I think it escapes the domain of work. It's widely propagated in a variety of different mediums. I don't operate under the pretense that me and my direct friends and kin are a good representation of the world at large, but to give an example:
You've got to go shopping, and there are occasions where you're confronted with a mass of people. I actually like people, and social interactions generally, as I suspect most do, but there's this weird undercurrent- which to be fair may exist regardless of social/economic organization- I don't want to rethink my path through the store, I don't want to maneuver through the crowd, I don't want to talk with people, I fume at the idea of people chatting in the middle of the aisle. I'm in this considerable, and evidently consequential hurry, to rush through life on autopilot. Rushing to get back to doing literally fucking nothing. But this phenomena seems to be a shared experience among my friends and relatives.
I've read pretty widely, I generally don't traipse into the territory of pseudo-religious woo-woo, but Eckhart Tolle fairly elegantly explains that the world as we know it is largely structured around what he defines as the ego. The ego is exhausting, it's all consuming. But it's continuously demanded as we move evermore towards the speed-of-light society. Decision after decision, projections of the future made from a patchwork-geist stitched out of the past. Closely attending to arbitrarily defined time. Balancing accounts. Superficial chats with disassociated people trying to think their way out of the bag. Meanwhile there's the internet, and its widespread integration into nigh-every facet of life, I don't need to make the list for you, and I'm sure you can point out a litany of negative consequences and their cascading effects on you personally and society at large. I for one am running in an ego-depleted state almost constantly, so yeah, I agree with you.
All this to forward some unknown and undirected agenda, blindly. You specialize in some repetitive task, go in to the same building day after day to do what you did every other day, and with negligible respite. The undirected part, I think is one of the things that really gets people. We're social animals, we want a function in a community, perhaps even need it to be made whole, but that's been extracted by the abstraction of bureaucracy and organization, you toil for some faceless, dispassionate, and disconnected c-suite exec you'll never be in the same room with. You don't do it for your boss, you probably don't do it for yourself. One could aggrandize the economic impact you have on your community servicing your amorally defined debt to a bank that you've never walked into, and purchasing goods from a chain supermarket which contributes pennies to a few dozen workers. Companies that are headquartered in a state a thousand miles away, selling goods from all over the world- countries and their cultures you know next to nothing about, people who you'll never know.
It's not just work though, it's everything, everywhere I think. I could write pages about it, suffice it to say I don't like where we are.
"Once time was money, it became possible to speak of “spending time,” rather than just “passing” it—also of wasting time, killing time, saving time, losing time, racing against time, and so forth. Puritan, Methodist, and evangelical preachers soon began instructing their flocks about the “husbandry of time,” proposing that the careful budgeting of time was the essence of morality. Factories began employing time clocks; workers came to be expected to punch the clock upon entering and leaving; charity schools designed to teach the poor discipline and punctuality gave way to public school systems where students of all social classes were made to get up and march from room to room each hour at the sound of a bell, an arrangement self-consciously designed to train children for future lives of paid factory labor.25"
"25.:Those who designed modern universal education systems were quite explicit about all this: Thompson himself cites a number of them. I remember reading that someone once surveyed American employers about what it was they actually expected when they specified in a job ad that a worker must have a high school degree: a certain level of literacy? Or numeracy? The vast majority said no, a high school education, they found, did not guarantee such things—they mainly expected the worker would be able to show up on time. Interestingly, the more advanced the level of education, however, the more autonomous the students and the more the old episodic pattern of work tends to reemerge."
Of course it's not just getting up and shuffling from class to class, but also waking up regularly, meeting deadlines, managing time efficiently. All of these things combined with the "basic educational foundation" which is in fact largely preparatory for later education and workplace fundamentals does seem to point against your assertions. And, frankly I think it's all harmful.
Edit:
Should probably also indicate that socialization in a hierarchical setting with various modes of authority being assumed while also dealing with virtual strangers at all points in the day is also not unlike work.
What are you really measuring come exam time? It's not an objective measure, that much is sure. Someone who is loaded with work, family, and various other considerations isn't given a due handicap, and even in the event that there is a curve in place, it's still not measuring much. We'd do better to recognize that the measure of man is almost always going to result in spurious data. A D student isn't necessarily dumb, but disinterested, or distracted, perhaps disenfranchised or something along those lines. And grading itself really isn't revelatory, it's easy to game. I just did it, open book quiz with a digital copy, I ctrl-F'd through it and found the answers with ease, I didn't read much of anything, but I did get a perfect score. What does it say, then? That a student can exploit Campbell's law, and the teacher can do the same, so the district can look good and continue receiving grants. It has nothing to do with intelligence, it has to do with sculpting the metrics to say that someone is intelligent. Grading wasn't always the case, mind you, it was an invention of the late 1700's - and frankly a bad one. But institutional inertia carried it to the present.
What I assure you won't result from dismantling the systematic psuedo-objective measurement of humans is "cognitively handicapped" generations.
my white cheese 0%
Place the diced ham and chopped onion in a bowl.
Add the sour cream, fromage blanc and parsley
I'm pretty impressed, it doesn't sound bad at all.
Re-feeding, with some parsing:
mon fromage blanc:
Put the diced ham and chopped onion in a bowl.
Add the [sour] cream, cottage cheese and chopped parsley.
Salt and pepper. Mix well.
Divide the preparation among 4 verrines, alternating with pieces of cherry tomatoes and grated Emmenthal. Decorate with sunflower seeds and dried tomato petals.
I kinda want an English version, is there one available?
You've got to go shopping, and there are occasions where you're confronted with a mass of people. I actually like people, and social interactions generally, as I suspect most do, but there's this weird undercurrent- which to be fair may exist regardless of social/economic organization- I don't want to rethink my path through the store, I don't want to maneuver through the crowd, I don't want to talk with people, I fume at the idea of people chatting in the middle of the aisle. I'm in this considerable, and evidently consequential hurry, to rush through life on autopilot. Rushing to get back to doing literally fucking nothing. But this phenomena seems to be a shared experience among my friends and relatives.
I've read pretty widely, I generally don't traipse into the territory of pseudo-religious woo-woo, but Eckhart Tolle fairly elegantly explains that the world as we know it is largely structured around what he defines as the ego. The ego is exhausting, it's all consuming. But it's continuously demanded as we move evermore towards the speed-of-light society. Decision after decision, projections of the future made from a patchwork-geist stitched out of the past. Closely attending to arbitrarily defined time. Balancing accounts. Superficial chats with disassociated people trying to think their way out of the bag. Meanwhile there's the internet, and its widespread integration into nigh-every facet of life, I don't need to make the list for you, and I'm sure you can point out a litany of negative consequences and their cascading effects on you personally and society at large. I for one am running in an ego-depleted state almost constantly, so yeah, I agree with you.
All this to forward some unknown and undirected agenda, blindly. You specialize in some repetitive task, go in to the same building day after day to do what you did every other day, and with negligible respite. The undirected part, I think is one of the things that really gets people. We're social animals, we want a function in a community, perhaps even need it to be made whole, but that's been extracted by the abstraction of bureaucracy and organization, you toil for some faceless, dispassionate, and disconnected c-suite exec you'll never be in the same room with. You don't do it for your boss, you probably don't do it for yourself. One could aggrandize the economic impact you have on your community servicing your amorally defined debt to a bank that you've never walked into, and purchasing goods from a chain supermarket which contributes pennies to a few dozen workers. Companies that are headquartered in a state a thousand miles away, selling goods from all over the world- countries and their cultures you know next to nothing about, people who you'll never know.
It's not just work though, it's everything, everywhere I think. I could write pages about it, suffice it to say I don't like where we are.