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