IT ISN'T AMERICA'S STUDENT MATH AND READING SKILLS THAT ARE THE PROBLEM. IT IS THE FACTORY SOCIETY WE HAVE BECOME!

IT ISN’T AMERICA’S STUDENT MATH AND READING SKILLS THAT ARE THE PROBLEM. IT IS THE FACTORY SOCIETY WE HAVE BECOME!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 23, 2009

“As are families, so is society. If well ordered, well instructed, and well governed, they are the springs from which go forth the streams of national greatness, and prosperity, of civil order and public happiness.”

William Makepeace Thayer (1820 – 1898), American author

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A WRITER WRITES:

The following article is from one of my all-time favorite authors and journalists, Thomas Friedman, author of "The World is Flat." For anyone even remotely interested in the quality of America's public schools, this is sobering.

Call me parochial in the scope of my interest ("Think globally, act locally"), but I hope the Collier County Public Schools in particular become one of those "islands" of excellence he mentions. We've got our work cut out for us.

I'd love to hear your thoughts - but more importantly, please share this with your friends if you find it of value.

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OP-ED COLUMNIST THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

SWINNING WITHOUT A SUIT

Published: April 21, 2009

Speaking of financial crises and how they can expose weak companies and weak countries, Warren Buffett once famously quipped that “only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit.” So true. But what’s really unnerving is that America appears to be one of those countries that has been swimming buck naked — in more ways than one.

Credit bubbles are like the tide. They can cover up a lot of rot. In our case, the excess consumer demand and jobs created by our credit and housing bubbles have masked not only our weaknesses in manufacturing and other economic fundamentals, but something worse: how far we have fallen behind in K-12 education and how much it is now costing us. That is the conclusion I drew from a new study by the consulting firm McKinsey, entitled “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.”

Just a quick review: In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. dominated the world in K-12 education. We also dominated economically. In the 1970s and 1980s, we still had a lead, albeit smaller, in educating our population through secondary school, and America continued to lead the world economically, albeit with other big economies, like China, closing in. Today, we have fallen behind in both per capita high school graduates and their quality. Consequences to follow.

For instance, in the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment that measured the applied learning and problem-solving skills of 15-year-olds in 30 industrialized countries, the U.S. ranked 25th out of the 30 in math and 24th in science. That put our average youth on par with those from Portugal and the Slovak Republic, “rather than with students in countries that are more relevant competitors for service-sector and high-value jobs, like Canada, the Netherlands, Korea, and Australia,” McKinsey noted.

Actually, our fourth-graders compare well on such global tests with, say, Singapore. But our high school kids really lag, which means that “the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers,” said McKinsey.

There are millions of kids who are in modern suburban schools “who don’t realize how far behind they are,” said Matt Miller, one of the authors.

It is not that we are failing across the board. There are huge numbers of exciting education innovations in America today — from new modes of teacher compensation to charter schools to school districts scattered around the country that are showing real improvements based on better methods, better principals and higher standards. The problem is that they are too scattered — leaving all kinds of achievement gaps between whites, African-Americans, Latinos and different income levels.

Using an economic model created for this study, McKinsey showed how much those gaps are costing us. Suppose, it noted, “that in the 15 years after the 1983 report ‘A Nation at Risk’ sounded the alarm about the ‘rising tide of mediocrity’ in American education,” the U.S. had lifted lagging student achievement to higher benchmarks of performance? What would have happened?

The answer, says McKinsey: If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher. If we had closed the racial achievement gap and black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher.

There are some hopeful signs. President Obama recognizes that we urgently need to invest the money and energy to take those schools and best practices that are working from islands of excellence to a new national norm. But we need to do it with the sense of urgency and follow-through that the economic and moral stakes demand.
With Wall Street’s decline, though, many more educated and idealistic youth want to try teaching. Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, called the other day with these statistics about college graduates signing up to join her organization to teach in some of our neediest schools next year: “Our total applications are up 40 percent. Eleven percent of all Ivy League seniors applied, 16 percent of Yale’s senior class, 15 percent of Princeton’s, 25 percent of Spellman’s and 35 percent of the African-American seniors at Harvard. In 130 colleges, between 5 and 15 percent of the senior class applied.”

