i can make any kind of age from three months to a year these experiments reached a radical conclusion which would come to define political and social engineering in the twentieth century the driving force in society is not eno youthful i mean one thing is reproduced really fast another thing is that people were not affectionate towards rats so you didn't really need to worry about the call objection unless something truly horrible is done and finally i guess  greek society that's kind of a metaphor for life the idea that you somehow wind your way through a maze of course in the christian traditions the maze is full of meaning and you're eventually trying to get to god it's kind of the telegrams progress whereas in modern society people that need to said that you know life was like a maze that you could never run to the end of but in the twentieth century an american laboratories the maze was once again adopted as a symbol of hope not a hope that one could get to god or to get to a meaningful life but the hope that people could actually be controlled in a very scientific manner that that social life could be remade on the basis of scientific principles men can shape the behavior of others but far from being a scheme to control people without their knowledge and allows men to study and analyze behavior and to apply its healing potential to such fields of education medicine as if she jest is the study of behavior it's the notion that really all that matters is behavior and not the full of processes that lie behind behavior and it also is very much a method of control i'm waiting for it to turn counter clockwise  and i reinforce that movement behaviorism is the whole idea of behavior modification where you can use various kinds of techniques to modify people's behaviors so that they stop doing what you don't want them to do and they start doing what what you want them to do so i think it's the scientific aspect of it in the controlling aspect of it that defines behavioris to finally graduated to human beings john watson was an extremely interesting character in the history of american social science and also the history of american advertising which is an odd and significant connection between the interested in control one find this throughout his work he did give me a baby and i can make any kind of man in the late nineteenth century alongside the rise of jim crow segregation in the eight hundred ninety s what you saw is that corporations develop a much more elaborate way to justify the fact that the wealthy corporate elite which was whipped out exception white to explain the reason why that reason has its basis and what it became known as the eugenics movement you were born with either encouraged to reproduce and those who are quote unfit should be discouraged from reproducing from having children that eventually went into forced sterilization programs which started in the united states directed against african americans native americans immigrants in particular eugenics was a pseudoscience rooted in the idea that you a recognized pre biologically determine differences in people based on their ethnicity and that be you could construct a policy that favors some ethnic groups over others both in terms of immigration policy and in terms of integration into us society based on this hierarchy of heredity this pseudoscience this philosophy gained a lot of traction in the united states amongst the industrialists class especially at a time when immigrant workers who made up a large percentage of not the majority of workers of the turn of the twentieth century were beginning to form unions were beginning to create collective organizations police their own political parties to challenge the conditions of industrialization which were horrific and oppressive it took root in the universities it took root among the highest offices of government calvin coolidge for instance republican president believed that and even stated his belief that a lot of social problems were associated with inferior races we see old summit lead this philosophy is going to play  part role in shaping immigration policy after the passage of the immigration act of one thousand twenty four which essentially creates a national quota system that favors immigrants based on their ethnicity and based on their nationality important understand about the eugenics movement is that it was created and funded by the corporate elites that ruled america coming into the twentieth century it was the rockefeller's the ha amends the kellogg family of the cereal they funded research programs at universities all of it created funded by these corporate families the rockefeller's in particular according to my calculations if you factor in all the money that rockefeller eventually gave the young institute and the other money from the government this was the largest social fund that's ever been by the history previous experiments in the workplace the ultimate effect would be to increase the power of the great capitalists at the expen the story of what is now term scientific management for taylorism begins decades earlier when frederick winslow taylor was hired by bethlem steel to increase efficiency in the industrial workplace once upon a time the greatest theorist of the free market adam smith had warned the division of labor would create a catastrophe for human society frederick taylor disagreed and taylor's view there was far too little division of labor factories to be run far more efficiently if kaspar mechanized and broken down even further in a series of experiments he set out to reduce every task performed in the factory into individual units measuring how long they took and setting targets for workers to on its surface scientific management seems like an excellent idea increased efficiency allows more products to be manufactured in a shorter amount of time yet there was another more sinister motivation lurking in the background ever since the nineteen century machine shops had been a bastion of skilled labor what this meant was that a considerable degree of power remained concentrated on the shop floor the same skills that meet production possible also enabled machinists to challenge management when they felt they were being treated unfairly for management this was an unacceptable bargaining chip for taylor it was simply inefficient taylorism was certainly about descaling it was a belt studying what skilled workers did to decompose those tasks into their basic elements and then teaching people to do specific aspects of it without learning the entire set of ray of activities that were involved and are involved for a skilled person in that sense it's um it's a mechanism of control because you dictate to people