Responsible?

I was sitting down, reading a book, on a warm Saturday morning, in a tennis clubhouse. I was the "duty parent" - a responsible adult (don't laugh). Most of the boys (including SonOfVirge) were engaged in a match, apart from a chattering of lads who were in-between sets.

"... I learnt that negative bee plus or minus square root of bee squared minus four ay cee all over two ay..." blathered an in-betweeny.

Of course it wasn't hard to work out what he was talking about. His high-school maths classes were climbing the giddying heights of quadratic equations. The blather-recipient was obviously impressed by this feat of memory and a discussion ensued on the relevance of mathematics to life. Neither of them had the faintest clue how the abstract equations they were learning at school could possibly be attached to any real life concept. They discussed, with some considerable wit, the ways such a formula could have been discovered - again displaying complete cluelessness as to the physical relevance of the subject and why anyone would ever have wanted to study it. I can only hope that some time in what remains of their schooling years a teacher has the skills to explain how intimately those equations are linked with important real world concepts like first-person shooter game mechanics, street drag racing and football kicking.

Maybe I'm stretching a long bow here, but I see this "teaching without vision" as another aspect of the practice of deskilling. It's dumbing down life to the point where nobody needs to try to understand what they are doing. Just follow the simple step-by-step rules and the system will work smoothly. Unfortunately it's not true. It's anything but smooth. The people in the system are not machines.

If you remove the need to understand a process you remove any need for taking responsibility. Nobody cares. People break rules when it suits them. Oh dear! What shall we do? We'll introduce another set of simple rules to make sure people are following the rules. People are all different. What shall we do when someone doesn't fit the simple rule system? Since we don't understand the system we'll just have to force them to fit. It may be completely ridiculous but it's not our responsibility. We're just obeying the rules because if we don't, that other set of rules will come down like a ton of bricks.

Once you build up companies of people all following simple rules, an amazing thing happens. On a macroscopic scale you start to see emergent behaviour. You get to see a chaotic system that is inefficient and inequitable for the majority of the company's people and its customers.

Where was I heading with this discussion? It looks like turning into another anti-authoritarian rant. Yeah, it's turned. Follow orders blindly at your own peril. I'll shut up now.