It seems to me that we need to get over the "boss-worker", hierarchal mentality because such old, manipulative concepts don't translate to the new reality. While such an approach might work with some students, we continually forget that intrinsic motivation is key to accomplishment and success, especially in complex circumstances. I don't have this exactly right, but I remember a story Pat Dolan tells in his book, Restructuring Our Schools: A Primer on Systemic Change, where an auto worker said something like this: "I make good money here. I can send my kids to college. I can afford to live a pretty good life. And I hate this place."
I think it's time to change the model—kinda what Margaret Wheatley writes about in Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. The model has to be more organic in nature, not machine-like and hierarchal otherwise I'm afraid we'll get nowhere and we'll be talking this way 50 years hence. One of my all time favorite quotes is by Wheatley (page 25):
"I sit in a room without windows, participating in a ritual etched into twentieth-century tribal memmory. I have been here thousands of times before, literally, I am in a meeting, trying to solve a problem. Using whatever analytic tool somebody has just read about or been taught at their most recent training experience, we are trying to come to grips with a difficult situation. Perhaps it is poor employee morale or productivity. Or production schedules. Or the redesign of a function. The topic doesn’t matter. What matters is how familiar and terrible our process is for coming to terms with the complaint.
The room is adrift in flip chart paper—clouds of lists, issues, schedules, plans, accountabilities—crudely taped to the wall. They crack and rustle, fall loose, and, finally, are pulled off the walls, tightly rolled, and transported to some innocent secretary, who will litter the floor around her desk so that, peering down from her keyboard, she can transcribe them to tidy sheets, which she will mail to us. They will appear on our desks days or weeks later, faint specters of commitments and plans, devoid of even the little energy and clarity that sent the original clouds—poof—up onto the wall. They will drift into our day planners and onto individual “to do” lists, lists already fogged with confusion and inertia. Whether they get “done” or not, they will not solve the problem.
I am weary of the lists we make, the time projections we spin out, the breaking apart and putting back together of problems. It does not work."
The idea for me is to find new ways to be with one another that allows and encourages each person to their highest potential. It's not easy; it's not linear; but it is absolutely necessary if we are going to be successful with ALL of our kids, and with each other.
