The Student: A Short History

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The Student: A Short History

This article was written by Michael S. Roth from The Wall Street Journal. Appeared in the May 18, 2024 print edition. Teaching teachers new tricks.

The U.S. has the world’s best universities and, it sometimes seems, the world’s worst students. This is because most universities have two business models. One is research and development in concert with the private sector, and the creation of new patents. The other is keeping young people off the streets and the unemployment rolls, and using other people’s money—parental savings, student loans—to advance programs of indoctrination inimical to most Americans. 

The Student. A Short History

By Michael S. Roth

The first business attracts the cream of the world’s scientists and makes the U.S. the world’s leading innovator. The second is clotted with identity-based tokenism, political extremism, bureaucratic incompetence, intellectual imposture, and students who can’t spell. Not to mention, especially on Ivy League campuses, antisemitism. University presidents pander to the mobs, and professors link arms to defend their protégés. 

Democracy requires educated citizens. Government needs competent servants. The education system produces neither in sufficient number. From your local preschool to the Harvard Kennedy School, American education is failing the public. But it was not always this way, and it doesn’t need to be.

Michael S. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University, and his book “The Student” is an instructive and idealistic apologia for the ideals of instruction, from Confucius and Socrates to the clowns and communists of current educational theory. An apologia is not an apology—as medieval students knew; an apologia is a defense or justification—but Mr. Roth’s is welcome anyway.

The means and ends of education, Mr. Roth shows, have always changed to reflect their time and place. He begins with the ancients: Confucius (“harmonious integration”), Socrates (“critical self-awareness”) and Jesus (“renewal through the acceptance of a mentor’s path”). Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus didn’t write anything down, so we must take their students’ word about their pedagogical aims.

Confucius, the son of a nobleman who had lost his social footing, lived in disordered times, and wrote in exile, like Machiavelli but with morals. Confucian educational theory inculcated private virtue (de) in the service of public benevolence (ren). The ideal student is a junzi (learned gentleman), the ideal result a “harmonious collective.”

Socrates was born in 469 B.C., about a decade after Confucius’ death. Unlike many of today’s professors, Socrates was good with his hands and was proud to defend his homeland. “His stonemason father taught his son the family trade, and Socrates fought for Athens against the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. One student, the soldier-historian Xenophon, depicts Socrates as the practical man who teaches that eupraxia (well-being) comes from successfully completing a challenging task. Another, Plato, depicts Socrates as an ironic trickster, whose irritating questions teach that self-knowledge begins in recognizing your own ignorance.

Athens’s oligarchy executed Socrates for “corrupting the youth.” 

Jesus was also executed for political reasons. He taught, Mr. Roth writes, neither Confucius’ “return to tradition” nor Socrates’ “conversational encounters,” but pursued the “transformative dimension of learning” to the highest level, total rebirth. This method creates disciples and revolutionaries, not students and bureaucrats. Socrates would have appreciated the irony, and Confucius the results, of how Christianity remade education.

Before the modern age, the ideal education was private: small groups of adepts or followers, and tutors in the homes of the wealthy. The university was born in medieval Europe to train staff for the Catholic Church. It was reborn in early modern Europe during the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. As the means of education went public, its ends changed from teaching Christian dogma and training bureaucrats to reviving the Greek “spirit of critique” (” critical thinking,” as educators now call it) and socializing liberal-minded gentlemen. The proto-modern student appears late in the Renaissance. Hamlet (home from Wittenberg U.) is anguished, antagonistic, depressed, pushing thirty and entirely dependent on his parents. Shakespeare, the son of a glover, did not attend any university.

Mass democracy requires mass education, and that, gradually, opened the university to all. The early 20th-century American university was both a finishing school for idlers and a social and professional escalator for women, African Americans, and the children of immigrants. The contradictions in the student body heightened in the decades after 1945. The GI Bill and the removal of racist quotas allowed adult students to study seriously and made university admissions more meritocratic, but “corporatization” and credentialism conformity also intensified.

“The great object of Education,” Emerson wrote, should be “commensurate with the object of life.” He meant the inner life, not social life, or the pursuit of a “vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism.” But, like Ophelia with Hamlet, today’s American student receives mixed messages. One is the Romantic ideal of education as personal liberation; the other is the Enlightenment ideal of ordering society by reason and specialization.

Mr. Roth is alert to these complexities, but he struggles to explain what happened to student identity in the 1960s. Why did the leaders of the freest and most comfortable generation in human history become Trotskyites and Maoists? Why, when the students asserted their Kantian right to educate themselves, did their independent minds all conform to the same repressive political ideologies?

The usual parochial reasons (civil rights, the Vietnam draft, campus curfews, sex-segregated dorms) are insufficient. The rebels of 1968 lost the battle but won the war by retreating to the campus, inducting generations of students into the myth of revolution and sending them on the long march through the institutions. More than the internet, the prime site of radicalization today is the elite private university. As Mr. Roth notes, if the good student is a true believer, there is no place for Socrates’ “ironic skepticism.” A degraded Confucianism endures because the ever-expanding bureaucracy needs managers.

The university has always been a Ship of Theseus, sailing on even as all its original timbers are replaced. It has mutated into the allegorical Ship of Fools, a vessel for vanities. The crew is now cannibalizing itself, like the shipwrecked sailors in Théodore Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” (1819). Salman Khan’s “Brave New Words” suggests it can be refloated on the ocean of artificial intelligence. AI, Mr. Khan believes, can combine the personalized ancient model (“the kind of tutor Aristotle was Alexander the Great”) with the impersonal modern model (“the utopian idea of offering mass public education to everyone”).

