60. Dreamers are a problem
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
And then schools refocused on mass and scale, and the dreams faded. While these new heroes created generations of kids who wanted to disrupt the world as they did, they also sowed the seeds for the end of those dreams.
It turns out that industry scales. Little businesses turn into big ones. One McDonald’s turns into ten thousand. One scientist at Pfizer creates a pathway for one hundred or one thousand obedient assistants and sales reps.
Fifty years ago, businesses realized that they were facing two related problems:
They needed more workers, more well-trained, compliant, and yes, cheap workers willing to follow specific instructions…
and
They needed more customers. More well-trained, pliable, eager-to-consume customers watching TV regularly and waiting to buy what they had to sell.
Dreamers don’t help with either of these problems. Dreamers aren’t busy applying for jobs at minimum wage, they don’t eagerly buy the latest fashions, and they’re a pain in the ass to keep happy.
The solution sounds like it was invented at some secret meeting at the Skull and Bones, but I don’t think it was. Instead, it was the outcome of a hundred little decisions, the uncoordinated work of thousands of corporations and political lobbyists:
School is a factory, and the output of that factory is compliant workers who buy a lot of stuff. These students are trained to dream small dreams.
What about the famous ones we hear about? Surely the successful people we read about have something special going on….
Majora Carter grew up in the 1960s in the South Bronx. She wasn’t supposed to have dreams; neither were her classmates. The economic impediments were too big; there wasn’t enough money to spend on schools, on support, on teachers who cared.
And yet Majora grew up to be, according to Fast Company, one of the hundred most creative people in business, a TED speaker, a community activist, and a successful consultant. Her fellow students are still waiting to get the call.
Dreamers don’t have special genes. They find circumstances that amplify their dreams. If the mass-processing of students we call school were good at creating the dreamers we revere, there’d be far more of them. In fact, many of the famous ones, the successful ones, and the essential ones are part of our economy despite the processing they received, not because of it.
The economy demands that we pick ourselves. School teaches us otherwise.
I’m arguing for a new set of fairy tales, a new expectation of powerful dreaming.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
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