On Thu, 2 May 1996 16:14 Ralph Niebuhr wrote -
> Joan Pomo writes: "As we get deeper into the information age, our primary
> and high schools are failing us. Who will we have to hire in 10 years?
> Thoughts?"
>
> My thoughts are that these statistics are rather frightening, especially
> when you consider that California's prison population has now surpassed
> the number of people enrolled in institutions of higher learning. The
> prison population itself is largely composed of dropouts and illiterates.
> Both the "not ready" statistics and the number of inmates will continue to
> grow until a way is found to radicaliy transform a public school system
> which utterly fails to awaken students' minds. This is the root of the
> problem.
>
> Teach students how to learn and research, and inspire them with a vision,
> and you will not be able to stop them. This is exactly what we are trying
> to do with our grown-up organizations. One of our highest priorities in
> this process should be to reach out and do whatever it takes to transform
> our educational system into a true "Learning Organization."
>
> Privatization might be a good first step. At the very least it would
> quickly flatten out the suffocating layers of administrative parasites
> that currently weigh down our public education system.
Great proposal. Some of our businesses have learned how to unleash
people and turn them from top-down driven, somewhat irresponsible
employees into self-controlled and self-motivated, responsible
associates or team players who live by values. In our family, we
proved that this can be done with children as well.
But I have something else to add about government being the problem.
We should not expect a federal government to carry out this function.
In government, there is literally no way to make accountability the
reality it is in the business world. My associate was there for over
20 years and learned that government employees are not parasites,
even though they act that way. The mistake is that we voters asked
the federal government to improve our educational systems when all
they are able to do is make them worse. The constitution specifically
left these powers to the states so that there would be competition
and no one solution which none of us can get away from by moving to
another state. Federal government should only be allowed to do those
things which no one else can do. We cannot have 50 different defense
establishments or 50 different foreign relations groups. But we
should have 50 different sets of environmental laws and 50 different
solutions to education so that we can all see which one works better
and can move to that. The same is true for welfare wherein the
federal government has literally destroyed millions of people in the
name of helping them and been a major factor in causing over one
third of all children to be born without a father. This is the only
way to insert enough accountability into a system of government to
expect some reasonable success. Of course, I agree that there is no
reason not to privatize our schools and perhaps many reasons why no
other alternative will be effective.
I caution you not to think of the government worker as the only
problem. The problem is voters who want someone else to fix it and
don't understand the limitations of government, particularly federal.
Just two cents, Joan
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joan Pomo The Finest Tools for Managing People
Simonton Associates Based on the book
jpomo@gate.net "How to Unleash the Power of People"
--"jpomo@gate.net" <jpomo@gate.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>