Mr. Roth asks if certification by “a teacher (or both)” is “the capitalist version of Confucian harmony,” with teaching reduced to “lessons of conformity;” students should be so lucky. As the founder of the tutoring firm Khan Academy, Mr. Khan has done more than anyone to compensate for the failings of old-school education. He is blunt about the unsustainable inadequacy of a system in which three-quarters of graduating high schoolers “lack basic proficiency in writing” and “a majority of students, even the ones who graduate from high school and then decide to go to college, do not even place into college-level math.”

The alternative ideal, advanced in this readable and cheery view of the academic apocalypse, would grant “every student on the planet” access to “an artificially intelligent personal tutor” that could debate with them, fine-tune their writing, and suggest “new ways of experiencing art and unlocking their own creativity.” It would be enough for them to learn to read and write.

As the fates of Socrates and Jesus teach us, terrible things are often done in the name of the public good. 

Mr. Khan, of the Kahn Academy, recommends that students ask their AI to help “generate a first draft” of essays, but admits that the line between “help” and “cheating” is unclear. He recognizes the need for data protection and “guardrails” to avoid “bias and misinformation” but admits “uncertainty” about how these guardrails should be designed, because AI is a new frontier.

We have already crossed it. While Mr. Khan dreams of a “real, ethical, responsible tutor sitting next to your child when they do anything on the internet,” the emerging reality of this fraternal image is Big Brother, under orders from the Education Department and the American Federation of Teachers. Some teachers get flustered by directing the traffic at drop-off and pickup. They won’t have the time to micromanage the digital education of every child.

AI will take over because it is efficient, cheap, and nonunionized: Khan Academy serves more than one hundred million students a year on an annual budget of about $70 million: “equivalent to the budget of a large high school in many parts of the United States.” Mr. Khan believes that teachers won’t be thrown overboard in the name of efficiency, because teaching is an “essential profession.” But if AI will shortly “automate almost any traditional white-collar process,” why should teachers be spared?

The same goes for university students. AI, Mr. Khan writes, can be trained not to favor college applicants by “race, religion, gender, or age”—but it won’t, because that would be political anathema. AI can also detect cheating which is endemic in college papers—but that would be bad for the university business.

Though universities will fight to retain their pre-digital monopolies, the writing is on the whiteboard. Why take out a government-issued mortgage on a traditional credential for a white-collar job that no longer exists? What kind of eupraxia would students get from completing a task in which AI did the demanding work? Anyway, we don’t need more social workers, gender students and Marxist literary theorists. We need plumbers, nurses, and soldiers: people trained to do the jobs that AI cannot yet do. Socrates’ father was right: Stonemasonry is a job for life.

Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Putting People Ahead of Profits.

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Putting People Ahead of Profits.

Our founder Ron Slee has spent the last several weeks looking at how people make money. These thoughts have led to tonight’s blog post: putting people ahead of profits.

For some time now, those regular readers of our blogs and listeners to our Podcasts have noticed my focus on customer service and customer retention. Many will have seen the thread through our blogs from various Contributors who have focused on the intuitive truth that customer service enhances customer relationships which results in high customer retention and the data analytics that support that position. The question remains why companies don’t address these issues more.

Recently I was told that I needed to refresh the standards for sales per employee in the product support space. This blog will be the start of that refreshing process.

It is hard for me to imagine that it has been almost thirty years since I wrote several documents addressing job descriptions, standards of performance, best practices, and market opportunities. 

What is harder to imagine is that the standards in those documents have not been updated, in any serious manner, to reflect the changes in technology, in the equipment in use in the filled, and in the materials used. More importantly the use of data analytics and machine learning is available through artificial intelligence. My intent is to update each of these documents in 2025.

Significantly for metrics and operating standards I created a business called the Insight (M&R) Institute with a gentleman named Malcolm Phares. Mac during his career had been the VP of Dealer Development for PACCAR and was one of the creators of “Twenty Groups” for the On-Highway Tracking Industry. 

The two of us created Insight to perform the same function but for the heavy equipment world. We had Insight groups for many of the major OEM’s. We developed a very comprehensive series of standards and defined each of them and provide data sources for information in business systems. It finally ended up that we had two hundred standard metrics for parts, service, sales, rental, and administration. There was truly little that we missed. 

We met our Insight Groups, consisting of twelve dealers in each group, three times a year and did best practices with each of the groups. Mac was an incredibly capable man, and I would not have been able to do this work without him. We also developed a “neutralization document.” This allowed us to present material in a manner that allowed the dealers to be able to compare with their peers even though they had differing financial statement and balance sheet policy differences.

In the 2000’s Dale Hanna and I updated the Insight business after I had purchased Mac’s share in Insight. We created The Capital Goods Sages. www.thecaptialgoodsages.com This is an internet-based business which allows subscribing dealers to submit their data to our financial model and receive their results compared to our standards. In this way I am still able to create aggregated results to maintain operating standards for each of the two hundred metrics. 

As my consulting activity moved overseas so did my ability to aggregate standards for different regions in the world. We report back to the subscribing dealers their results with graphics. A frowny face, a smiley face, a green light and orange light, a red light, and a red cross. 

What many businesses missed in the application of standards of performance is that there is a point at which you are getting a number that is too high or too low depending on the measure. Most dealers just keep pushing the performance higher and higher. This is a bit of a trap. The dealers think their performance is off the chart in a metric without realizing that there is an offsetting metric that is involved. For instance, drive up sales per employee and the result is lower customer service. 

This is what caused the title of this blog. Too many dealers are driving up sales per employee and seeing dramatic increases in Net Profit. What they don’t see is that customer retention is going down. We have a dispute with that statement between dealer executives and I often. They tell me that can’t be true when their overall sales revenues have increased year over year.

I agree with that fact completely. However, at the same time as their sales revenues have increased the number of businesses competing in the market has decreased. In a recent blog I noted that in the years 2000 through 2025 that the number of dealerships competing in the construction equipment market has decreased by 75%. From 2000 dealers in 2000 down to five hundred, or less dealers, in 2025.