well you do this part of the entire task and and you don't do anything else and you dictate to eight ten or twelve people various specific aspects of the whole task rather than allowing a skilled person to decide how the entire tasks should be done so there's very much control and bomb there to the degree that this involves the skilling and involves control it tends to take power away from workers it takes power away from therefore the collectivity of workers and therefore makes them less likely to be rebellious makes them less likely to form various kinds of movements that would operate against let's say broadly the capitalist system so this is something that management thinks is a good idea for the workers but is not a good idea for them they have to be free to be to be creative and in fact henry ford in in his biography said exactly that basically he said something like you know i'm i'm too smart to have these kind of rational principles imposed on me but those stupid workers out there we need to impose those principles on them because they would know what to do if we didn't impose those principles on them so rationalization mcdonald's ization is always something that those on top want to impose on on the bottom but something they don't want to affect their work at henry ford in effect invented the automobile assembly line and and more generally the system that came to be known as ford is one aspect of fordism has to do with  over workers and more specifically the control of workers by the assembly line so all of worker might do for example has put a hub cap on the car as that car going past as it was being constructed on the assembly line so instead of thinking creative skilled worker you had a kind of mindless kind of worker who repetitively did the same task over and over again well that kind of worker is robot like you are forced into a series of robot like actions the most interesting thing for me about mcdonald ization or they were border concept of rationalization is the idea of the irrationality of rationality that these rational systems inevitably spawn all sorts of irrational consequences this is supposed to be an efficient system yet it ends up being very often inefficient it's dehumanizing one of the kind of alternate irrationalities from my point chanst if you work in an environment where you're beaten up all the time well you're beaten up moreover if you work in an environment that is so fragmented that stole their own robbed you of dignity and so of the expression of your own capacities then they'll be diminished you'll be then you'll be bored you will be reduced in your potentials and you are not too likely to take initiative in other domains either this is why taylorism  pursued this is why fragmenting of work is pursued it weakens the workers not just on the job but in their communities too which is what you want to do so that they don't take more of the income from themselves thus reducing profits for the elites so it's a perfectly sensible policy a perfectly sensible approach a devil's approach but a perfectly sensible approach from the point of view of those of the cop who are trying to stay there and who are trying to advance moreover if they don't they just get wiped out so it's not even really an option what you'd have to do is to create a new kind of economy in which these situations and these conditions don't restrict our options the corporate entity corporate person it's not really a person but call it an entity is it pathological answer yes why because it drives towards profit regardless of the broader implications doesn't matter if your drive towards profit in truth is pain and suffering promotes you know generates black lung disease in a mine or pollutes the environment or literally destroys the society it doesn't matter your horse by the nature of the relations and among corporations the market america workers in russia were unimpressed by scientific management a major contributing factor to the crunch time rebellion of one nine hundred twenty one was the introduction of taylor's techniques immediately after the rebellion was crushed a government document on rationalisation spoke of the instinctive mistrust of all workers toward all kinds of experiments directed at extracting greater productivity from workers a crime had envisioned a decentralized system where they would actually own and control their own work and resources but lenin had something different in mind socialism and wrote is merely state capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent cease to be capitalist monopoly in new means of control have been created not by us but by capitalism and its military imperialist stage  society with some development owned by the west i mean a highly educated and productive intellectual class but that's also true of third worlds so they thought this can happen so therefore we have to drive and i was going back to spain it was entirely natural that they should be in the lead in destroying the popular revolution the curtain much earlier had predicted all of this she said that the in the future it will be two forms one form will be they will take over the state and they will create a red bureaucracy which will be the most vile and brutal regime the world's ever seen and there are others who will understand that they can't take over the state so they have to serve concentrated private power and state power and they'll be the technical until it gets you who don't implement the policies of the masters and what we know call them liberal democracies which are very good prediction it's one of the few predictions in the social sciences that actually came true which is one of the reasons why nobody ever studies as much the bankers who would cite for both the soviet union and the united and science tries to get rid of unnecessary things let's make everything equal so there aren't any other factors than the ones we're controlling for so they were trying to see what effect changing the lighting would have on employees begin to grow and the care that people have about each other and then that could easily expand to care about the community and i also work in the reorganize just because people have to say there are better ways to things if we are treated better we'll work better and so forth about the broader social impact of doing these kinds of things as we've seen earlier arak a good drug control makes people feel worse about themselves they get it creates more mental illness creates bad relations outside the workplace well if people spent most of their time in a collaborative work place they become more collaborative they care more about each  other you can have a democratic corporation a worker own business and a worker