The bus gathers the uniformed youth and transports them from the Council estate to the institutionalised school where the bell rings the changes every 40 minutes: for five days a week and most of the 52 weeks in a given year for more than ten years.
This thought train led to a flow of ideas about how and why I, and just about everybody else, gets moulded to suit the workplace.
Universal primary and secondary education. What’s it all about?
- It keeps the kids off the streets till they are old enough to join the workforce.
- It introduces them to a set of knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA) appropriate to the worlds of work in our modern nation and in the new global world. In theory critical thinking and life long learning are developed – but not too much!
- It homogenises kids so that they know their place and respect their elders and betters.
- It examines and grades them to make it easier for employers to recruit them.
You can therefore view the education system as a vast and expensive way of moulding the citizens such that they are able and willing to slot into the many worlds of work.
The many worlds of work. What’s it all about?
- Self sufficiency: I live in an old cottage with a walled garden big enough to feed a family. I could in theory grow all my own food, harvest rainwater, and build a composting toilet. It is more difficult to deal with electricity, clothing, and heat in the winter. The theory is not easy to put into practice. The Technological and Industrial Studies Group (TISG) in the south Sudan gave up its space programme because none of us knew what iron ore looked like. Instead we tried to build a wooden bicycle.
- Work, rest and play: people of the First World spend eight hours sleeping, eight hours working and eight hours resting and playing. On a daily basis this involves, amongst other things, being distracted by the media and by social networks – increasingly online. Many people also set aside one or two weeks to go somewhere else and do something else, often as a package that includes exposure to ‘have a nice day’ smiles from service providers who are paid a pittance compared with the customers.
- The undeserving poor and welfare benefit scroungers present austerity targets for right wing politicians. I appreciate the stereotype but I do not know of living examples in my own community – maybe I don’t get out enough! I suspect that the total welfare payments are tiny relative to the total of unpaid taxes – by an order of magnitude. (Ref)
- Extremely long finger nails were a status symbol when I was teaching in Zambia. They were indicators of indolence, especially for boys who were obviously in a position to avoid manual grafting. I have no way of knowing whether they were better suited to less physical forms of work.
- Buy and sell stuff: I use money to buy many things mainly through the internet. The money comes from having sold my labour at a good price before I retired. Thus I have savings, investments and pensions. So I am now independently wealthy and no longer a wage slave and compelled to work.
- With grace or grudge: what matters is not so much the kind of work that you do as your attitude towards it. Who is better off, the person who cleans public toilets for a pittance but with grace v the person who designs community sculptures for a fortune but with a grudge?
Three official definitions
Three Types of Work (Bellah et al. 1996) introduced the following famous division of the three kinds of work – job, career, and calling.
- A job's function is to provide means to satisfy basic needs.
- A career's function is self-expression and mastery.
- A calling puts one's talents in the service of something greater.
The Good Work principles delineated by Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon (Gardner et al. 2001) are: engagement, excellence, and ethics.
- Engagement means that the worker can feel a sense of connectedness and presence with her work.
- Excellence means that she can produce high quality results competently.
- Ethics means that she will also carry the responsibility of the short and long term effects of her work to others
https://ajattelunammattilainen.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/the-three-keys-to-meaningful-work-final.pdf
Decent work, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), involves opportunities for work that is productive and delivers:
- a fair income,
- security in the workplace and social protection for families,
- better prospects for personal development and social integration,
- freedom for people to express their concerns, organize and participate in the decisions that affect their lives, and
- equality of opportunity and treatment for all women and men.
Some other ideas:
Slavery, wage slavery, sweatshops, zero hours contracts, production lines, trade unions.
SO – the school children put in a lot of time being moulded and groomed for the world of work. Is the formal school system still a good way of managing the task?
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