Part of it, said Kopp, is a lack of jobs elsewhere. But part of it is “students responding to the call that this is a problem our generation can solve.” May it be so, because today, educationally, we are not a nation at risk. We are a nation in decline, and our nakedness is really showing.

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I must confess at the outset that I am not a fan of Thomas Friedman. The world is not flat and technology has not made it so, but the world has caught up with and in some cases passed the United States as if it were standing still.

Technology, at this juncture, is mainly toys of distraction rather than tools of efficacy when it comes to electronics.

When used as tools, well, we have seen what damage it has done in a worldwide recession and a shrinking rather than an increasing world economy. Yes, I am saying the machinations of electronics have led to chaos and opportunity, and opportunity has led to chaos. Information technology and the Internet have been misused, but this is largely because we are in the dawn of this new age and should not ascribe fanciful claims.

It happened in the sixteenth century with the dissemination of the Bible and the Protestant Reformation, so it is not new. What is new is that we have an army of spin-doctors to put it all in a false light.

Journalists such as Friedman know how to hit the hot buttons, say the right things, elaborate with the right jingoisms for a society that seldom thinks at all much less very deeply.

American society wants clipped and understandable explanations for the brain drain without getting to the central issues that have orchestrated the problem. We love to expound on symptoms and direct our strategies to deal with them. Journalists are the new celebrities of that calling. To be fair, Friedman didn’t invent this process, but he is skilled in manipulating it to his purposes with a vulnerable public falling prey to his jingoistic analysis.

Friedman gives himself a way when he indicates he remains enamored of an anachronistic paradigm, the factory. He puts the whole problem of education for America’s decline in math and reading skills in terms of jobs and earnings: “They are being prepared for $12-an-hour jobs — not $40 to $50 an hour.”

You see, that is the problem. Education has become vocational training.

We have become lock, stock and barrel a factory society that treats education as a vocational conduit to well paying jobs to keep society’s factory operating at full tilt, which is not the function of education at all.

You need not take my word for it, but read Ivan Illich’s DESCHOOLING SOCIETY (1972) and TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY (1973), or Thomas Sowell’s INSIDE AMERICAN EDUCATION (1993), or Page Smith’s assessment of higher education in KILLING THE SPIRIT (1991) where they repeat this same charge.

Then there was Dr. Keith Hart, professor emeritus of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He was on a discussion panel recently on C-Span ruminating about our current economic chaos. The panel was clearly caught up in its own algorithms regarding economic multipliers and if the future held a zero or one or better forecast for such indices.

Economists discussing these mathematical abstractions have the hum of turbines in a power plant without the utility.

Professor Hart, who has a tendency to wave his hands like a humming bird desperate to stay in flight, said essentially that we have been in the business since WWII of creating synthetic jobs to fuel our synthetic economy which has in turn created a synthetic infrastructure to support a synthetic foundation. This has in turn taken us away from our values and therefore our concrete sensibilities.

Fifty years ago when I was in college that was already starting but it hadn’t yet reached the acceleration I experienced as a professor in the 1970s. That was the period when “management style” were the buzzwords, and former corporate executives were establishing MBA programs at Wharton, Harvard and MIT on the “case study” methodology in executive development. This was like a prairie fire across the country. No matter your discipline, everyone had to have an MBA.

We became a factory producing not tens of thousands but millions of MBAs with the precision of a Ford assembly line. I taught in these MBA programs from 1970 to 1980 for several universities as an adjunct professor. The MBA curriculum was one without imagination, creativity but with a uniformity and precision as if produced by a tool and die craftsman but without the same utility.