The Time is Now.

Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.
For our course lists, please click here.

The Student: A Short History

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The Student: A Short History

This article was written by Michael S. Roth from The Wall Street Journal. Appeared in the May 18, 2024 print edition. Teaching teachers new tricks.

The U.S. has the world’s best universities and, it sometimes seems, the world’s worst students. This is because most universities have two business models. One is research and development in concert with the private sector, and the creation of new patents. The other is keeping young people off the streets and the unemployment rolls, and using other people’s money—parental savings, student loans—to advance programs of indoctrination inimical to most Americans. 

The Student. A Short History

By Michael S. Roth

The first business attracts the cream of the world’s scientists and makes the U.S. the world’s leading innovator. The second is clotted with identity-based tokenism, political extremism, bureaucratic incompetence, intellectual imposture, and students who can’t spell. Not to mention, especially on Ivy League campuses, antisemitism. University presidents pander to the mobs, and professors link arms to defend their protégés. 

Democracy requires educated citizens. Government needs competent servants. The education system produces neither in sufficient number. From your local preschool to the Harvard Kennedy School, American education is failing the public. But it was not always this way, and it doesn’t need to be.

Michael S. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University, and his book “The Student” is an instructive and idealistic apologia for the ideals of instruction, from Confucius and Socrates to the clowns and communists of current educational theory. An apologia is not an apology—as medieval students knew; an apologia is a defense or justification—but Mr. Roth’s is welcome anyway.

The means and ends of education, Mr. Roth shows, have always changed to reflect their time and place. He begins with the ancients: Confucius (“harmonious integration”), Socrates (“critical self-awareness”) and Jesus (“renewal through the acceptance of a mentor’s path”). Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus didn’t write anything down, so we must take their students’ word about their pedagogical aims.

Confucius, the son of a nobleman who had lost his social footing, lived in disordered times, and wrote in exile, like Machiavelli but with morals. Confucian educational theory inculcated private virtue (de) in the service of public benevolence (ren). The ideal student is a junzi (learned gentleman), the ideal result a “harmonious collective.”

Socrates was born in 469 B.C., about a decade after Confucius’ death. Unlike many of today’s professors, Socrates was good with his hands and was proud to defend his homeland. “His stonemason father taught his son the family trade, and Socrates fought for Athens against the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. One student, the soldier-historian Xenophon, depicts Socrates as the practical man who teaches that eupraxia (well-being) comes from successfully completing a challenging task. Another, Plato, depicts Socrates as an ironic trickster, whose irritating questions teach that self-knowledge begins in recognizing your own ignorance.

Athens’s oligarchy executed Socrates for “corrupting the youth.” 

Jesus was also executed for political reasons. He taught, Mr. Roth writes, neither Confucius’ “return to tradition” nor Socrates’ “conversational encounters,” but pursued the “transformative dimension of learning” to the highest level, total rebirth. This method creates disciples and revolutionaries, not students and bureaucrats. Socrates would have appreciated the irony, and Confucius the results, of how Christianity remade education.

Before the modern age, the ideal education was private: small groups of adepts or followers, and tutors in the homes of the wealthy. The university was born in medieval Europe to train staff for the Catholic Church. It was reborn in early modern Europe during the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. As the means of education went public, its ends changed from teaching Christian dogma and training bureaucrats to reviving the Greek “spirit of critique” (” critical thinking,” as educators now call it) and socializing liberal-minded gentlemen. The proto-modern student appears late in the Renaissance. Hamlet (home from Wittenberg U.) is anguished, antagonistic, depressed, pushing thirty and entirely dependent on his parents. Shakespeare, the son of a glover, did not attend any university.

Mass democracy requires mass education, and that, gradually, opened the university to all. The early 20th-century American university was both a finishing school for idlers and a social and professional escalator for women, African Americans, and the children of immigrants. The contradictions in the student body heightened in the decades after 1945. The GI Bill and the removal of racist quotas allowed adult students to study seriously and made university admissions more meritocratic, but “corporatization” and credentialism conformity also intensified.

“The great object of Education,” Emerson wrote, should be “commensurate with the object of life.” He meant the inner life, not social life, or the pursuit of a “vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism.” But, like Ophelia with Hamlet, today’s American student receives mixed messages. One is the Romantic ideal of education as personal liberation; the other is the Enlightenment ideal of ordering society by reason and specialization.

Mr. Roth is alert to these complexities, but he struggles to explain what happened to student identity in the 1960s. Why did the leaders of the freest and most comfortable generation in human history become Trotskyites and Maoists? Why, when the students asserted their Kantian right to educate themselves, did their independent minds all conform to the same repressive political ideologies?

The usual parochial reasons (civil rights, the Vietnam draft, campus curfews, sex-segregated dorms) are insufficient. The rebels of 1968 lost the battle but won the war by retreating to the campus, inducting generations of students into the myth of revolution and sending them on the long march through the institutions. More than the internet, the prime site of radicalization today is the elite private university. As Mr. Roth notes, if the good student is a true believer, there is no place for Socrates’ “ironic skepticism.” A degraded Confucianism endures because the ever-expanding bureaucracy needs managers.

The university has always been a Ship of Theseus, sailing on even as all its original timbers are replaced. It has mutated into the allegorical Ship of Fools, a vessel for vanities. The crew is now cannibalizing itself, like the shipwrecked sailors in Théodore Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” (1819). Salman Khan’s “Brave New Words” suggests it can be refloated on the ocean of artificial intelligence. AI, Mr. Khan believes, can combine the personalized ancient model (“the kind of tutor Aristotle was Alexander the Great”) with the impersonal modern model (“the utopian idea of offering mass public education to everyone”).

