A name I should have known

Mr. Dilettante posts on something very interesting to a quality engineer like myself; the apparent fact, according to Michael Barone, that union policies are largely designed to mitigate the work of one Frederick W. Taylor, who (along the lines of the Prussian schools so decried by John Taylor Gatto) worked to make production lines as "idiot proof" as possible, all while organizing the workplace around the assumption that workers are more or less dumb animals--incapable of initiative and inefficient unless driven.

In other words, apart from the fact that they can quit when they want to, Taylor's model seems to give the worker about the same respect as, or at times somewhat less than, a typical antebellum slave-owner might grant.  It's no wonder that the history of the labor movement is filled with strife with that kind of thinking!

But of course, we've come a long way since those dark days, and we obviously would never make such mistakes again, right?

OK, then, let's consider what most teachers are taught about classroom management, then, and let's ask whether most schools risk actually teaching students not just what to think, but rather how to think.  No, I'm not talking about "critical thinking" (which all too often simply means "doubt what the bad guys are saying"), but rather, "logic."

Given that very few schools actually teach either informal or formal logic, it would seem that they're really being run along Taylor's model even today.  We then ought to expect fully that a large portion of adults would then be functioning not in a thinking way, but struggling to overcome basic, Pavlovian conditioned responses.

By design, and note that the teachers unions are asking us to pay for the privilege of having our children treated like Taylor's factory drones.