on business that really is managed by the workers that uses the corporate for and that gives us a hope because it's possible at least theoretically to reform  corporations participatory economics is the name for a different way to do the economy it's a it's a different approach to accomplishing production consumption in our cation economic functions oh different than what different than is an alternative to all of that it's a different kind of a time in a participatory economy in a good economy oem instead of organizing economic life to keep a small sector of peace on top and to enrich  that and distribute for purposes of human fulfillment development you know legally advertising with sensible information rather than people competing with advertising that has nothing to do with actually communicating with a production or you don't carry production of course not you don't need more do you want to generate all kinds of activity and product which doesn't make people better workers around the globe continue to struggle for workplace democracy and equal rights mass production continues apace tailoress and combined with human relations make up the cornerstones of worker management in the twenty first century in china scientific management has taken a nightmarish portions so extensive is the division of labor that millions of people are forced to perform roughly the same motion thousands of times a day in the united states workers in service industries corporations are increasingly resorting to video surveillance and computerized monitoring that is the first time it was announced in other places but never was it a goal to be successfully administered because the idea is so crazy so damaging inherently good people simply because the law the experience of prussia in germany was that it was possible to convert very human beings into human resources that's a translation of the german compound and the primate king of these people in complete making them able to think information for april eight hundred seventy two explains that incorporating knowledge teaches workers to be able to perceive and calculate their grievances thus making the more is bound to retard the growth of industry sixteen years later in the report of the senate committee on education is equally explicit we believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring the period eighteen eighteen to say nineteen twenty roughly but with how scientifically engineer a factory better life from the one hand and where the ability to work for it on the other now the direct investment returns to the taxpayer in order to aid in the process a garret plan was introduced it had a new organizational scheme in which different subjects would be cut by different department united states removed from their own for families that are very vulnerable age become emotionally dependent on a pat on the had a smile a insult intellectual dependence in spite of rhetoric to the contrary a teacher's nightmare is invested in those kids if any who test scores the signs of approval by the teacher you're allowed to feel good about yourself if an authority issues a signal that you can do that on the other hand  what are we trying to do if our goal is to help kids become critical thinkers lifelong learners who really enjoy thinking and reading and playing with numbers and ideas if we want to help them become good learners and good people who can create and sustain a functioning democracy then education would look very different from the way it looks right now at least in our culture we would have to question the use of grades what research finds is that when kids are trying to get good grades in school three things tend to happen they begin to lose interest in the learning itself now the purpose is just to get a good grade rather than to engage with the question or problem and second they tend to think less deeply and retain knowledge for a shorter period of time compared to kids who don't have any grades and third they tend to pick the easiest possible tasks that's not because they're being lazy it's because they're being rational we tell kids we want to see a better report card we want to see higher grades naturally they'll pick the shortest book or the easiest project because that maximizes the chance of achieving that goal so regardless of what your goal is if there is if you're interested in assessing kids and teachers and schools to see are we doing a good job here you would never need tests in order to see whether kids are learning and where they need help and you would never need grades to report the results of the evaluation we place on those assessments we would certainly do away with standardized testing the kind of testing used in particular states for provinces where everyone takes the same test and then you compare everyone scores these tests tend to measure what matters least it tends to be a good marker for family income because what standardized tests mostly measure is the size of the houses near the school but it's the case that some of our deepest thinking kids just don't do well on tests some kids who get great scores have never had an original idea in their lives oh no there are many other things died that we use  take for example the belief in survival of the fittest which is seen as a darwinian notion in fact charles darwin never even used the phrase survival of the fittest that was coined by a right wing social the nineteenth century and herbert spencer who tried to corrupt darwin's thinking to his own reactionary political purposes what darwin talked about was natural selection which means that the individual organism that's best able to adapt to a changing environment is more likely to be around to survive and reproduce but that doesn't specify competition is a mechanism in fact often the act of avoidance of competition if not the deliberate pursuit of cooperative strategies turns out to make it more likely that organisms and entire species will survive the research consistently shows that competition not only isn't necessary for excellence but tends to impede excellence on most tasks and the more challenging the task the more ingenuity problem solving skill it requires the more competition tends to do it's robbed that achievement excellence pulls in one direction and competition pulls in another and in fact another kind of research study corroborates that if you take a whole bunch of people and give them a task to do some kind of problem to work out and half of them are told see if you can figure out how to do this test and the other half are told this is a contest with a prize to whatever wins were does the best job study after study after study across cultures and most gender across ages to find that