80s52 The End of the 80s

This is the last piece about the 1980s for a while. I move on to the 1990s with next week’s blog. I left out a lot of the 80s and will have to return to those years some other time. The 90s will be full of interesting and somewhat controversial things. Some of the things will be kind of sensitive so I may have to be careful what I say so as not to offend others. I am not sure how I will handle that and still try to tell the truth.

Let me get back to the 80s. I see a reoccurring frustration that pops up in the journals as far back as the late 1970s. It is the prevalent notion that if we just ran education like business everything would be all right. Over the years there have been panels, round tables and all sort of articles about how business can tell us how to run education. I even had friends in business that would tell how they could straighten us out. It always really annoyed me! I saw greed, corruption, and dishonestly prevalent in business and I wondered what part they wanted us to adopt?

After hearing a speaker tell us about how we really need business input in telling us what kids need to know in life I wrote the following diatribe:

“Business wants quiet, content, happy workers…Company people, people who show up on time, do what they’re supposed to do, when they are supposed to do it and then go home grateful that they have a job. What we have are noisy, malcontent, unhappy workers who think the company is out to take advantage of them so they take advantage of the company. They do what they have to do in a bored, uninterested way and go home angry because they feel powerless to change their own future. Quiet, intimidated, grateful workers. “

Business is about maximizing profit at any cost. Maybe education is supposed to maximize learning at any cost. Hmmmm…if that’s it, we are gonna need a hell of a lot more money! Lately, we have learned again that business doesn’t have nearly all of the answers. In fact, I think maybe business could learn a lot from education.

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In December, I lament that I am not writing in my journal as much as I should. That is a problem that I had for years. I wasn’t carrying it around as much and so I didn’t have it with me sometimes when I could be writing. As a teacher I had it in my classroom with me but didn’t carry it as much when I shifted to the new position.

Moving from the classroom to an administrator position was a big change for me. I remember sitting at my desk and realizing I could go to lunch anytime I wanted. I was so used to going at a certain time each day with the kids that I just kept doing it. I felt a little guilty if I took a minute longer than the teachers. Teachers are so schedule and calendar driven, and I was too for 18 years, that it is hard to break that pattern.