Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Nov 20, 2020 7:34 pm
I did think about the word 'industry' in context of education. It's true there are experts, the teachers and psychologists, producers of text books and other materials. The raw material is people and their offspring i.e. consumers who want to be wiser or trained in a skill. In education the workers and the experts are or should be identical.
Maybe so, but that's not the main point of an educations system. Schools are about very much more than learning to be specialists in some vast array of specialities.
The school is where children form their attitudes to other people; where they learn the relative value of things, ideas and individuals - including themselves - and the rules of morality, commerce, governance and interaction in their society. It is where they learn to be friends, enemies, lovers, haters, builders, destroyers, buyers, sellers, servants, bosses; members of clubs, outcasts, elites, coteries, teams, couples, gangs, classes and castes.
The National Health Service structure has a managerial column that is sometimes at odds with the medics; I agree human services unlike other 'industries' cannot be geared to profit.
In the USA, it is. So is the "corrections" industry (prisons), while jurisprudence and law-enforcement are political -- but politics are heavily monetized.
If workers in all industries were generally highly educated or highly trained then the gap between the workers and the experts would be much lessened.
That gap has never been a problem. Workers respect expertise in their own fields. What they reject is expertise in areas they don't understand - also general knowledge that doesn't immediately translate to dollars or tangible goods. This conflict is not a question of better training or education; it's the alienation of practical people from theorists. Part of this, of course, the enmity of religious institutions toward secular ones.
The incentive has to be political.
And where is that to come from. The politics are already compartmentalized, customized to bloc interests and marketed in pre-packaged "policies", promises, slogans and merchandise.
In the cases of human services the managerial role is undertaken by the government
In the USA??? Unlikely.
and so the government must not be allowed to be dictatorial.
Where is the force and mechanism to stop that?
The era of dictatorial management was 19th century and has been surpassed by a democratic model.
The little cardboard model on the tabletop? Maybe. In real life, no.
In America, even more than other parts of the world, people are valued and empowered according to their financial means. The CEO who receives 265 times as much salary as the average worker in the same industry
https://www.statista.com/statistics/424 ... y-country/ also has 265 times as much physical security, political power and access to services - including education and health-care. The shareholder who rakes in the profits may wield many times the clout of the CEO; he can sell government posts and buy licenses, decide to replace thousands of workers with robots, or move the whole industry to a vassal country and leave them all stranded. There is nothing democratic about it!
What's happened to produce the present state of tension is that decisions made by the owners-of-everything adversely affected the working and agrarian classes: devastated their communities, deprived them self-esteem, security and stability; pushed them, in many cases , into poverty and forced them to compete for the crumbs of a prosperity they can plainly see other people enjoying.
And the very people who did this, convinced their victims that it's all the fault of liberal government.