Truth Versus Ideology James R. Lake It is your responsibility to understand that Our Schools and Education: the War Zone in America, Truth Versus Ideology.
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- Philosophy of Education (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Management Ideology: The Last Bastion of American Hegemony
I mean the basic frameworks and assumptions we use to talk about the practice and profession of management; our underlying beliefs about what management is trying to achieve, and how it goes about achieving it. There is a management ideology in existence today that took shape a hundred years ago, primarily through the ideas and practices of US-based management thinkers, and which continues to dominate the way we think about management.
Its key features are:. Setting and delivering of objectives according to the demands of shareholders. Coordination of effort and activities through professional bureaucracy.
An emphasis on efficiency and productivity as the key measures of success. Of course this ideology is not without its detractors. There is an ongoing deb ate among academics about each one of these principles, and there have been periodic challenges to this way of thinking from other parts of the world for example the Japanese quality movement in the s, and the European Quality of Working Life movement of the s.
But the point is, this ideology is the mainstream - it is the primary way of thinking about, teaching, and executing management.
For those studying management, or applying its methods, any nuances to the debate are entirely lost. This management ideology, with its North American roots, endures primarily because there is no viable alternative. Consider a few basic facts. One consequence of this dominance is that other perspectives get suppressed. There are strong traditions of management writing in both the French and German languages, but they are being marginalised: The entire business world is seemingly in thrall to the dominant American ideology of management.
America may have lost its lead in other areas of business, but it still holds sway in this one, vital area. I know what you are thinking: Well, there is some truth to this argument. An influential set of studies on cross-national management practices conducted by Stanford Professor Nick Bloom and colleagues sought to get to the bottom of things.
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These studies showed, essentially, that American firms outperformed all others. I have two responses to this argument. First, the methodology used by Bloom and colleagues, while painstaking and rigorous in its execution, was itself a product of the ideology I described above. In other words, the evaluation of success was based on such metrics as productive efficiency, consistent use of incentives, professional training, and so on. We shouldn't be too surprised to see that American companies score best on the measures of success that they themselves developed.
The freemen, mostly concerned about their rights and obligations as citizens, received a non-specialized, non-vocational, liberal arts education that produced well-rounded citizens aware of their place in society.
At the same time, Socrates emphasized the importance of individualism , impressing upon his students the duty of man to form his own opinions through reason rather than indoctrination. Athenian education also provided a balance between developing the mind and the body. Another possibility is that liberal education dates back to the Zhou Dynasty , where the teachings of Confucianism focused on propriety, morality, and social order. While liberal education was stifled during the barbarism of the Early Middle Ages , it rose to prominence once again in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, especially with the re-emergence of Aristotelian philosophy.
The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw a revolt against narrow spirituality and educators started to focus on the human, rather than God. This humanist approach favored reason, nature and aesthetics. Study of the Classics and humanities slowly returned in the fourteenth century, which led to increased study of both Ancient Greek and Latin. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, liberal education focused mostly on the classics.
Philosophy of Education (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Commoners, however, were not too keen on studying the classics, so they instead took up vernacular languages and literature, and also the sciences. Until at least the twentieth century, both humanist and classicist influences remained in the liberal education, and proponents of a progressive education also embraced the humanist philosophy. Study of the classics continued in the form of the Great Books program. Upon Hutchins' resignation, the university got rid of the program, but an adapted version still exists at Shimer College.
While liberal education is a Western movement, it has been influential in other regions as well. Liberal education and professional education have often been seen as divergent.
Management Ideology: The Last Bastion of American Hegemony
German universities moved towards more professional teaching in the nineteenth century, and unlike American students, who still pursued a liberal education, students elsewhere started to take professional courses in the first or second year of study. As an emphasis on specialized knowledge grew in the middle of the century, colleges began to adjust the proportion of required general education courses to those required for a particular major.
As University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum points out, standardized testing has placed more emphasis on honing technical knowledge, and its quantitative, multiple-choice nature prompts rote learning in the classroom.
- American Dream - Wikipedia!
- Everything you need to know about the war on poverty - The Washington Post.
- Vanished in the Night.
At the same time, humanistic concepts such as imagination and critical thinking, which cannot be tested by such methods, are disappearing from college curricula. Thirty percent of college graduates in the United States are likely to eventually work in jobs that do not exist yet. Rather than provide narrowly designed technical courses, a liberal education would foster critical thinking and analytical skills that allow the student to adapt to a rapidly changing workforce.
Esquivel said only eight percent of colleges provide a liberal education to four percent of students in the United States. Another factor is the fact that we just didn't have good data on poverty until shortly before the war on it began; our numbers only go back to The Nixon administration largely dismantled the OEO, distributing its functions to a variety of other federal agencies, and eventually the office was renamed in and then shuttered for good in A recent study from economists at Columbia broke down changes in poverty before and after the government gets involved in the form of taxes and transfers, and found that, when you take government intervention into account, poverty is down considerably from to , from 26 percent to 16 percent:.
While that doesn't allow us to see how poverty changed between the start of the war in and the start of the data in , the most noticeable trend here is that the gap between before-government and after-government poverty just keeps growing. In fact, without government programs, poverty would have actually increased over the period in question.
Government action is literally the only reason we have less poverty in than we did in What's more, we can directly attribute this to programs created or expanded during the war on poverty. In fairness, SNAP isn't the biggest anti-poverty program on the books. That would be Social Security, also expanded by the war on poverty.
The impact of non-transfer programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Job Corps on poverty is harder to measure, but what indications there are are promising. Amy Finkelstein and Robin McKnight have found that Medicare significantly reduced out-of-pocket medical expenditures for seniors, which increased their real incomes. The Oregon Medicaid Study found that the program significantly reduces financial hardship for its beneficiaries, who, under Oregon's eligibility rules at the time, all fell below the poverty line.
A randomized evaluation of the Job Corps found that it caused improvements on a variety of outcomes, most notably a 12 percent increase in earnings of participants but also reductions in rates of incarceration, arrest, and conviction.