Politics in Schools: does it affect productivity?

When any organizational entity expands beyond 21 members, the real power will be in some smaller body.-- C. Northcote Parkinson

Politics is practically inevitable in most organizations.

Politics is the accommodation of individual interests by means not normally sanctioned within an organization. Needs often arise which cannot be handled within given rules and practices, so "adjustments" are often made with an eye to "discretion" and the avoidance of "setting a precedent."

But productivity, too, is far from being an absolute good. Productivity narrowly conceived and overenthusiastically pursued, particularly where resources are scarce, may cripple important organizational capacities.

To examine these issues further, see Productivity, Politics and Hypocrisy in American Public Education


Cordially
-- EGR

Should Schools be Clone Factories?

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. -- James Madison

Many of us seem to long for the deep excitement, the sense of mission, the pervasive invigoration that was provided by the Cold War. Lacking the imminent threat of "mass participation in that Grand Incineration" that gave such cogency to our duck-and-cover drills, we miss the struggle against a world Communism that gave so much meaning to life and so much federal funding to U. S. industry and education.

So we dig up Frankenstein, Body Snatchers, and the Manchurian Candidate! We worry about WMD’s, terrorists, polygamists, militias, and other harbingers of the apocalypse. And we fuss and fret about cloning. We express apprehension, vexation, or reservation about the possibility of creating genetic duplicates of humans.

In reality, we have been cloning, or at least, trying to clone, educated minds for millennia. What do religious leaders want? Doctrinal clones. What do political leaders want? Political clones. What do ethnic leaders want? Ethnic clones. What do parents want? Clones of themselves.

To examine these issues further, see Cloning Student Voice

Cordially,
-- EGR