar not yet created. It is "A Time To Pause."

* * * * * *

For the past fifty years, such terms as alienation and self-estrangement have been tossed around leading to what has been called an "identity crisis" and "The Age of Anxiety." Society has failed to prepare citizens for this abrupt transition.

In society's hubris, it has counted on people's resilience to muddle through essentially unscathed, as it had in the past. The First Wave to The Second Wave was gradual. Institutions, and the infrastructure were in a state of being created, and this at a pace consistent with the growing of grass. So there was little trauma.

The transition from The Second Wave to The Third Wave has been meteoric and, alas, traumatic. One day we were pecking away at a typewriter and the next day at the keyboard of a computer. One day we were talking to each other from our cubicles or over the fence, the next day we were viewing video images of each other on cell phones. One day the left hand of business didn't know what the right hand was doing, the next day everything was reduced to 0 and 1 in ubiquitous digital fashion charting our every purchase and action instantaneously. Satellites dishes flying about the globe sent electronic signals back to earth, which bounced off cell phone towers, and computer monitoring stations tracing the most minute of human activities on earth.

Suddenly, Electronic Man was God. The sense that God was watching us was unnerving enough, but now there was no place to hide from each other. We are told we have become a schizophrenic culture but we have earned the identity quite honestly. How could it be otherwise? Remember, this has all happened in the last twenty-five years.

* * * * *

Some one hundred years ago, or after the Industrial Revolution, Henry Ford created the assembly line of making automobiles. His efficiency expert, Frederick Winslow Taylor instituted time management and called it "scientific management." This meant treating workers as interchangeable cogs in the machine of production. Taylor had contempt for workers as individuals finding them more resembling oxen than any other type.

We may have forgotten that government sponsored free but compulsory public education is an early twentieth century phenomenon. As Toffler points out, it wasn't a charitable gesture but a necessary condition to support manufacturing in The Second Wave.

Workers had to be able to read blueprints, make simple calculations, and comprehend the meaning of engineering designs. There was also an implicit agenda. Students were programmed to be punctual, polite, obedient, submissive, and to be fearful of, but also dependent on authority figures.

Students in school were not being taught to think but to do precisely as they were told, in other words, to "react to instructions." Workers, off the farm for the first time, and knowing no better, accepted the poor pay, horrible working conditions, and even worse living arrangements. They even fed their children to the giant machine where the children were in turn mercilessly exploited. A little education would prove a dangerous thing.

The Robber Barons, such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt were scoundrels in disguise. These names now register much respect: Rockefeller for his charities, Carnegie for the public library system, and Vanderbilt for our national parks. But the most generous sobriquet would be "hardheaded businessmen."

They didn't see workers as people nor did they worry about collateral damage to their delicate individual or collective psyches. Workers were fodder to an objective.

The Robber Barons legacy was to create like-minded individuals. Alfred Sloan of General Motors comes to mind. He once bragged during the Great Depression, although having to lay off tens of thousands of workers, that GM never missed paying a single dividend to stockholders during that national economic collapse.

They were ruthless exploiters of workers, but they were not the first nor would they be the last. Robber Barons have always been with us. As feudalism gave way to capitalism in the sixteenth century, as the Civil War gave way to carpetbaggers in the South in the nineteenth century, and as moderation in executive compensation gave way to excess in the twentieth century, people in power have made it their business to take advantage of the little man.

Now the Captains of Industry have been reduced to economic cripples. Largely due to their managerial leaderless leadership, the world economy has shrunk by $50 trillion at this writing in 2009.

* * * * * *

Here early in the twenty-first century, the little man, better educated and more able than most of his bosses, capable of carving his own initials into history, is being asked once again to make amends for the Ship of State going to ground. What has he been asked to do? He has been asked to bail out these power brokers in finance and commerce, these executives in industry and government without a say in the matter. It is interesting that gloom and doom are promoted as the dialogue of fear rages across the air waves if he, the taxpayer, fails to be obliging. It is "A Time To Pause."

* * * * * *

A curious thing happened in the 1930s. Despite not being trained to think for themselves, workers asked for better working conditions, better pay, and more control of what they did. Industry sent in social sciences to study these workers, Elton Mayo for one. Workers responded for the attention by working harder, and thus commenced the ironic and misbegotten humanistic movement. Working conditions improved, but workers remained in their place with social engineering now a tool of the Captains of Industry.