This was the army of the night (most were courses after work) that was setting the direction for the American ship of state. We have seen where it has taken us from Wall Street to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, from AIG to Bear Stearns, from Detroit auto to Pittsburgh steel, and beyond.

We have structured our society to take not give to get while the getting is good and then wonder why these lopsided educated people who run things have tried to walk off with the company store, run the company into the ground, merge and skim, or abort and fly to safety in their golden parachutes.

The Robber Barons were doing it in the nineteenth century, and many of them had the mistaken idea that by creating the Carnegie library system, Rockefeller Sloane-Kettering Institute, and the Mellon Institute, et al, that they had left enough culture to atone for all their sins of abuse of that pristine culture.

We talk about trickle down economics, but we don’t talk about trickle down culture.

Our culture has been starved of vibrancy, beauty, resilience, creativity, and essence because we have in the last hundred years not created a single Van Gogh, or one of his stature. This man in his madness and resistance to the church and state created out of an intrinsic need to express himself. It was his misfortune to live in another era of a dying culture. Create he did, and for it we are all blessed today. He never sold a single painting in his lifetime, yet his paintings today sell for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Alvin Toffler, who was thought to be an aberration, someone who came up with some ideas that could be quickly forgotten, described the society that the twentieth century created to satisfy first the Robber Barons, and their descendants, and then the army of automobile manufacturers and allied industries that followed.

As a boy, I vacationed in Detroit, where my uncle was a professor at the University of Detroit, and often was in the homes of automotive workers, homes that were upscale to my uncle’s home, and the homes of doctors and lawyers with whom he associated. None of these auto workers had gone to college, many had not finished high school, but their fathers and mothers, older brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts all worked for the “Big Three” automakers, and as Vance Packard was fond to say, were systematic waste makers.

They consumed and discarded as if the good times would never end. I seldom saw any books in these homes whereas I always saw them in homes of my uncle’s friends. I asked about this with the common response, “Who has time to read?” Indeed.

Toffler wrote in THE THIRD WAVE (1980) that industrialists in the early twentieth century found they needed employees who could read, write, and do simple math, and so they supported public education. These same industrialists said that they needed these educated workers to be obedient, compliant, polite, punctual, respectful of authority, controllable, and passive. Reading and writing and arithmetic were the explicit curriculum while the behavioral norms were the implicit curriculum. We are haunted by that legacy to this day.

This factory curriculum was in support of a factory output to minimize conflict, confrontation and communication with workers as persons. Frederick Winslow Taylor became an international educator and management consultant by treating people as things to be managed, manipulated, motivated and maneuvered, as the industrial needs required, while carefully conducting time studies to see that these workers performed at the ultimate level as if they were machines.

Now, why should it be a surprise that these workers would go home and would dominate their families and rear their children as if they were things to be seen and not heard, and to be obeyed without explanation, and to be punished arbitrarily because they could, and to be motivated by intimidation as they were motivated at work instead of with trust and love and understanding?

Nor why should we be surprised that our primary and secondary educational explicit and implicit curriculum should follow the same norm, or why should we think it was likely to be different at the university level?

I returned to the university in 1970 after graduating many years before, after working on four continents as an executive, and after reading extensively in many fields, including the one I was pursuing. My professors didn’t want to hear what I thought, what I had experienced, or how what they were teaching dovetailed or failed to dovetail with my empirical work. They wanted me to be submissive, passive, obedient to their authority, study for their tests, do their papers, and by all means attend every one of their lectures as if I were in the fourth grade.

I had one professor tell me,

“I understand you are a gifted writer, but I’m suggesting you drop my seminar, which you have attended infrequently (I was consulting on the side across the country to support a wife and four children) because if you write the best paper I’ve ever received I’m still going to give you the lowest failing grade I have ever given.”

“Not because of the quality of my work? Is that what you are saying?”

“Don’t be impertinent with me!” And with that,she walked away. I dropped the course.

