Lets just say...

[The ClayTaurus]

Agreed, as long as "teams" are not the norm in the education process,
there must be some individual effort with feedback. IMO

Then we agree

See? I'm not so bad.

 

[Mr. P]

Then we agree

See? I'm not so bad.

Are SO! :tng:

 

[sagegirl]

How do you know that?

I was going to mention it in my first response but thought it might sound contrived.....but since you ask. I was part of a workforce that for some reason I could never quite figure out was considered "executive", which we were not, but that title brought with it privledges and contact with executives within the company....above managers, above just about everybody we worked with. It was a strange grandfathered in factor. Anyway our contact with the suits as we called them, usually involved elaborate lunches, dinners, meetings that really promised alot but never really evolved into much, and alot of self promotion and self agrandizement.I saw this at several levels....the local, regional and national. The national level guys did a lot of traveling and morale boosting (I'd guess you'd call it,) but on a more daily basis I saw people working alot harder and being paid much less for their work. I dont want to get into details about the job.....just the idea that top executives get extremely well compensated for unproductive work. From what I saw and experienced most of their interest was in making themselves look good and more often than not they promoted procedures and policies that were virtually impossible to implement or totally ineffective. This is what I know.

 

[The ClayTaurus]

I was going to mention it in my first response but thought it might sound contrived.....but since you ask. I was part of a workforce that for some reason I could never quite figure out was considered "executive", which we were not, but that title brought with it privledges and contact with executives within the company....above managers, above just about everybody we worked with. It was a strange grandfathered in factor. Anyway our contact with the suits as we called them, usually involved elaborate lunches, dinners, meetings that really promised alot but never really evolved into much, and alot of self promotion and self agrandizement.I saw this at several levels....the local, regional and national. The national level guys did a lot of traveling and morale boosting (I'd guess you'd call it,) but on a more daily basis I saw people working alot harder and being paid much less for their work. I dont want to get into details about the job.....just the idea that top executives get extremely well compensated for unproductive work. From what I saw and experienced most of their interest was in making themselves look good and more often than not they promoted procedures and policies that were virtually impossible to implement or totally ineffective. This is what I know.

That's just abuse of the system, and it would happen under socialism as well.

 

[Hagbard Celine]

Education is viewed as a right not a privelege.

It's neither. It's essential for the functioning of a major power in today's world. It's for the people's own good if you will. We can't have a large underclass of illiterate simpletons running around and expect to compete economically or in any other way with the rest of the world.

An ideal world, in my opinion, is one in which everyone is college educated or higher. Can you imagine how cool it would be if people weren't so ignorant about everything? Ah, it would be great. But alas, I'm an idealist.

 

[speederdoc]

Not everyone wants to be college-educated or higher.

 

[The ClayTaurus]

Not everyone wants to be college-educated or higher.

Hence his point.

 

[sagegirl]

You really don't understand what it takes to run a company do you? or the risks involved?

The focus of responses to this post have been to the comment regarding the huge variances in pay and salaries. Its funny how the message gets focused on just one issue ......my point was that the "well intentioned" politicians that we have elected have failed to provide us with what they promise. I think this is the reason for so much apathy in our society and the lack of interest in voting . Our society could provide the education and opportunity for anyone to reach their full potential, but that has not been achieved. Surely there are those of priviledge that throw away their opportunities and there are those with less than favorable conditions whio rise to the top, but generally they are the exceptions, poverty begets poverty, middle class, whats left of it, gets by, and the wealthy and powerful seem to beable to perpetuate a system that benefits them the most.

 

[Hagbard Celine]

That's just abuse of the system, and it would happen under socialism as well.

Have any of you ever read George Orwell, "The Road to Wigan Pier?" It's a good book and a good discussion on Socialism.

Here's a paper I wrote on it a couple of years ago.