Some saw through this and attempted to form unions. The Robber Barons sent in thugs to break up union meetings. People were killed. Eventually, unions got a foothold in such industries as the steel and automotive. Unfortunately, the union hierarchy became a mirror image of corporate management. It is little wonder, then, how it would come to pass that union leadership would sell out to management. Workers were given pay concessions and entitlements but no control of their work or participation in the decision-making. They were expected to do, not to think. Workers suffer for that breach in control to this day, as does every segment of American society.

The Great Depression came and workers were punished for corporate speculation. But then, in the early 1940s, industry was once again thriving, as World War Two mobilized the nations industries with the War Powers Act (1942 - 1947). Following the war, a totally engaged United States was situated to mass-produce for a world leveled by devastation. The American Century, as pundits called it, was moving down the slippery slope to "empire."

* * * * * *

This commentary has been about people and their weaknesses. Nations have their vulnerabilities to pride and avarice as well. It would suggest the nation-state is disinclined to learn from history, yet it is there for all to see. We have the rise and fall of Greek Civilization, along with the rise and fall of the Roman, Spanish, and British Empires. They were once where the United States was in the second half of the twentieth century. Although they are all still with us, they are empires no more.

Each was once considered invincible; each became warlike; each rode the waves of hegemonic pride, and each fell on its sword. Is this to be the destiny of The United States?

Since World War Two, we have suffered an undeclared war and stalemate with North Korea in the 1950s, a defeat in Vietnam bridging the 1960s and 1970s, and now the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq bridging the 1990s and the new century. We are bleeding red blood and red ink, as did our dominant predecessors.

In the euphoria of 1945 victories in Europe and Japan in W.W.II, America slept economically, only to find in the 1960s, Europe and Asia were in full recovery.

Today, Europe and Japan own our manufacturing industries that shall never return. We are now in The Third Wave, the Information and Electronic Age. Everything has changed while we remain essentially the same, crippled by nostalgia.

Like societies before us, we prefer to rest on our laurels, hoping for change without the concomitant courage required to change, thinking and doing as we have done since the 1940s. We make cosmetic changes while being careful not to disrupt atavistic leadership or to discard our anachronistic infrastructure. We are behaving precisely as other "empires" behaved in their decline, only ours is more rapid. How could it be otherwise? There has been more change in the past thirty years than in the previous three hundred. It is "A Time To Pause."

* * * * * *

You say you're an educator, but you haven't indicated what level or what discipline. If it is high school, you've got your work cut out for you. High school has become a playground to feed the insatiable appetite of technology with less to do with education and more to make everyone computer literate. This is reminiscent of the public school objective of industry in early twentieth century. Being able to manipulate handheld electronic devices is not thinking. They are tools and I sense an opportunity for students to do much cheating in school as in other places as well.

It has been my observation that high school teachers are a combination of cheerleaders, class monitors, baby-sitters and mood facilitators. The most popular teachers are the teachers the students "love," which doesn't necessarily mean they are the best teachers.

Cosmetic change is the rule in declining corpocracy. It is meant to show corpocracy's soft and caring side, but has turned out to be a luxury it and we can no longer afford. Despite this, corpocracy persists as business as usual, moving the furniture around but changing nothing.

Workers in the steel, automotive and general manufacturing industries are out of sync with the times, and should have been preparing for The Third Wave. Workers held on to their comfortable lifestyles, denied the inevitable changes that they could clearly see on the horizon, but did nothing. Of course, they weren't programmed to do anything. Everyone has been complicit in this denial.

Top down authority and decision-making no longer work, yet it persists. Being polite, obedient, submissive and fearful of authority no longer work, but no one has attempted to change this programming. We remain reactive and dependent students, workers and citizens. We have a President of Hope, who is unintentionally reinforcing despair. We need to be reprogrammed with sacrifice, struggle and courage to make students, workers and citizens able to cope with the reality of today.

A society on automatic pilot cannot help but produce students, workers and citizens who are dependent, reactive, and motivated by fear. Our century long public school system has succeeded in making us permanently juvenile. Look around you. We may reach chronological maturity but most of us remain as students, workers, and citizens suspended in terminal adolescence and arrested development. We are collectively victims of learned helplessness.