Mr. Roth asks if certification by “a teacher (or both)” is “the capitalist version of Confucian harmony,” with teaching reduced to “lessons of conformity;” students should be so lucky. As the founder of the tutoring firm Khan Academy, Mr. Khan has done more than anyone to compensate for the failings of old-school education. He is blunt about the unsustainable inadequacy of a system in which three-quarters of graduating high schoolers “lack basic proficiency in writing” and “a majority of students, even the ones who graduate from high school and then decide to go to college, do not even place into college-level math.”

The alternative ideal, advanced in this readable and cheery view of the academic apocalypse, would grant “every student on the planet” access to “an artificially intelligent personal tutor” that could debate with them, fine-tune their writing, and suggest “new ways of experiencing art and unlocking their own creativity.” It would be enough for them to learn to read and write.

As the fates of Socrates and Jesus teach us, terrible things are often done in the name of the public good. 

Mr. Khan, of the Kahn Academy, recommends that students ask their AI to help “generate a first draft” of essays, but admits that the line between “help” and “cheating” is unclear. He recognizes the need for data protection and “guardrails” to avoid “bias and misinformation” but admits “uncertainty” about how these guardrails should be designed, because AI is a new frontier.

We have already crossed it. While Mr. Khan dreams of a “real, ethical, responsible tutor sitting next to your child when they do anything on the internet,” the emerging reality of this fraternal image is Big Brother, under orders from the Education Department and the American Federation of Teachers. Some teachers get flustered by directing the traffic at drop-off and pickup. They won’t have the time to micromanage the digital education of every child.

AI will take over because it is efficient, cheap, and nonunionized: Khan Academy serves more than one hundred million students a year on an annual budget of about $70 million: “equivalent to the budget of a large high school in many parts of the United States.” Mr. Khan believes that teachers won’t be thrown overboard in the name of efficiency, because teaching is an “essential profession.” But if AI will shortly “automate almost any traditional white-collar process,” why should teachers be spared?

The same goes for university students. AI, Mr. Khan writes, can be trained not to favor college applicants by “race, religion, gender, or age”—but it won’t, because that would be political anathema. AI can also detect cheating which is endemic in college papers—but that would be bad for the university business.

Though universities will fight to retain their pre-digital monopolies, the writing is on the whiteboard. Why take out a government-issued mortgage on a traditional credential for a white-collar job that no longer exists? What kind of eupraxia would students get from completing a task in which AI did the demanding work? Anyway, we don’t need more social workers, gender students and Marxist literary theorists. We need plumbers, nurses, and soldiers: people trained to do the jobs that AI cannot yet do. Socrates’ father was right: Stonemasonry is a job for life.

Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

How We Teach – How You Learn

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How We Teach – How You Learn

Our founder, Ron Slee, is back this week with a blog post that goes straight to the heart of our mission here at Learning Without Scars: How We Teach – How You Learn.

I have taught for many decades. During that time, I was primarily in classrooms, although sometimes it was in swimming pools, or tennis courts or golf courses. Not only did the venue change but also the age group of students changed. From infants who were taught to be able to swim and survive when on the water from the age of six months old to senior citizens who were afraid to swim. However, primarily I was in classrooms or lecture halls or auditoriums. A typical class size ranged from twenty-four students at round tables to several hundred. 

I started teaching in the 1960’s so a lot of time has been involved in teaching and trying different methods to get students to “get it.”

I have always been interested in learning and understanding and not memorizing. I still want to be able to reconstruct my learning years and years later. If I don’t understand something, will I be able to remember it?

Which brings me to the specific subject of this blog. I want you to learn – to understand. So, I will never tell you the answer. I will ask questions of you. I will coax you into working it out on your own. I found out years later that this was called the “Socratic” way of teaching.

The Socratic method is a dialogue between individuals based on asking and answering questions. This method, attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, aims to probe, and examine beliefs, leading participants toward a deeper understanding of truth and coherence.

Here’s how it works – the following comes from a google search.

Questioning Common Beliefs. 

The Socratic method begins with commonly held beliefs. Socrates engages in dialogue with others, questioning these beliefs to uncover inconsistencies and contradictions.

Internal Consistency and Coherence. 

Through a series of questions, Socrates scrutinizes beliefs for internal consistency (whether they hold up logically) and their coherence with other beliefs. The goal is to bring everyone closer to the truth.

Midwifery of Understanding.

 Socrates likens his method to midwifery, helping interlocutors develop their understanding in a way analogous to a child developing in the womb.

Pedagogical Contexts.

  1.  Modified forms of the Socratic method are employed today in various educational contexts.

In summary, the Socratic method is a powerful tool for critical thinking, encouraging self-examination and intellectual growth. 

As Socrates famously said, “I know that I know nothing,” emphasizing the importance of questioning and seeking behavior. 

I am sure I drove my students crazy. I used textbooks but never followed the sequence of the textbook. The students, conscientiously, would ask at the end of a lecture what the section or pages were going to be that I would cover in the next class. They wanted to be prepared. I never told them. In fact, I used to jump around in the book deliberately so that they could not prepare. I wanted them to listen to the lesson. I wanted them to have to think.

That caused me problems as a student. I didn’t want to memorize, and it cost me. In High School I took Latin and Geometry. There are certain things you do have to memorize. Like Theorems in Geometry. Like words in a new language. I got 38% in the first semester in both. The family wasn’t happy. So, I lost some privileges. Like weekends at the lake. 

I spent the next three months with my grandmother. She worked my proverbial off. I completed the year with a 76% average. So, I learned a valuable lesson. One size doesn’t fit all.

Anyone who has been in a classroom with me knows how I work. I wander through the room. Watching everyone. I can see when people get it and when they are lost. I keep talking until I see the lights go on in everyone’s eyes. That really turns my crank. I still teach. Not every month like I used to but enough to know that things in the learning world are still the same. Once you get someone into a learning environment, they are subject to their teachers. They care about learning only if the teacher cares about teaching. 