Orwell and Socialism Mid-1930’s

“What I am concerned with is the fact that Socialism is losing ground exactly where it ought to be gaining it,” George Orwell (p. 171). It seems that the idea of Socialism, that everyone should cooperate equally and give and get their fair share, would have taken off like a rocket during Britain’s economic “slump,” especially in the lower and middle classes, but as Orwell observed, “With so much in its favour…the idea of Socialism is less widely accepted [during the 1930’s] than it was ten years ago (p. 171).” An aversion to Socialism, especially among the middle classes, was one of, if not the biggest problem weighing in on the English Labour party during the 1930’s. Orwell argues that Socialism should have been Labour’s salvation and that the reasons behind why it was not, were based solely on the actions and “mistaken methods of propaganda” spewing forth from its own members (p. 171). Orwell championed Socialism as a common sense answer to many of the social and economic problems plaguing Britain during the 1930’s.
The need for economic policy change in England was more than relevant during the 1930’s. In fact, as Orwell says in chapter 11, “It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment we are in a very serious mess, so serious that even the dullest-witted people find it difficult to remain unaware of it,” (p. 170). Orwell was an advocate for economic change in Britain during this time. In part one of his book, Orwell makes his case for change by giving us a first-hand, almost ethnographical account of the lives of coal miners and their families living and working in the northern industrial town of Wigan Pier and of the fetid conditions surrounding them during the “slump” of the 1930’s. The Great Depression, which had rippled across the Earth like an earthquake from its epicenter, New York, the site of the cataclysmic stock market crash of October 1929, hit Britain like a tsunami. Britain never experienced the affluence of the roaring twenties and was already knee-deep in a quagmire of unemployment, poverty and recession before the slump hit. Following World War I, ownership of Britain’s industries had to be switched back to privatization from the Ministry of Defense and production shifted from tanks and weapons back to consumer goods. With this shift came the pitifully unforeseen consequences of dramatic inflation and the horrid realization that many of Britain’s production technologies, most dating from the Industrial Revolution, were obsolete. Unemployment was also dramatically out of control at the time with as many as one in every seven men, the “intractable million,” out of work at any one time (lecture). Orwell, while living-out his research for the Left Book Club, experienced the squalor and hopelessness of these conditions on a personal level by living and working exactly as the miners did. Orwell states just how widespread these conditions were all over Britain when he discusses unemployment statistics in chapter five. He refers to the fact that unemployment figures were based solely on the number of people registered to receive government unemployment pensions—aptly named the “dole.” Orwell points out, that if he were to add the “destitute” and “those who for one reason and another were not registered” to the number of those who were, he could put the number of underfed citizens at about five million, which would still be a drastic “under-estimate” due to the fact that even attempting to get a ballpark figure of the number of dependents, mostly wives and children, would not be plausible and could not be figured into the approximation (p. 75). Orwell puts his estimate of unemployed workers and those who were dependent on or were drawing the dole in Wigan Pier right at one out of every three people (p. 76). Orwell, in illustrating his case for economic change also points out the inhumane application of the “means” test, a test applied by the government in order to make absolutely sure that those drawing the dole were totally unemployed. The cruelty of the means test bore itself out in the form of public embarrassment for families who had to turn out all that they owned and in pitting families against each other by “much spying and tale-bearing” (p. 78). Orwell gives the example of the man who was reported as having a job when someone spotted him giving feed to his neighbor’s chickens. The cruelest effect of the means test was probably that it broke-up families by forcing elderly and bed-ridden family members into the streets or into boarding houses by counting them as “lodgers,” thereby forcing their dole wages to be docked (p. 79). Orwell submitted that a Socialist system would remedy most, if not all of these problems by providing egalitarian resource distribution and employment for everyone.
When the Great Depression hit in October of 1929, many traditional Marxists saw it as a sure sign that the Capitalist system had finally toppled under its own weight and were proudly heralding the eventual take-over of Socialism due to the process of “historic necessity” (p. 172). According to Orwell, by the mid-1930’s, this attitude had become less prevalent and was being replaced with a widespread hatred and fear of Socialism, which Orwell attributes to people’s mistake in drawing parallels between it and Communism, which was, at the time, taking hold by force in Russia because of Lenin and the Bolshevic Revolution. After the Labour party first came to power in 1924, they actually worked to separate themselves from the word “Socialist,” which evoked images of Lenin and the Bolshevic Revolution in Russia—the worker’s paradise (lecture). Orwell thought that one of the reasons that Socialism had been so widely rejected by even those it promised to help the most was because it had drawn-in and been dominated early-on by people he fittingly called cranks, who had twisted its message and filled it with hypocrisy. In Orwell’s own words, “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England” (p. 174). Orwell concluded that most of these cranks were comfortably positioned in the middle class, where they hypocritically reveled in and coveted their social standing, clinging “like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige,” all the while preaching the benefits of Socialism and spouting-off about class equality (p. 175). These cranks, spewing forth this idealistic fervor for Socialism “while theoretically pining for a classless society” would no more congregate or fraternize with a person from the lower classes than they would jump off a cliff (p. 175). To the contrary as Orwell points out, “If a real working man…had walked into their midst, they would have been embarrassed, angry, and disgusted; some, I should think, would have fled holding their noses” (p. 175). This sort of rude behavior, Orwell points out, is not purposefully acted out. Rather, class distinctions, our individual niches on the social hierarchy, are something that we are born into and cannot help. Orwell admits that even he, as someone with a middle class upbringing, had trouble relating to members of the lower classes. “It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions—notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful—are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the product of a special kind of upbringing…to get outside the class racket I have got to suppress not merely my private snobbishness, but most of my other tastes and prejudices as well” (p. 161). Orwell believed that Socialism would never work unless the cranks were able to accept the full scope of changes they would have to endure to make it work. Social classes, those things that make us who we are and separate us from those of other distinctions, would, in a Socialist society, have to be stripped from us. Orwell believed that people were not ready or willing to accept the certainty of egalitarianism as one of Socialism’s most natural and essential characteristics.
Orwell’s second reason behind why Socialism was not being accepted was because, “the idea of Socialism is bound up, more or less inextricably with the idea of machine-production” (p. 188). The idea of Socialism would never have arisen had it not been for the Industrial Revolution. Orwell concludes that industrialization leads naturally to what he calls “collectivism,” which is defined by centrally located control, egalitarian allocation of resources, and constant intercommunication (p. 188). All of these things are possible only with the technological innovations of industrialization led by machine-production. Orwell submits that the idea of Socialism, bound up inescapably in mechanical progress, would naturally lead to a sterile world, extremely well ordered and efficient, like a machine. Such a world would have no room for disorderly things like wild plants and animals, disease, weeds, wildernesses, poverty, and everything would be made of rubber, glass or steel, under the complete control of man. It is the vision of sterility, order, efficiency, and dependency on machinery, as Orwell states it, from which “sensitive minds recoil” (p. 190). From Orwell’s point of view, mechanization is something that should be embraced. The purpose of machinery is to decrease the amount of work that a person has to do so that they will be free to pursue other, more exciting things. Orwell refers to H.G. Wells, the author who’s fanciful and frequently accurate visions of the future predicted that mechanization would lead to a soft, “fool-proof” world full of fat, lazy hobbit-like people who do nothing but drink spirits and recreate all day. This, Orwell says, is why people tie Socialism and Communism, “the Cult of Russia,” together. People believe that a Socialist government would lead to the mechanical progress, the “machine worship,” of Russia’s Bolshevic-run Communism, leading to a faithless society, completely dependent on machine slaves. This aversion to Communism, and in turn, Socialism, would ultimately lead people to turn to the other, more terrible alternative: Fascism.
For Socialism to prevail in England, Orwell believes first, that the people who ought to be Socialism’s champions, i.e. the English Labour party, should go back to the real message of Socialism: Justice and liberty for all. English Socialists must stop preaching to the choir and allay fears of Communism to spread their message to the masses. Second, people must learn to embrace mechanical innovation. Machines liberate people, giving them time to live their lives instead of toiling them away. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Orwell believed that “the present, stupid handling of the class-issue may stamped quantities for potential Socialists into Fascism” (p. 172). The class issue must be laid to rest and people must learn to allay the selfish, subconscious fears they have of being equal with their fellow man and allow room for what is good for the whole of English society.

