Possible Error Acknowledged

A colleague informs me that Inequality Schools Blava might actually be losing money, due to reconstruction.

It may not be true, but it may be.

News

A new Samizdat is coming.
Unfortunately I typed it using Apple software and have been unable to find a compatible printer....

what I'm doing here

Recently I spoke to another teacher who was upset by something I'd written.It had upset him and his wife. They felt as though I were unfair to them.

And, he quite rightly pointed out I had made a factual error. He had not taken an expenses paid trip, as Ihad said. His job search was not paid for by the school.

That is a mistake and I'm sorry about it.

As I explained to him, the point was to raise the issue of fairness. Teachers are treated differently, but those differences are not always fair.

A further point is that I don't wish to single out individual teachers. I am a bit less forgiving, however, of individuals who set themselves up as "above" or "better than" the rest of us--e.g., directors.....

Exit Interview

Anti-Capitalist Samizdat Number 4

He was a stout … man with an exaggerated bottom and a face that looked as though it never needed a razor.—Graham Greene

We deem ordinary people competent enough to select mayors, governors, even presidents. We regard them as capable of selecting legislators who will decide their taxes, who will make laws that, if violated, consign them to prison, and who can send them off, the younger ones, to kill and die in war. Should we really ask if ordinary people are competent enough to elect their bosses?--David Schweickart, After Capitalism


Last week I was visited by the local Task-Master, a man with an exaggerated bottom. As I had recently written him, informing him that I was ending my relationship with Inequality Schools, this was expected. His first question was whether I would complete what I was working on. Maybe he used the phrase “wrap things up”. I’m not sure, but he does seem to like clichés.

In one way, that is exactly what a Manager should know. In another way, it’s an odd question. It’s a question which no sane person can answer with a “no”.

Mr. Manager: Before you leave I would like you to finish
that painting you are working on….that one over
there in the corner…. What’s it called anyway?
Worker: Yes, I’ll finish it. It’s called the Mona Lisa.

Just asking the question is, actually, insulting. As if the person being asked couldn’t figure out what to do next without the Supervisor Task-Master’s help. As if when I told Big Bottom I was quitting, I could not understand the consequences of my decision without his help.

My remarks presuppose a certain norm of decency and respect. How foolish of me to do so. Capitalism is a system which is inherently disrespectful to human dignity; and Inequality Schools is nothing if not capitalistic.

In my message to Thames Wilson and Mr. Big Bottom, I had explained that my values were completely opposed to the values of Inequality Schools. I believe in things like democracy. They don’t. They confuse responsibility with obedience.


Since I referred to a clash of values in my message, another of Mr. Big Bottom’s questions has a funny ring.

BB: Well what will we tell the kids?
I mean I don’t want to step on your toes.

Funny phrase that. Step on my toes? Step on MY toes? By telling people that I think Inequality Schools are undemocratic? By telling people that I think Inequality Schools are anti-free thought?


What kind of mind can use this clichéd expression in so convoluted a way? As if he would be doing me a favor by concealing what I think?
The really interesting thing is that I told Mr. Big Bottom:
Tell them the truth…
And he said, “That you resigned?”

Now, after thinking about it, I think there is a more sinister interpretation of those words. I now think that what Mr. Big Bottom really meant was

That you resigned . . . . and nothing more, nothing
about your reasons, nothing about how you say
Inequality Schools are not democractic….

If I am right, that would be an incredibly self-serving, and, in a way, subtle use of language. It would also be deceptive.
However, Mr. Big Bottom is well capable of being less than fully candid and truthful during social interchange.
Just before leaving for the most recent vacation, I spoke with Mr. Big Bottom about the possibility of leaving a day early. The look on his face told me he was uncomfortable, and there was a lengthy pause in the conversation while he tried to find something to say. During that lengthy pause, I recalled having heard that the school was not finding it easy to find substitutes lately, and I guessed that Mr. Big Bottom was uncomfortable as he thought about the difficulty of finding a substitute, and it was that which I read on his face.
The words which came out of his mouth when he finally spoke were, however, very different. He spoke about how I would lose money because he’d have do dock me a day’s pay. As if he were concerned about me.

I mentioned this earlier conversation to him during our exit interview.

He said something like, “Oh, that was just a casual conversation….”

Well, it was casual in one sense. We hadn’t agreed to meet in advance. I had approached Mr. Big Bottom without any prior warning.

However, there was nothing casual or spontaneous about Mr. Big Bottom’s reply. He had plainly paused to think about what he would say to me. There was a noticeable gap in the flow of the conversation. His response was planned, designed to fit the situation. So why would he describe it as the opposite?

