Saturday, February 23, 2008

A Wrong Turn at the Industrial Revolution

I for one cannot wait to read Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of American Unreason. I learned about it from an article in the New York Times on Valentine’s Day. The article written by Patricia Cohen, was titled Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

Just from my experiences of the last 30 years, I feel it is true. When we look at the United States of America, we see a people that are collectively fulfilling the famed Peter Principle. As a nation and a culture, we are rising to a level of incompetence.

It was commonly known in the ancient world that competence varied widely between artisans. Since they would never need to work together, it was not important. Legend has it that the building of King Solomon’s Temple required artisans from all over the Europe and Asia. The variation in competence was solved by developing a system to assess and thus a blueprint to develop competence in order to complete the construction of the temple.

It believed that the master builder of the temple was recognized that different people defined competence differently. One third of the artisans defined it as the knowledge gained through education to understand why we do something. Another third defined it as the skills gained through training to understand how we do something. The last third defined it as the wisdom gained through experience to understand when we do something.

Recognizing that all three views complemented each other, legend claims that the master builder developed the maturity model structure. It can be assumed the structure is very similar to our modern capability maturity models; and that there were five levels of educational maturity, five levels of skill maturity and five levels of experiential maturity.

Due to the complimentary nature, in order for an apprentice to complete the first level of development they needed to demonstrate level one competence in all three areas. This continued as the apprentice moved up the developmental model until they reached level five at the top. They were then designated as journeymen, which indicated they had a level of competence that allowed them to travel to do work without supervision.

Though this three dimensional perspective of competence continued to evolve through guilds, colleges and early universities, for many reasons, it began to break down with the introduction of factories. In time, the simultaneous model gave way to a linear separation of education, then training and finally experience. This separation led to inconsistencies between the three and tended to feed the natural preference of individuals who prefer one method to the other for developing understanding.

The bottom line, without the standards of character and the structure of discipline, individuals left to their own compass will be driven by the natural tendencies of the own temperament. They have no reason to expand their capabilities and no motivation to see the world through other perspectives. Without a rationalization to drive their development, they will believe, feel and think based on the limited wiring given to them at birth.

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