I hated public school. It was hell for learners who were faster or slower than the norm. Even 40 years ago, it catered to the mediocre. The curriculum lumbered along like a brontosaurus, every subject belabored until Joe and Jane Average achieved mastery.
In sixth grade, we had a kid in our class named Sidney. He was at the opposite end of the learning curve from me. I was always bored, he perpetually perplexed. I was “weird” because I was brainy (the term “nerd” had not yet become common), and poor Sidney was mercilessly picked on because people thought he was stupid. They would shout at him as if he were hearing-impaired, mock the way he spoke, trip him up when he walked by, and just generally make his life miserable.
Even at the age of 11, I couldn’t figure out why a child deserved to be bullied because of something he couldn’t help. Had Sidney chosen his learning disability? Supposing I was weird already, so I might as well make the most of it, I befriended him. I was one of only a handful of kids, that whole year, who treated him like a human being.
I got through elementary school by believing that adulthood would be different — that in the grownup world of work, people would be nice to each other. This basically held true for the first 19 years of my working life, when I juggled duties at a small insurance agency. Then I moved into the big corporate arena, and found myself right back in sixth grade.
Big corporations don’t even know what fair competition is. They’ve never had to practice it, and they do nothing to encourage excellence in their employees.
The all-American myth is that the business world rewards smarts and initiative. We’re told (or at least, we used to be) that even the Sidneys among us could get ahead if they worked hard, that the mediocre were constantly challenged to improve themselves, and that the brainy would lead them all. In reality, things are quite different.
Big corporations, many of which got where they are by lobbying the government to drive their competitors out of business, don’t even know what fair competition is. They’ve never had to practice it, and they do nothing to encourage excellence in their employees. Backbiting, conniving, bum-kissing, and total conformity are the tooth and claw needed to survive in this jungle. Truth has no currency; all that matters is what the bosses want to hear.
Employment in a large corporation is serfdom. It has little, if anything, to do with free enterprise. Everyone is terrified of originality and initiative. In every interview, a job applicant is asked the same inane questions. The right answers are not the truth, but what the interviewers want to hear.
“Do you have initiative?” Of course you do. “Are you a team player?” You’d better be. You certainly need to know where you see yourself in five years — in the hive, productively droning away.
Public schools prize conformity. They turn out good little drones. Young people graduate from them knowing nothing but how to be useful to the system — how to fit in. By the time they reach adulthood, any glimmer of originality has been bored or bullied out of them. Thus are they ready for the only function they are fit to perform: serving their corporate lords.
Sidney once walked several blocks from the store to my house balancing a watermelon on his head. He wanted to reward me for my friendship by bringing me something nice. Loyalty tends to be rewarded. But in corporate America, it is a commodity no longer prized. Instead of earning our trust, the new feudal order prefers to motivate us with fear.
I sometimes wonder what became of Sidney. Did he end up in the mailroom or the warehouse of some large company? He was capable of learning, if anyone had the patience to teach him. Apparently no one at our school did. Possibly he works in some charity-funded enterprise, but more likely he’s being taken care of by the government.
Big corporations are taken care of by the government; it follows that they want everybody around their fiefdoms to be taken care of in the same way. That is one reason, perhaps, why so many of their executives pay money to modern-liberal and “progressive” causes. Through taxation, inflation, the expensive misdirection of Medicare and Medicaid, and the exorbitant cost of socialized medicine, the state has gradually chiseled away at the edifice of protection that employers large and small used to afford their workers. As we are discouraged at every turn from taking care of ourselves, soon there will be nobody left to care for us but government. Which, I suspect, is exactly the plan.