The consistent picture is a lack of sincerity.

In the message where I gave notice, I wrote that Inequality Schools confuse responsibility with obedience. Interestingly enough, Mr. Big Bottom made precisely that confusion during our brief conversation. He said something like, “I assume you’ll be responsible during the time left …” Here “responsible” means “follow the rules”. Of course, that interpretation is a Nazi interpretation, worthy of the likes of Adolf Eichmann. And, it is also true that people whose notion of responsibility stopped at following the boss’s orders were hung at Nuremberg.


Then too, there’s a little matter of research by a famous psychologist, Kohlberg, and his idea that the highest form of moral development involves breaking rules.....possibly something Mr. Big Bottom never heard about or (more likely) heard about in school, and quickly forgot.

It is also worth pointing out that Mr. Big Bottom drives to work every day, even though he is a short distance away by public transport. Is that responsible behavior? I think not, but evidently Mr. Big Bottom disagrees. Perhaps, if that is responsible behavior, it might not be a bad thing to be irresponsible.

My answer to his question about whether I’d be “responsible” must have disappointed him. I told him I would not attend faculty meetings—or “staff” meetings as they like to say. I explained that he had shown an inability to use my time wisely, by such outlandish behavior as the fish propaganda (discussed in Samizdat 1) and that I felt no obligation to have my time wasted by him. He made no reply to my remark.

Who chose this man to be my boss? And, on what basis? And what are the qualifications of the man who chose Mr. Big Bottom?

Good questions. But I don’t expect that I will ever know the answer. (More freedom of information at a democracy-loving American school…)


It is a striking anomaly of modern capitalist societies
that ordinary people are deemed competent enough
to select their political leaders—but not their bosses.
Contemporary capitalism celebrates democracy, yet denies
us our democratic rights at precisely the point where we
spend most of the active and alert hours of our adult lives.
--David Reickart, After Capitalism

Samizdat 3: Pity the Poor Manager

Pity the poor manager….

In order to insure the performance of adequate effort on the part of
workers, capitalist production always involve an apparatus of domination, involving surveillance, positive and negative sanctions and varying forms of hierarchy. --Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts (student edition), p. 16

One of the striking facts about Inequality Schools is the difference between managers and teachers. Managers don’t teach, but that doesn’t stop them from standing up in front of the teachers and pontificating about the importance of the teaching profession. Since managers don’t teach, this sounds a bit hypocritical. Their winged words ring hollow. You would think that they would be at least a little embarrassed. But, apparently they are not. They seem unable to ask themselves the simple question: If teaching is so important, why don’t you do some?

Managers, of course, do have a very difficult role to play. They do have advantages teachers don’t have, but they are not yet capitalists. They don’t own the company, and they must bow to the will of those with more property. After all, the first goal of a manager is to protect the investment of the capitalist.

One of the first public relations goals of a manager is to create the idea that he or she is not mainly protecting the interests of the owner/capitalist. And, in fact, sometimes, the goals of the company’s owner will be served by good teaching. At other times, the point will be to increase enrollment, thereby increasing productivity. If the new students have marginal English, and you are a manager, that’s not your problem. If teachers become too noisy complaining about this, then you can lecture them on the fact that this is an international school, and you can conveniently ignore the fact that you are enhancing your CV and your own job prospects by increasing enrollment. That can be a good selling-point for a manager looking for promotion or another job: “When I was manager, I increased productivity.” Personally, I think that we should have more sympathy for our managers. They also suffer from the rigorous demands of the capitalist system—even if they have escaped from the demanding world of the classroom. They still have to endure trips to such unappealing destinations as San Francisco where they will be far from their loved ones and be required to have boring conversations with other managers and the company’s president about how to motivate the teachers and get them to work harder. These are real hardships.

On the other hand, there is a further paradox or contradiction in the Inequality Schools’ product. The product is designed by a man who is not an educator, in consultation with educators to be sure…


Then again, to judge from what I saw of the so-called Accreditation Team which visited our local branch of inequality schools, their primary measuring stick is flawed. The operative measure seems to be the status quo in the United States, what most schools in the U. S. are doing, which begs questions about the quality of American schools. As Socrates used to say, “Is it good because the US does it or does the US do it because it is good?”

And that leads to another question, a linguist’s question:
How is it that a bunch of monolingual English speakers come to be running around the world teaching multi-lingual people to be even more multi-lingual?