 

[The ClayTaurus]

Have any of you ever read George Orwell, "The Road to Wigan Pier?" It's a good book and a good discussion on Socialism.

Here's a paper I wrote on it a couple of years ago.

Orwell and Socialism Mid-1930’s

The utopian idea of socialism is fine when it's an idea, but when you factor in that human nature is an ugly beast, socialism will always be doomed before it even begins.

 

[CSM]

The utopian idea of socialism is fine when it's an idea, but when you factor in that human nature is an ugly beast, socialism will always be doomed before it even begins.

You are exactly right...Hagbard himself is a prime example....by that I mean look at how he acts towards those who do not agree with his point of view; they immediately fall into a certain class (determined by himself of course). Anyone who does not agree with Hagbard is immediately less intelligent, less educated, incapable of independent thought, etc...

Pretty hard to have a classless society under those circumstances. Then there is the whole criminal element to be dealt with, nevermind those who just "don't fit".

 

[Hagbard Celine]

Anyone who does not agree with Hagbard is immediately less intelligent, less educated, incapable of independent thought, etc...

Get out of my head! Aaaahaaggahaa!!!!!! GMAB.

 

[CSM]

Get out of my head! Aaaahaaggahaa!!!!!! GMAB.

I rest my case.

 

[Annie]

It's neither. It's essential for the functioning of a major power in today's world. It's for the people's own good if you will. We can't have a large underclass of illiterate simpletons running around and expect to compete economically or in any other way with the rest of the world.

An ideal world, in my opinion, is one in which everyone is college educated or higher. Can you imagine how cool it would be if people weren't so ignorant about everything? Ah, it would be great. But alas, I'm an idealist.

Idealist is not the word I would choose. Not everyone is college bound, regardless of family income or opportunities presented. Heck, it might be good to let 8th graders that would rather tioil than go to school, do so, as long as they are basically literate.

 

[Hagbard Celine]

Idealist is not the word I would choose. Not everyone is college bound, regardless of family income or opportunities presented. Heck, it might be good to let 8th graders that would rather tioil than go to school, do so, as long as they are basically literate.

I've always thought it would be good to have a system similar to Germany's where people are sifted through the educational system based on what their strengths are. Like if you showed good math skills, you'd go on to higher education in science or mathematics or if you showed good vocational skills, you'd go to vocational school to learn a trade. We could administer proficiency tests throughout the educational cycle to determine a person's strengths, which would narrow down people's choices and effectively sort everybody out to where they needed to go or where they would be best suited to go.

 

[Hagbard Celine]

I rest my case.

Stop trying to pick a fight dick head.

 

[The ClayTaurus]

Stop trying to pick a fight dick head.

Stop being a hypocrite, DICK HEAD. Sheesh.

 

[Hagbard Celine]

Hey I responded to his little jab with a cutesy come back but he kept it going. This was a civilized discussion until the knuckledragger showed up and started beating his chest.

 

[The ClayTaurus]

You can't simultaneously tell someone to not pick a fight, and then pick a fight with him all at the same time. Pick one.

 

[Hagbard Celine]

Hey, I can't be held responsible for my own actions if I'm provoked. I'll have it both ways thank you.