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Most of us don’t think much on how the world works. We know little of science, economics or human sciences. I should know, having taught them all in universities. Students who get into these ‘centres of excellence’ (which they both can be and are usually not) are brighter than average and most of them ‘know’ more rubbish than knowledge and have not developed high level learning skills. We can test this, but most of the time don’t as it would expose our teaching failures. To some extent, of course, great works and theories are not established by evidence, but through mannered acceptance. ‘Education, education, education’, as its boring repetition and patronising tone suggests, is built in cultural control and moralising.
To claim to know because I’ve been doing teaching and research is problematic. Cops claim to know about policing because they do it and the barely hidden claim the rest of us can’t because we don’t. Experience is more important than book learning. This is both true and false. Such matters have been discussed over thousands of years. What one finds teaching people is that most re-invent the wheel or regurgitate small parts of the available literature (perhaps all their teachers know). There is very little scholarship about and little Enlightenment spirit. I won’t argue anything on this. It’s been done. Do you know about the work or where to find it?
Deep set in what we do are habits of human resource management. I don’t mean the turgid dross you may experience at work or in a HRM module or reading Harvard Business Review. It’s deeper than Inspector Gadget filling in Personal Development Reviews when he’d rather be out catching crooks who will be let off by Magistrates. Human resource management is an evil that underscores nearly all our thinking and attempts at improving social practice. I’ll say more later through some practical examples, but will say now that my thesis is that the vast majority of us live on ‘benefits’ that kick in because we are employed as cogs in the wheel of this evil.
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