[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
 

Fredrick Taylor is responsible for much of what you see when you look around. As the father of Scientific Management, he put the fine points on Henry Ford’s model of mass production and was the articulate voice behind the staffing of the assembly line and the growth of the industrial age.

Armed with a stopwatch, Taylor measured everything. He came to two conclusions:

Interchangeable workers were essential to efficient manufacturing. You can’t shut down the line just because one person doesn’t show up for work. The bigger the pool of qualified labor, the easier it is to find cheap, compliant workers who will follow your instructions.

People working alone (in parallel) are far more efficient than teams. Break every industrial process down into the smallest number of parts and give an individual the same thing to do again and again, alone, and measure his output.

One outgrowth of this analysis is that hourly workers are fundamentally different from salaried ones. If you are paid by the hour, the organization is saying to you, “I can buy your time an hour at a time, and replace you at any time.” Hourly workers were segregated, covered by different labor laws, and rarely if ever moved over to management.

School, no surprise, is focused on creating hourly workers, because that’s what the creators of school needed, in large numbers.

Think about the fact that school relentlessly downplays group work. It breaks tasks into the smallest possible measurable units. It does nothing to coordinate teaching across subjects. It often isolates teachers into departments. And most of all, it measures, relentlessly, at the individual level, and re-processes those who don’t meet the minimum performance standards.

Every one of those behaviors is a mirror of what happens in the factory of 1937.

Of course, business in the U.S. evolved over time to be less draconian than it was seventy years ago. Companies adopted a social contract (usually unstated). Union movements and public outcry led to the notion that if you were obedient and hardworking, your hourly gig would continue, probably until you retired, and then your pension would keep you comfortable.

In the last twenty years, though, under pressure from competition and shareholders, the hourly social contract has evaporated, and manufacturers and others that engage in factory work have gone back to a more pure form of Taylorism. No, Walmart and Target and Best Buy don’t bring “good jobs” to Brooklyn when they build a megamall. They bring hourly jobs with no advancement. How could there be? The pyramid is incredibly wide and not very tall, with thousands of hourly workers for every manager with significant decision-making ability.

Walmart has more than 2 million employees around the world, and perhaps a thousand people who set policy and do significant creative work. Most of the others are hourly employees, easily replaced with little notice.

The bottom of our economy has gone back into the past, back into alignment with what school has perfected: taking advantage of people doing piecemeal labor.

This is not the future of our economy; it is merely the last well-lit path available to students who survive the traditional indoctrination process. If we churn out more workers like this, we will merely be fighting for more of the bottom of the pyramid, more of the world market’s share of bad jobs, cheaply executed.