The answer to that question is not hard to find. The government of the United States consciously set out to dominate the world after World War Two. Just as military spending increased after the fall of the Soviet Union, so too, after World War Two, plans were made to maintain a permanent wartime economy. (See Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.)

US dominance has taken the form of direct military intervention in such countries as Lebanon, Panama, Granada, Vietnam, as well as the more recent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The US has supported proxy armies in Guatemala and El Salvador. And, then there have been a few democratically elected leaders who were removed with US support. Additionally the US routinely funnels money into countries to influence elections. This is, of course, because we believe so deeply in democracy that we have to make sure people vote for the right leaders.

So, if people want to learn English, it isn’t always because they like the sound of it. And if you are an American who is teaching abroad, it’s not merely because your culture and language are attractive to your students and their parents. It’s because other people have noticed that the United States is a big bully, and they want to stay on the right side of the bully.
You owe your job at Inequality Schools to US imperialism.

What is an honest teacher to do? First of all, you have to face up to this fact. Having done so, you cannot change history. But, you must ask yourself how many of your actions are supporting the status quo. And you need to think of creative solutions.

The obscenity of this situation is obvious when a younger, less educated manager goes into the classroom of more experienced, multilingual, non-American teachers and starts making recommendations. What the hell is s/he doing there? Some cynics would say that s/he’s there because s/he’s an American and they are not. Maybe you say that s/he means well. S/He sincerely wants to help, even if it is part of his/her job description.



Reality Check: Managers are not there only to make gentle recommendations—a manager’s opinion about what you’re doing can decide if you have a job next year.

How can a manager dare to even pretend that s/he knows how to evaluate someone who, for example, has been teaching a foreign language, someone who is multilingual, and has been teaching for twenty or
thirty years? Really, we should pity the poor manager, being put in a situation where s/he obviously just doesn’t fit—Pity them, that is, if it were not for the fact that their salaries are larger than ours, and their benefits are better than ours.

But really, you will say, how can you be so petty? Can’t you see the job of management is more demanding? Can’t you see how hard he works?

Yes, it would be hard, I have to admit, to pretend that I am qualified to evaluate people who know things I don’t know and have been teaching for many more years than I have. But, if I were a manager, the honest way to deal with that problem would be to find another job, one I am actually qualified for.

If a manager hasn’t got the training and skills needed to perform the job s/he is allegedly evaluating, then the manager certainly cannot evaluate the other person who knows how to do that job. You cannot understand what that teacher is doing if you’ve never taught that subject! If we followed this simple principle, how many classroom visits by managers would not occur?

It is an absurd situation. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. But, then again, Slovakia only suffers from US cultural domination. Many countries have had a worse fate. In South America, people have been tortured and murdered to maintain US interests.



On the US Embassy in Baghdad:
See Alternet.org, “Asian workers trafficked to build U.S. embassy in Baghdad” by David Phinney, March 03, 2007.

Also recommended: How Bush Stole the Election of 2004:
“The Stolen Election of 2004” by Michael Parenti, CommonDreams.org; March 04, 2007
http://www.michaelparenti.org/elections.html

How The American Philosophical Association Entered My Life

The American Philosophical Association first entered my life when I was twenty years old. I was finishing undergraduate school and had been admitted to a graduate school. I received a letter from them...

What did the letter say?

Of course, there are two versions here. One is the official letter. The other is the letter as it impacted me.

The letter was a sort of warning about jobs. I am sure it was carefully, and cautiously worded.

But I took it as a death sentence. I interpreted it as a message saying that at the end of my graduate career I would not have a job.

This influenced my life for many years.

It is also noteworthy that I had no one to talk with about this letter. I don't recall talking to any teachers about it. I don't recall talking to other graduate students.

So, you might, in a way, fault me. Or you might trace a certain causal chain back to my inaction.

You might say I misinterpreted the letter.

But, the truth is, that I've always been, in a way, angry about that letter......

I wonder if anyone else had this experience.