All our subject specific classes cover five plus hours. They have around twenty segments. Class segments and Support Material Segments. Each segment has a quiz at the end. The student must achieve a 60% score on the quiz to proceed to the next segment. We start every class with a pretest to determine the knowledge and skill level of each student before they start. We end every class with a final assessment. The students must achieve an 80% score to earn a certificate. 

We are in the lifelong learning business. Learning is hard. It requires desire and discipline. If every person were to strive to be the best that they could be they would be learning every day.

The Time is Now.

Audio Tracks

 

French

 

Polish

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Ho’oponopono

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Ho’oponopono

Learning Without Scars’ founder, Ron Slee, is back today with a blog post on Ho’oponopono, the Hawaiian Principle of 100% Responsibility.

Seneca, one of the most important Roman Stoic philosophers, said “Luck is what happens when preparation comes across opportunity. Thomas Edison said his work was 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration. Louis Pasteur among many others felt the same way.

In every case I suggest it is much more important to be ready when opportunity comes to you more than anything else. That leads me to thinking about our lives and our work. How much of our lives is under our control? As someone who is known to be a control freak this is a nasty question. 

In Hawaii we are a society that is further away from any other on the planet. It is 2500 miles to the nearest population center of any kind. Our culture has a lot of different influences. From Asia, the Americas, Oceania obviously. But there are others that cause us to wonder. It seems that using language as our tool on determining origins the Hawaiian people originally came from the middle east. That too follows ancient historical thinking.

But let us go back to Ho’opononpono and one of its foundations which is the principle of 100% responsibility. The kahunas, the priests of our culture, state that each human being is 100% responsible for their own reality. That it is useless to blame other people. We are not victims unless we choose to be victims.

Ho’opononpono says that if you don’t like your reality then you must change it. Desmond Tutu, the archbishop for South Africa had a saying that I go back to often. “If it is to be it is up to me.” In other words, we control our own destiny.

That brings me to Learning Without Scars and our purpose for being. We are here to help people identify their individual potential both personally and professionally. We are here to open your Ho’oponopono and let you take control of your destiny, of your future. 

There is a problem with this line of thinking though, isn’t there?

This is a challenging work. Learning and developing and growing as a person are demanding work. For most of us it is too much work.

Let me digress for a moment. Dr Gail Matthews, of the Dominican University of California conducted a major study of “The Impact of Commitment, Accountability and Written Goals on Goal Achievement.” She found that writing down our goals increases the percentage of achieving those goals in a major way. It seems that psychologically when we write down our goals it is as though we are signing a contract with ourselves. So, let’s provide you with a simple little exercise now. Choose an area of your life in which you would like to correct something. Select from this list: 

  1. Love and Relations
  2. Money and Finance
  3. Goals and Work
  4. Health
  5. Learning and Personal Growth.

Now write down several phrases with the first thing that comes to your mind about one of the above list. 

I would like you to select Learning and Personal Growth.

Don’t worry about the order. Next look at what you have written and create at most three specific goals or actions. They must be positive. Put that piece of paper on your refrigerator. 

The Ho’oponopono means to correct an error. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Given that we are 100% responsible for our life if there is something we are unhappy with we must correct the mistake that got us to where we are now. However, that means that we must accept the reality that WE are 100% responsible for it.

This is one of the most critical elements of this process. Until you accept, you’re responsible, it will be difficult for you to change. Deep down everything depends on us and we must stop making excuses or blaming circumstances and get to change our lives. Here comes something that I understand and believe in. From this point on it has nothing to do with being lucky. It becomes a personal choice.

One other observation please. 

The easiest person in the world to lie to is your reflection in the mirror – AND – that is the last person in the world you should ever lie to.

We are never victims unless we allow ourselves to be victims. When I say this, I am speaking of our choices – not situations involving crime. Whatever your job is, your career, you can control your outcome. You can be open to learning. You can go back to school. You can ask for help. You can go to counselling. You have many opportunities. It is a matter of making a choice.

You can apply this principle of one hundred percent responsibility to all aspects of your life. Start with the premise that everything is created in your mind before it becomes reality. SO. Change the way you think and act. It will change your reality.

In Hawaii this is called “cleaning.” We will continue to repeat the same painful episodes and circumstances because they are all coming from our subconscious.

To overcome the subconscious, Hawaiian’s, use a string of four expressions: Forgive me, I’m sorry, I love you, Thank you. You must accept it is your responsibility and when you do you have to forgive yourself deep in your subconscious for the choices you have made that got you to where you are today.

Try it. You will be surprised. It works.

The Time is Now. 

This blog was provoked by a book with the title “Maneki Neko” by Nobuo Suzuki. For me it is a follow up to the book Ikigai. This book covers the Japanese Secret of Good Luck and Happiness, it is a terrific read.

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He Who Stops to Ponder…

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He Who Stops to Ponder…

In this week’s bonus blog, a friend of Ron’s in Hawaii sent him the text below. Please read on for “He Who Stops to Ponder…”

He who stops to ponder and think will generally come out ahead.

When Gandhi was studying law at University College, London, a Caucasian professor, whose last name was Peters, disliked him intensely and always displayed prejudice and animosity towards him. Also, because Gandhi never lowered his head when addressing him, as he expected, there were always arguments and confrontations.

One day, Mr. Peters was having lunch at the dining room of the University, and Gandhi came along with his tray and sat next to the professor. The professor said, “Mr. Gandhi, you do not understand. A pig and a bird do not sit together to eat.”  Gandhi looked at him as a parent would a rude child and calmly replied, “You do not worry professor. I will fly away,” and he went and sat at another table. 

Mr. Peters, reddened with rage, decided to take revenge on the next test paper, but Gandhi responded brilliantly to all questions. 

