62. Pull those nails: The early creation of worker compliance
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
Years ago, I sat in on a fifth-grade class ostensibly working on a math project.
Mary Everest Boole was a mathematician in the 1800s, the wife of the inventor of Boolean logic. One of her legacies was string art, a craft designed to teach math to students. The project took the nub of Mary’s idea and industrialized it into a make-work craft project.
My job was to bring the hammers, twenty-four of them, which I had bought for cheap at the local hardware store. The students were using little brass nails to create patterns on inexpensive pine boards—and then they were going to use string to interlace modulo-nine patterns on the nails, creating (ostensibly) both learning and art.
At the start of the class, the teacher gave the students instructions, including the stern advice that they needed to be sure that the nails went in quite firmly.
For the next half hour, I sat and listened to twenty-four students loudly driving nails. I’m not sure if more nails led to more learning, but it was certainly noisy. (One thousand nails, thirty strikes per nail—you get the idea.)
Then the teacher interrupted the class and called a student (ten years old) to the front of the room. “I said,” she intoned, raising her voice, “that all the nails had to be put in firmly.” She made him wiggle a few nails. They were loose.
I will never forget what happened next. She didn’t ask him to hammer the nails in a little tighter.
No.
She stood there, and with the entire class watching and with the little kid near tears, took each and every loose nail out of the board. A half an hour of solid (and loud) hammering, for nothing. She intentionally humiliated him, for one clear reason. The message was obvious: I am in charge, and my instructions matter. You will conform and you will meet the quality standards or you will be punished.
If there’s a better way to steal the desire to dream, I’m not sure what it is.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
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