For six years going to graduate school full time year around I ran into such walls frequently. But for the efforts of one professor, I never would have made it. I owe him more than I could ever repay him. In fact, I owe him my life.

You see, they tried to beat me down to the point that I didn’t want to live, to deny me the degree no matter how well I defended by thesis with my orals, or no matter how excellent my written thesis was.

This professor guided me through the final no man’s land of academia. I’ve often wondered how many others weren’t so lucky. Getting a Ph.D. is an endurance contest with a lot of chicken shit along the way. It is the reason fully 25 percent of Ph.D. candidates never receive their degrees, and are known as “ABD’s” – all but dissertation. A dissertation is a book and the committee evaluating that book is the same collection of professors wih whom one had been conducting open warfare.

You get much further in our adolescent factory society behaving rather than challenging.

Diana West is the author of a best selling book with the intimidating title to our factory society: THE DEATH OF THE GROWN-UP: HOW AMERICA’S ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT IS BRINGING DOWN WESTERN CIVILIZATION (2007). West is a columnist who has finally had enough. Those who read me will find she says many of the same things I have been saying for years. I am happy for her success. She doesn't skirt the issues, but zeroes in on them with punishing clarity.

That is why I insist writers such as Friedman are misleading the public by failing to acknowledge and then deal with the central issues derailing society, which are seeded in our collective passivity.

Collective passivity has been programmed into us because it has served the purposes of a factory society. We are no longer a factory society, but for all the tea in China you cannot wave a magic wand and dispense with that mindset. It is our culture, as we know it.

We have systematically and carefully orchestrated this mindset into our collective conscience while writers and economists want to tweak it at the edges and expect the core of our collective behavior to change. I wrote this in THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995):

“For the past quarter century, we have been bombarded with the idea of how to manage change. Change is of secondary importance. Change will come about naturally, over time, once we bring about change in ourselves. Order comes from within. To establish order takes more than good intentions, more than a change of attitude. Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way we view the world. Order requires the individual going against the grain.”

There would be no interest in change if we were still the dominant force in the world. While Friedman talks the nonsense about the world being metaphorically flat and President Obama uses his magical oratory hoping to match it with the numbers of recovery, the American electorate suffers from learned helplessness, terminal adolescence and arrested development, the legacy of a factory mentality (see SIX SILENT KILLERS CRC Press 1998).

We behave as a society are inclined to prescriptions for solving our dilemmas without identifying the nature of our decline. Obviously, the United States scores in math and reading skills are low, but so are our skills in self-restraint and delayed gratification.

You don’t get to where you wish to go on hope, alone. You get there by getting off your ass and showing the courage to be what you could be. You don’t get there by obsessively comparing and competing, but by finding your own center. You get there with hard work not by taking short cuts. You get there by realizing it is not genius that creates opportunity but preparation that does.

My BB is business manager for a Jewish Day School, classes from pre-K through eighth grade. Many of the parents send their children to this school at great sacrifice. They don’t do it because they are rich. They do it because they care to give their children a solid cultural and intellectual education. They do it because they have stepped outside our collective passivity at a price.

When I was in college, I took a tough curriculum of science and mathematics, physics and chemistry, and the best students in those courses were invariably Jewish men and women. Likewise, I took many electives in the humanities because I like books and ideas. Again, Jewish students led the way, and often were my best teachers.

During Christmas vacations, while in college, I would go to the Clinton County Library (Clinton, Iowa) every day to study. My mother would ask me if I saw any of my friends there. I would always say the same thing. “My Jewish friends.” I mention this because when the home is not a factory, but a place of encouragement and discovery children will behave differently.

All the magical rhetoric, and metaphorical ideas (“swimming without a suit”) are meaningless if we don’t abandon the factory paradigm. It no longer fits the times or the needs of society. We live in a culture that never wants to grow old and so has little interest in growing up. We will know when we have turned the corner when plastic surgery becomes an obsolete profession and people prefer Mozart to “American Idol.”

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