Mr. Peters, unhappy and frustrated, asked him the following question. “Mr. Gandhi, if you were walking down the street and found a package, and within was a bag of wisdom and another bag with a lot of money, which one would you take?”  Without hesitating, Gandhi responded, “The one with the money, of course.”  Mr. Peters, smiling sarcastically, said, “I, in your place, would have taken wisdom, don’t you think? Gandhi shrugged indifferently and responded, “Each one takes what he doesn’t have.”

Mr. Peters, by this time was beside himself and so great was his anger that he wrote on Gandhi’s exam sheet the word “idiot” and gave it to Gandhi. Gandhi took the exam sheet and sat down at his desk trying very hard to remain calm while he contemplated his next move.  A few minutes later, Gandhi got up, went to the professor, and said to him in a dignified but sarcastically polite tone, “Mr. Peters, you signed the sheet, but you did not give me the grade.”

Wit always wins over anger.

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Changes in Learning

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Changes in Learning

Today, our Founder Ron Slee writes a blog post on the many changes in learning. He also makes a few grumbles about how his family gives him a hard time!

It has been some time since I wrote a blog on employee development. It is unusual for me not to be sharing my thinking with someone, in some cases anyone. I have been confronted on two fronts recently: My daughter Caroline who is a teacher in the desert in Southern California and my granddaughter who is pursuing her master’s degree in Hawaii.

Both love to provoke me. I can’t imagine why. 

My granddaughter was excited to share a book they are using in one of her classes this semester – “The Narrative Gym.” It is about Communications. It is an amazing read and a more amazing subject to be teaching students in a master’s program. Of course, communication is one of the keys to life. We are social animals after all. COVID set us back somewhat in the communications area. Working from home is another example of how we reacted, or perhaps responding is a better way of saying it. Many businesses found that they could redesign their work. I know many people started to redesign their lives. 

My daughter recently suggested another book – “Ruthless Equity: Disrupt the Status Quo and Ensure Learning for ALL students.” Talk about a powerful book. Many of us have become tired of the status quo when either protecting it or attacking it seems to be tearing apart everything that we have believed to be true. This book restores my soul. “All men are created equal” but then everything we do stresses the inequalities.

At Learning Without Scars we are aiming to help everyone identify their individual potential. That is an extremely difficult thing to do. People’s eyes glaze over when I talk about it. What I am trying to do though is provoke people to think. To think about everything and anything that they do. You know how envious I am of the Japanese societal approach to Kaizen. Make everything you do better every day. This is a view of work that in my mind allows people to become more engaged as people in what they do. They can CHOOSE how to do their job. They can CHOOSE to make their lives better by how they do their job. In the world that I grew up in, that was not the primary goal. Let me show you how this is done. Let me tell you what I just showed you. Then let me tell you again what I showed you. Now you try. I will be here to help so don’t worry. But just do it. Do it my way. Then practice it and get better at it. Make fewer mistakes and do it faster. Now you are doing the job. Just keep on doing it.

That is what I rejected in my early thirties when I started in the consulting world. I knew there were better ways to do things. 1980 when I opened R.J. Slee & Associates in Edmonton, Alberta was also when America was invaded by the Continuous Improvement Revolution. Total Quality Management arrived. Edward Deming and Joseph Duran brought their thinking back to America from Japan where they had been implementing it.

For a long time, I have used a tool I developed called “Five Things” that is aimed directly at the Continuous Improvement objectives. I ask people to list five things that they would like to change about their job that would make things easier for them personally. Then five things that they do that are a real pain to do. Finally, five things that they would like to change in their work to make things better for the company. Normally I do this in a group setting. We then take the individual items and put them on a flip chart, a blackboard or a screen so everyone can see them. You can imagine their surprise when many had the same thoughts. Not just that but their true shock at how many were on all three lists. So, something that would make their lives at work better, eliminate something that is a pain for them to do and at the same time is beneficial for the company. Of course, my questions are always the same. If that is true, then why haven’t we already addressed it?

I have a request please. Go get either of these books. Better still get both. Read them and think about the concepts and positions taken. Then send me an email with your thoughts. Let’s have a mini book club in the ether. Online.

In the meantime, for those of you who haven’t subscribed to our quarterly newsletter there is still time. The last one was published October 1st. You can subscribe at www.learningwithoutscars.com. 

At Learning Without Scars we offer one hundred and thirty-eight Workforce Development classes. That is six hundred and eighty hours of learning. It provides sixty-nine academic credits.

At Learning Without Scars we offer twenty-eight Technical Schools classes. That is five hundred and sixty hours of learning. It provides fourteen academic credits.

At Learning Without Scars we offer two lecture series covering twenty hours of lectures which produces two academic credits.

That is one hundred and sixty-eight classes, which is one thousand two hundred and sixty hours of learning.

To say we have been busy with product development is a serious understatement. Not only are we interested in helping you identify your potential, but we also provide you with learning tools to help you achieve it. All the best in your pursuits.

The time is now. 

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Friday Filosophy v.03.10.2023

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Friday Filosophy v.03.10.2023

Ron Slee shares quotes and thoughts from comedian Steve Wright in Friday Filosophy v.03.10.2023.

Steven Alexander Wright (born December 6, 1955) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and film producer. He is known for his distinctly lethargic voice and slow, deadpan delivery of ironic, philosophical and sometimes nonsensical jokes, paraprosdokians, non sequiturs, anti-humor, and one-liners with contrived situations. 

Wright was ranked as the 15th Greatest Comedian by Rolling Stone in its 2017 list of the 50 Greatest Stand-up Comics. His accolades include the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for starring in, writing, and producing the short film The Appointments of Dennis Jennings (1988) and two Primetime Emmy Awards nominations as a producer of Louie (2010–15). He is known for his supporting role as Leon in the Peabody Award–winning tragicomedy web series Horace and Pete.