What is worse, our total social and political culture has formed an institutional cocoon of support around us, which has little interests in us challenging it much less growing up. The economic bailout, which is insane at one level of thinking, is consistent with this programming.

* * * * * *
Entitlement programs are blamed for the collapse of the automotive and steel industries. This is ludicrous compared to the toxic nature of worker programming. What we have sowed we now reap. It cannot be any other way. Entitlements were an attempt to bring workers on board without giving up control. Needed now across the nation are thinking workers who will take the initiative, assume risks, and they are not ready. This failed programming will take at least fifty years to correct, and it hasn't even been contemplated much less commenced. Instead, we are giving all our little darlings computers and other electronics to play video games. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., why did you have to die?

Given these striking developments, we shy away from real pain or change. Take the panic that followed the 1957 successful launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union. The panic gave way to the push for "new math and science" in school. Fifty years later we see it was a failed reactive strategy.

American students today in terms of math and science are some of the poorest in the developed world, yet the US spends more for education. We'll throw dollars at any problem and hope that some of them stick to resolve the issue. We're doing it again with the bail out, and yet we fail to see the irony. We are not too good at looking at ourselves, still enamored of our place in the world.

The Sputnik hysteria of the 1950s was topped when in 1980 Tom Brokaw wailed on NBCTV, "Japan Can, Why Can't We?" The program was an invitation to viewers to see why Japan, Inc. was eating our lunch in terms of automotive, appliance and glass and steel sales. Immediately, there was a drive to duplicate the miracle of Japan failing to consider what worked in Japan - a group-oriented society -- would not work in the US - an individual oriented society.

We took some solace in placing a man on the moon in the late 1960s, while remaining enslaved to a factory mentality with Machine Age thinking into the twenty-first century.

* * * * * *

Education demonstrated its soft and caring side by giving in to cultural studies, feminine studies, and ethnic studies, as well as to political correct curriculums. A college education became the province of the noisy minority. The real absurd part of this folly, however, was the onus to learn was not placed on students, but teachers were placed on trial.

It wasn't the student who was failing if the student had poor grades or did poorly on his Standard Achievement Tests (SAT's), but his teachers. Teachers became the exclusive measure of academic performance. Federal funds were withheld from a school if a school did poorly to punish it, as if punishment was a learning construct.

The fault was always that of "poor teaching," not poor parenting, not poor societal reinforcement, not the fault of the media, but of teachers in the combat zone of education.

Teachers were expected to get inside these little minds and motivate them to learn when all distracting stimuli from television to video games, from too little exercise to too many empty calories were making the challenge an impossible one. These little minds could play house and have babies but they couldn't control their libidos, or for that matter, their wills. Schopenhauer looks more prophetic all the time.

Then teachers and the entire educational industry got clever. They would teach to standard achievement tests. In the day-to-day studies, they would go over the exam questions in Q&A sessions, which would essentially cover everything that would be asked, and they would do this right before the test. SAT's scores improved, and students got better grades, while teachers survived.

* * * * * *

Learning to think, it would seem, is ancillary to the societal educational process. Today, education has become a series of second chances.

If a student gets a bad grade in a course, he can take the course over and erase the bad grade. There is no sense of shame or consequences with any meaning.

If a student drops out of school, he can get a meaningless GED, and take some innocuous courses at a community college, to qualify for an actual university.

There is no penalty of delay or consequences in making poor choices, so we have a veritable inflation in the taking of them. Moreover, if a student is disruptive in class, the teacher is scrutinized for her class control, while the student is unlikely to be expelled but suffer a meaningless caution. Here again, the teacher is on trial.

In college, one reason students want to get into the most prestigious universities is because once in, nearly all students have "A's" averages, according to those monitoring such activities. There is also truth to the fact that with such credentials they have an invitation to the best jobs in America, not necessarily because they can think but because they now have the pedigree.

Even in these pristine institutions, professors are alleged to teach to the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) so as to see the majority of their students making the cut to our top graduate schools.

Education is a factory industry. Society has failed to move beyond Machine Age thinking as traditional academia is holding on for dear life as it becomes increasingly irrelevant. Do I exaggerate? Not if what is happening at the grass roots level in my own backyard is any indication.