REVISED SAMIZDAT NUMBER TWO

APOLOGIES
WILL NEED TO REFORMAT THIS


Interview with a teacher
So, how do you feel about working for Inequality Schools International?
Well, the name really says it all. No matter what sort of propaganda the school may make about making kids good or smart, the bottom line is that they are helping privileged kids continue to enjoy the advantages of privilege. I mean un-earned privileges. These kids are getting the tools which guarantee that they will enjoy their superior status in the future.
(Wait a minute! Are you a communist?)
No, but I don’t believe in capitalism either. Look, the problem is that most people cannot afford to send their children to Inequality School. So, the school is already selecting for the privileged from the first step. One local manager likes the slogan “PLAY”; but it would be more accurate to say, “NO PAY: NO PLAY”. And, of course, schools don’t ask where the money comes from. So, some kids (the ones who attend Inequality Schools) grow up with advantages that other kids don’t have. You multiply that and you get increasing wealth inequality—And it’s not just about money, it’s about quality (and length) of life.
(Editor's Note: This is a very sketchy argument, but it could be made more exact. See Chapter Three of Robin Hahnel, The ABC's of Political Economy.)
(But that’s not the school’s fault.)
No, it’s not the school’s fault. But there are some facts here you can’t ignore. Let me put it like this. I could see what sort of place this really is the first month I worked here. We had a special meeting for IB students. There were maybe eight adults sitting around the table, teachers, the school’s director, and I don’t know who else. And we were all discussing, one-by-one, how each student was doing. We were micro-managing their performance. And these kids were not especially talented or clever. But here they were getting extreme detailed attention. And about the same time I remember reading a story in a newspaper about Roma kids in the east of the country who don’t have running water or even shoes. That sort of drastic wealth inequality is immoral. Here we were paying obsessive, even superstitious detail to these kids, and other kids, probably no less intelligent or deserving, had no shoes and no running water. I say it's superstitious because I doubt whether such excessive attention really accomplishes anything; for example, it means the kids have little chance to develop independently. But the main point is that we have fantastic wealth inequality, inequality of resources, for no good reason. Is the school doing anything to change that? No, not really, even if it pays lip service to ‘responsibility’.
(But, wait a minute! Are you being fair? Doesn’t the school encourage kids to think about the less fortunate? They even took kids to one of those poor communities you are talking about.)
You’re right. They did take kids to a poor community to help. And the people responsible deserve credit for that. But, the question I am asking is about the bigger picture. Is that typical of the overall institution? Or, is it just a sort of sidebar? I think it was just a sidebar because the basic fact about the institution is that it gives you a degree if you have enough money to pay. No pay/no play. Yes there are also a few scholarships, and that’s good. But all that doesn’t change the basic picture. Martin Luther King once said that it’s no good to toss a coin to a beggar if you ignore the edifice that creates beggars. The school is not only ignoring that edifice, but it’s also giving privileged kids the tools they need to maintain their status within the edifice.
(But you can’t expect one school, or even one chain of schools to reform society.)
No, one school and one chain of schools can’t do everything; but the question is, what direction are you moving in? Are your actions, on the whole, positive or negative? Let me give you some other examples. This institution has a track record and it’s an ugly one.
Furthermore, it has a Stalinist approach to its own history. But, I’ve seen three different directors, and there seems to be a common thread, which I attribute to the Inequality Czar, Thames Wilson.
(What in the world are you talking about?)
The school has unwritten and secret illegal policies about who gets management positions and who gets the best contracts.
(How do you know that?)
Well, you can’t know exactly what the policies are because they are not public. But if you talk to people who wanted better positions and were turned down, or people who were fired, a picture begins to emerge. The school has an ideological test for management positions…
(Ideological test?)
You have to be a regular church-going Christian. At any rate, that's what people say... and I have known people who had to go through ideological tests... one person was turned down for having the wrong religion. Another was invited to be interviewed by Thames Wilson personally--taking a trip the interviewee would have had to pay for--to discuss his "moral" beliefs--and my friend was convinced that "moral" was a euphemism for "religious".
And one employee was fired because of gossip (allegedly stemming from the wife of the US ambassador) about his sexual orientation. Another person was fired because the director at the time didn’t like the faces she made during faculty meetings… There is a general pattern of disrespect toward teachers. The root problem is short-term (one year) contracts which makes it easy for a director to get rid of people.
(But this is all gossip.)
Yes, it is “gossip”, but the question is whether it’s true, or whether it has a basis in reality. It could be inaccurate in detail, but reflect reality; we just don't know. And, notice that if the policies are secret, then they are not written down, and since people get fired or leave, it’s hard to actually find out what’s really going on. That’s why I say it’s ‘Stalinist’. The school can make up whatever stories it wants because there is no institutional memory of wrong-doing.
(But these are serious charges.)
Yes, they are, and I cannot prove them.
Look, I’ll tell you what kind of morality this institution really has. For years, many employees had to pay for their own health insurance. And the school did not take money out for taxes, even though it was required to do so by law. Recently it started to follow the law. Of course, the school claimed that there was a loophole in the law. They wouldn’t say ‘loophole’ of course; they’d say it was an honorable exception. But what I’m saying is that it’s a moral duty of an employer to contribute to health insurance and retirement for employees. That’s the norm in civilized countries. (Of course I except the United States from the civilized countries)
And the hypocrisy doesn’t end there. A few years ago the IB teachers asked for more prep time so they could improve the quality of their lessons. They unanimously agreed that they didn’t have enough time. The director of IB had two answers. One, which she gave in public at a meeting, was, roughly, if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen. Of course, she wasn't so forthcoming. She mumbled something about how if teaching IB was too hard for you, then you didn't have to do it. The school was so kind it wouldn't force anyone. Her other, more diplomatic answer, was that since the school was now paying taxes there wasn’t money for that.
But notice, the school should have been paying taxes all along, and anyway, why should teachers be penalized because suddenly the school had decided to start following the law? The school had been neglecting its responsibility, and, now, was finally doing the right thing. In any case, I’ll bet the school is what people at the local American-run school of management would call a 'cash cow’ for the inequality schools system.
(What do you mean ‘cash cow’?)
I’ll bet that this particular school makes large profits compared to the other schools in the system, and even makes up for schools that make less money (or run in the red), because recently the enrollment here has increased drastically.
(But you don’t know that, do you?)
No, I don’t, but it sounds plausible. And, what’s worse, I think I should be able to find out. I mean, if this were a reasonable democratic institution, I should have access to that sort of information without a court order. It should be made public. I should know what my sweat, blood, education, and talents are contributing to. But it’s a tribute to the deeply democratic nature of the institution that so many important facts are not out in the open, and all you ever know is gossip.
Don't you have anything positive to say?
About individual teachers, or teachers in general, yes. About individual administrators, or individual actions by administrators, yes. But most administrators, most of the time, live in a fantasy world. For example, our local director just returned from a meeting where he was hob-nobbing with other directors. That's very bad. It increases his already too large sense of his own superiority. Here's another example. Once a previous director wanted to help us prepare for a large number of new Korean students. So, he read a book written by another director of an international school--not a book written by an anthropologist or scholar, not written by someone who knew both English and Korean. He chose a book written by someone like himself. And the lessons he learned were something like an administrator's fears about what might happen. It was absurd. He had no real information. All the information was focused on possible problems that he, as an administrator, might have. He was unable to understand that teachers have different lives. What would have been useful was a short crash-course in Korean language--and not at the end of the day when you're exhausted... Recently we visited Kia’s factor, and we couldn’t even say “hello” or “Thank You” in Korean!”
Here's another way to make the same point. Administrative positions should be eliminated. There should be no supervision of teachers by people in non-teaching positions. Administrative duties should be spread among the teachers.
I should mention that there is research in economics about the value of self-management and workplace democracy. It shows that self-management and workplace democracy increase efficiency.
Furthermore, the current super chief should retire. As Slovaks say, a fish rots from the head down
Thank you.
Thank you.
THANKS TO OUR SPONSOR FASTVAKIA:
http://www.fastvakia.blogspot.com


