| Class of Tools Today's lesson, courtesy of credit-to-human-conciousness Russ Kick, appears to be about public education but is mostly about efficiency since the former got me thinking about the latter. http://www.thememoryhole.org/edu/sc "It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job. Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was. Fingers are pointed at various aspects of the schooling system—overcrowded classrooms, lack of funding, teachers who can't pass competency exams in their fields, etc. But these are just secondary problems. Even if they were cleared up, schools would still suck. Why? Because they were designed to. How can I make such a bold statement? How do I know why America's public school system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization, lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)? Because the men who designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system in the late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing. [...] Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'" While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process." In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population—mainly the children of the captains of industry and government—to rise to the level where they could continue running things. [...]" That the powerful wish for more of it is not a difficult notion. "The purpose of power is power." Those who seek power are forever those who seek power. A feedback loop with an axis of air, constant motion to retain a sense of identity because powermongering has eroded their core identities into nothing. They do not want to disappear -- they fear metaphysical extinction as any human does -- but with their core identity already gone, the only way they continue to exist is to keep the wheel turning, to keep power flowing in their bloodlines. Philosophically speaking: If I am nothing, I need as much material wealth as possible, as much land as possible, as much power as possible, as many memories and emotions in the minds of others -- positive or negative, it matters not -- as possible. I must control everything, take everything into myself and my ways in order to prove I exist... but since such a task is impossible in a single lifetime, the best I can do is keep that control in my lineage. Eventually, of course, my plans will disintegrate and my bloodline dilute or congeal, for no plan or act or thought of a temporary being can tie a string to eternity. If I am nothing, that matters not to me. I have no time to plan that far ahead when I still have power to gather and flood into my emptiness. But if I am something, if I am more than my body, I have little need for wealth and followers; I need only efficiency of resources to sustain my body and efficiency of companionship and human contact to sustain my self. I will be remembered and loved by a few, by those who I also love, for as long as our bodies hold out -- which is enough for me. Efficiency is knowing the word "enough" and being content with enough, to never waste one's time or resources and especially never waste the time or resources of another. Whenever evil men talk of efficiency, they mean only what is most conducive to their gaining power and/or molding others into controllable forms. And I mean it when I say "evil." Evil is too often treated as a generality, like "good," as in "good and evil are only matters of perspective." No they aren't. Any plan or act or thought considered evil by anyone boils down to selfishness, doing or procuring something for oneself at the deliberate expense of another, every time. And good is similarly reducable to selflessness, deliberately sacrificing to do something not in any way in one's own interest without the promise of a later reward. We are temporary creatures. Time and resources are all we have and too often we don't have enough. Evil is gathering more of both from others; good is sacrificing both so that others may have more. Inefficiency is wasting all one's time and resources, producing nothing for the enjoyment or utility or betterment of others; efficiency is wasting none of one's time or resources, spending it wisely in efforts to produce something enjoyable for others -- something for all the other somethings out there. The most we can do for each other is be good, efficient or both. |