DRAMATIC REWRITE (The Tampa Tribune, Sunday, March 8, 2009)

Florida education is taking all the stops out. It is unapologetically preparing students for advanced placement classes, and eventually, college. It is called "Springboard," a new hands-on method of teaching math and language arts curriculum in middle and high school. It is supposed to make learning more engaging for a generation of students who want only to play with their GameBoys, while being meant to build higher-level thinking ability, but get this, critical thinking ability, the type of thinking that has us deep in yogurt now.

One should be a little suspicious of "Springboard" since the College Board, the company for the SAT test and Advanced Placement courses and tests, created it. Few seem concerned that learning is formulated to a test rather than having the test formulated to learning. Quoting Marilyn Brown, author of the article: "The program uses engaging fun activities to improve critical thinking skills and promises to prepare more students for Advanced Placement and college-level classes."

First of all, we need creative thinking skills, which are not taught, to compliment critical thinking skills that have been the limit to our problem solving. Second, if you teach to a test more students will do well on the test, which is a poor measure of comprehension of the subject matter. Third, "Springboard," seemingly, reinforces Machine Age thinking, when we're now in the digital age. And fourth, one of the beauties of going through the pain of learning concepts is that they stick with us. It would seem from this piece that we have gone from rote learning in education to education as entertainment.

* * * * * *
Before "Springboard," 12th grade students in Hillsborough County (Florida) read "Beowulf," Homer's "Iliad," and Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales."

Now, they will read Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club," George Orwell's "Shooting An Elephant," scenes from "Forrest Gump," and Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window." Music will be Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It From The Grapevine, and photo essays.

English Renaissance literature that included Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and Sophocles will be replaced by scenes from "My Fair Lady," "The Manchurian Candidate," "Nine to Five," "Cinderella," and "The Legend of Bagger Vance." They will reflect on critical studies of cultural, feminist and Marxist movements.

Poetry and essays of John Donne, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and Sir Isaac Newton will be replaced by such stories as "My Sister's Keeper" by Jodi Picoult or "The Poisoned Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver, and the song by Billy Joel "We Didn't Start The Fire."

The Romantic period: the poetry of Robert Burns, William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats, and Jane Austen's fiction.

This is to be replaced by "Othello," and its modern versions, The Drama of Racial Intermarriage," staging, composing and writing an argumentative timed writing.

Fortunately, "Springboard" has made only minor intrusion into traditional math, but even that is disturbing. Algebra I Springboard lessons start out with students arranging marshmallows and spaghetti on blue paper to discover ways to multiply binomials.

Now, I know mathematics is scary for a lot of people, and I sense this because math is made as if something way out in left field and not instrumental to our daily lives. Rather than marshmallows and spaghetti, I would think it would be more appropriate to show how Algebra is applied in "CSI" to do the chemistry, or in "Numbers" used to create the statistics, and then how both chemistry and statistics are common to our daily lives through demographic and psychometric instruments.

Yes, there is some difficulty going from numbers to algebraic letters in Algebra and their relationship to numbers, and how the two relate to solving unknowns. We don't have slide rulers anymore, but students have handheld calculators. The properties of logarithms and exponential functions could be shown in the design of these calculators.

If I read this article correctly, there has not been a departure from geometry, which comes the Greek word "to measure the earth." Geometry is used in these CSI dramas to chart the trajectory of a bullet, or to measure how tall a person was from triangular coordinates. Fascinating! If a student is lucky, and I was such a student sixty years ago, I was able to take plane geometry, solid geometry, spherical geometry and analytical geometry in high school, which are basic building blocks to life.

If I were teaching mathematics, I would begin by teaching the history and forms and applications of mathematics in everyday life. Mathematics is not separate from us but integral to us. I would have my students discuss the great mathematicians and how they came to discover math's various forms. And I would show that most of our great philosophers came out of a mathematical tradition.

Why? Ah, now that is the question. There is logic to mathematics, which is the fundamental grammar of science, but it is rooted in man's understanding of his existence measured against what is unknown and possibly knowable.

I often write about my anger with science and technology, but my anger is not directed at the purity of the language but its uses and abuses. Because in science and technology we can do something it doesn't mean it is right or good or has long-term advantage to society. That is why I feel a cultural tradition in literature and the arts is critical to having a valid perspective and moral underpinning to do the right thing. I sense that Springboard is not the disease but symptomatic of the malady.

Be always well,

Jim