An After-thought: Why Special Added On Activities

to Teach Morality are Superfluous

There is a possible view of good things (education, the ability to use theories or create works of art, the ability to read--skills and knowledge in the broadest sense.) One view, a view that I think is held by many teachers, and which I myself once tacitly held says that some things are just good, no matter who has them. If I teach a bad person how to read, that’s good because reading is good. Interestingly enough, neither Socrates nor Kant believed that. Both held that such things as reading are good or bad only if one adds to them something more mental—a good will (Kant) or knowledge (a “techne”) of good and bad (Socrates). And that seems right to me now. Every form of knowledge can be misused and abused. Plainly, Inequality schools recognizes that, and for this reason attempts to educate children and young adults in morality. Whether their methods succeed or are well chosen is another question. I just want to mention why I think their methods are flawed. Ironically, within the design of Inequality schools, there are already required courses where students think about how to live—-courses in literature and language, and history, as well as the IB course called “theory of knowledge”. Advanced language study (whether it be English, Slovak, German, French, etc.) is always study of literature. It is through studying literature and history that students learn about moral reality. The fact that the managers at Inequality schools feel the need to add on some special training suggests a misunderstanding or mistrust of the traditional humanities.—-Mistrust because just maybe literature and philosophy and history are too open-ended, too much open to interpretation. After all, the humanities require a student to actually think for him- or herself; and maybe that’s dangerous; the student might not end up with the right interpretation. So, we have to tell them what the right rules are. Or, perhaps, it’s a classic case of marketing hot air. Experts in marketing will tell you that it is precisely when two products aren’t really different that you need to advertise. And there’s a question about the morality of that too!