 He graduated from Emerson in 1978 and began performing stand-up comedy the following year at the Comedy Connection in Boston. Wright cites comic George Carlin and director and former standup comic Woody Allen as comedic influences. 

In 1982 executive producer of The Tonight Show Peter Lassally saw Wright performing on a bill with other local comics at the Ding Ho comedy club in Cambridge, a venue Wright described as “half Chinese restaurant and half comedy club. It was a pretty weird place.” Lassally booked Wright on NBC‘s The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, where the comic so impressed host Johnny Carson and the studio audience that less than a week later Wright was invited to appear on the show again. 

By then Wright had firmly developed a new brand of obscure, laid-back performing and was rapidly building a cultlike following and an onstage persona characterized by an aura of obscurity, with his penchant for non sequiturs and impassive, slow delivery adding to his mystique. The performance became one of HBO’s longest-running and most requested comedy specials and propelled him to great success on the college-arena concert circuit. 

Numerous lists of jokes attributed to Wright circulate on the Internet, sometimes of dubious origin. Wright has said, “Someone showed me a site, and half of it that said I wrote it, I didn’t write. Recently, I saw one, and I didn’t write any of it. What’s disturbing is that with a few of these jokes, I wish I had thought of them. A giant amount of them, I’m embarrassed that people think I thought of them because some are really bad.”[

After his 1990 comedy special Wicker Chairs and Gravity, Wright continued to do stand-up performances, but was absent from television, doing only occasional guest spots on late-night talk shows. In 1999 he wrote and directed the 30-minute short One Soldier, saying it’s “about a soldier who was in the Civil War, right after the war, with all these existentialist thoughts and wondering if there is a God and all that stuff.” 

  • Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.
  • I went to a restaurant that serves ‘breakfast at any time’. So, I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.
  • Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.
  • A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I’m afraid of widths.
  • When I die, I’m leaving my body to science fiction.
  • Be nice to your children. After all, they are going to choose your nursing home.
  • A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
  • I installed a skylight in my apartment… the people who live above me are furious!
  • I was walking down the street wearing glasses when the prescription ran out.
  • It doesn’t matter what temperature the room is, it’s always room temperature.
  • For my birthday I got a humidifier and a de-humidifier… I put them in the same room and let them fight it out.
  • I live on a one-way street that’s also a dead end. I’m not sure how I got there.
  • On the other hand, you have different fingers.
  • If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?
  • I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.
  • I look like a casual, laid-back guy, but it’s like a circus in my head.
  • Do Lipton employees take coffee breaks?
  • Babies don’t need a vacation, but I still see them at the beach… it ticks me off! I’ll go over to a little baby and say ‘What are you doing here? You haven’t worked a day in your life!’
  • Is it weird in here, or is it just me?
  • I went to a general store, but they wouldn’t let me buy anything specific.
  • I had a friend who was a clown. When he died, all his friends went to the funeral in one car.
  • I have the world’s largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world… perhaps you’ve seen it.
  • I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn’t park anywhere near the place.
  • I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.
  • I intend to live forever. So far, so good.

The Time is Now.

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Friday Filosophy v.02.17.2023

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Friday Filosophy v.02.17.2023

Friday Filosophy v.02.17.2023 offers quotes and words of wisdom from the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth.

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798). Wordsworth’s magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published by his wife in the year of his death, before which it was known as “the poem to Coleridge”. Wordsworth was Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850.

Wordsworth was taught to read by his mother and attended, first, a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth, then a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families, where he was taught by Ann Birkett, who insisted on instilling in her students traditions that included pursuing both scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at the school in Penrith that he met the Hutchinson’s, including Mary, who later became his wife. 

After the death of Wordsworth’s mother, in 1778, his father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire (now in Cumbria) and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. She and William did not meet again for nine years.

Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John’s College, Cambridge. He received his BA degree in 1791. He returned to Hawkshead for the first two summers of his time at Cambridge, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape. In 1790 he went on a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy. Some modern critics suggest that there was a decline in his work beginning around the mid-1810s, perhaps because most of the concerns that characterized his early poems (loss, death, endurance, separation, and abandonment) had been resolved in his writings and his life. By 1820, he was enjoying considerable success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works.

 Wordsworth’s youthful political radicalism, unlike Coleridge’s, never led him to rebel against his religious upbringing. He remarked in 1812 that he was willing to shed his blood for the established Church of England, reflected in his Ecclesiastical Sketches of 1822. This religious conservatism also colors The Excursion (1814), a long poem that became extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It features three central characters: the Wanderer; the Solitary, who has experienced the hopes and miseries of the French Revolution; and the Pastor, who dominates the last third of the poem. 

Such kind of conversational tone persists all through the poetic journey of the poet, that positions him as a man in the society who speaks to the purpose of communion with the very common mass of the society. Again; “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”  is the evidence where the poet expresses why he is writing and what he is writing and what purpose it will serve to humanity.

Wordsworth remained a formidable presence in his later years. In 1837, the Scottish poet and playwright Joanna Baillie reflected on her long acquaintance with Wordsworth. “He looks like a man that one must not speak to unless one has some sensible thing to say. However, he does occasionally converse cheerfully & well; and when one knows how benevolent & excellent he is, it disposes one to be very pleased with him.” William Wordsworth died at home at Rydal Mount from an aggravated case of pleurisy on 23 April 1850, and was buried at St Oswald’s Church, Grasmere. His widow, Mary, published his lengthy autobiographical “Poem to Coleridge” as The Prelude several months after his death. Though it failed to interest people at the time, it has since come to be widely recognized as his masterpiece.

  • Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.
  • Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.
  • To begin, begin.
  • Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
  • Life is divided into three terms – that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future.
  • To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
  • Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.
  • Faith is a passionate intuition.
  • For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.
  • When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.
  • How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root, and in that freedom bold.
  • Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And shares the nature of infinity.
  • Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come.
  • I listened, motionless and still; And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more
  • The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.

 

The Time is Now

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How Has the Internet Changed the Role of Education?

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How Has the Internet Changed the Role of Education?

In this week’s post on Lifelong Learning, our Founder, Ron Slee, takes a deep dive into the worldwide web with, “How Has the Internet Changed the Role of Education?”

The Internet is transforming education by changing the way students learn and the way teachers teach. This is true in both public and private education. 

  1. Online learning: The Internet has made online learning accessible to everyone. Students can now attend classes and complete assignments from anywhere, anytime.
  2. Personalized learning: With the Internet students have access to a wide range of resources that allow personalized learning experiences.
  3. Collaboration: The Internet enables students and teachers to collaborate in real time from different locations, making it easier for students to work together on projects and assignments.
  4. Access to information: The Internet provides students with instant access to a vast amount of information, making it easier for them to research and learn about various topics.
  5. Improved communication: The Internet has made communication between teachers and students as well as between schools much easier and more efficient.

Overall, the Internet has greatly improved the education experience for students and teachers alike providing them with new tools and resources to enhance their learning and teaching experiences.

Learning Without Scars is a company that aims to improve the education system, by making learning a positive and enjoyable experience for students at schools or in the workforce. The company uses a variety of methods to achieve this goal. Reading material with audio tracks and quizzes; a series of segmented video classes using power point slides with text and audio tracks and strategically inserted film clips that are closed captioned.

Today there are a variety of companies providing Internet based learning. Kahn Academy for students from Preschool through High School through to EdX and Coursera for business applications. There is a lot available out there.

Our goal is to provide employees and students access to tools that can measure their skills and knowledge: the Job Function Skills Assessments. With these Comprehensive Assessments the individual has an opportunity to objectively measure their skills and knowledge and how it applies to their jobs. This is the first such assessment in our industry. This is viewed by the Workforce Development side to Technical and Vocational Schools to evaluate the needs of the employees working at businesses in their area that also are a potential employer for the students of the school.

We are experiencing difficulties, particularly with the group of technicians in dealers. Turnover rates are extremely high. A recent article in the New York Times by Christina Caron poses the question, “When is it time to quit your job?” The author covers the usual issues such as burnout. Burnout, according to Dennis Stolle, the senior director of applied psychology at the American Psychological Association is three symptoms; emotional exhaustion, negativity, and the feeling that no matter how hard you try you cannot be effective at your job.

There is another area of interest. Technicians have seen an amazing amount of change in the equipment that they perform repairs and maintenance. The job has become a serious challenge for advances in computers and telematics, allowing us to track the condition of equipment when it is working in the field using sensors everywhere. Many of the older technicians are struggling to keep up with these changes. In many cases a technician’s job defined who they were as people.

On the other hand, younger technicians, say under thirty-five years of age, are looking for different things in the workplace than the older generations. Laura Putnam, author of the book “Workplace Wellness That Works” addresses how the workplace functions. The younger workers want to have more control over how they work. They resist the old command and control style of leadership common in previous times. The employees are looking to organizations that support various aspects of wellness including physical, emotional, social as well as financial.

These younger technicians are leaving their jobs within six months at alarming rates. This is when the market is struggling to find qualified technicians to hire. Imagine spending all that time and money hiring someone and they choose to leave before they have been with you for six months. Billy Greenlee, Service Operations Manager/Rental Manager commented “I think retaining them becomes the next huge hurdle if you can get technicians on a good path. I’ve watched for years as my entry level techs start to mature it is all but impossible as a manager to bring their wages up, once they cross that threshold of being a “good” technician. It’s hard for a service manager to increase their salary to keep up with their market value when you start entry level techs at those lower hourly rates. I’ve been fortunate in my current position to not get pushback when I’ve gone to our ownership and request a 15-20% pay increase to bring my team up to their true market value as a technician. It’s paid dividends as most of my techs are at, or we’re just at, that transition point of being entry level to a seasoned tech. My other tool was moving to a rotating 4-10 schedule. But between those two things I have been able to keep my shop stable the last few years and get that return on investment on all of that education and training expense.”

Isaac Rollor recently posted a blog talking about technicians. He started as follows “Recently out of curiosity I used Indeed.com and searched “Heavy Equipment Mechanic.” For location I specified “USA.” Immediately there were 30,000 opportunities that populated my screen. Pretty amazing. Many of these job postings were urgently hiring. I saw many job openings for technicians at heavy equipment dealers. Isn’t it amazing that the focus of education for the past forty years has been on getting a University Degree? You will earn more money over your lifetime if you have a degree. Of course, they were making reference to high school graduation as the comparison. NOT technicians.

Bill Pyles took it further when we addressed the “On-Boarding” of new technicians. 

I feel it’s important to note that entry-level tech does not mean you’ve hired a technician to whom you can pay minimum wage for the next few years. The first two items a dealer needs are a developmental pay plan (earn while you learn) and a career-building training plan, from entry-level to Top Gun. Be sure part of the hiring process is a copy of your training and wage scale. Spend quality time with the new tech in explaining the “earn while you learn” approach. Remember, training never ends. 

Similarly, it helps to assign a “mentor” to these new employees. This is true whether you are hiring straight from a vocational or technical school or hiring a working technician. A mentor can be a great help in ensuring the new employees feel part of a team. An important member of the team.

I thought it would be worthwhile in Lifelong Learning to point out that it is not solely the responsibility of the employee to improve themselves through learning programs, but also how the business accepts new employees and how they are treated. One thing is certain: Technician turnover rates today are unacceptable. It is in every company’s best interest to address this issue soon.

The time is now.

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