Sunday, August 30, 2009

El Paso's Inadequate Public Transport

I've not conducted a scientific survey, but, thus far no one I've met

--and I don't get out much--has been hostile to the idea of

improved public transport.

If the politicians in El Paso had courage and creativity, they would

think about putting in street cars and improving bus service.

I do not believe it costs more than personal automobiles. You can

get the conclusion that public transport doesn't pay if you ignore

the costs associated with the use of private automobiles:

the construction of environment destroying roads, road construction

which contributes to global warming and makes an anti-pedestrian

culture...as well as the problems of social isolation and road rage....

and the problem of road accidents and deaths due to alcohol consumption.

There are even parts of the US where you can use public transport to go

home after a night out....



Saturday, August 29, 2009

Poverty in El Paso Texas

The official way of counting poverty is flawed, as was conceded by its
designer many years ago.

Nevertheless, I was surprised to read the following:

" a quarter or more of all people living in Philadelphia, Buffalo, Milwaukee,
Long Beach, Atlanta, Newark,Miami, and El Paso [were poor]"

source, "The Failures of American Poverty measures", Stephen Pimpare, Journal of Sociology &
Social Welfare, March 2009.
Available at
http://web.me.com/stephenpimpare/webpage/Welcome.html

A quarter or more of the residents of El Paso Texas have incomes at or below
the official poverty level.

I do not see that prices are lower here than Vienna. I haven't noticed that food is cheaper.
Nor is it cheaper to rent a house. I've seen efficiency apartments advertised for 600US
dollars per month--more than I was paying for a similar apartment in Vienna.

Possibly it's cheaper to use the bus if you buy a monthly pass. But buses are much, much
less convenient than the public transport that's available in Vienna. Public transit in
Vienna runs through the night and is very easy to use.

I can only guess that no one lives alone and people live with their families or
have roommates...

Lack of Imagination in El Paso, Texas

as a follow-up to yesterday's post in which I complained
that the citizens and politicians in El Paso, Texas seem to be in
denial about global warming,

I note in passing that in today's Editorial Page of the El Paso Times
there is an editorial in which the newspaper approves of the attempt
to lure the auto industry to El Paso...

I would be curious to know how much of El Paso's economy relies upon
the Department of War (the correct name for the "Department of Defense")

There are better ways to build an economy....




Friday, August 28, 2009

Unfriendly, Unpleasant El Paso, Texas

It would appear that neither the good citizens nor the mayor of El Paso Texas
know that last year

BETWEEN 300,000 and 400,000 people died as a result of global warming

and that's a conservative estimate.

I just got back from walking to my local library. It's a thirty minute walk one way.

As I walk, large trucks and a few cars zooom by. At the light, I see a proud young
man with sunglasses, proud of his youth and his shiny car.

But I would like to say to him: owning a car is no achievement. The scientific
and technological
discoveries necessary to make a car were hard won, but you have nothing to do with them.

And I would like to remind him that when he uses his car he contributes to global
warming,
and people have already died, and more will die...

Then there's the unkempt situation of the sidewalks I use. Most have stones and
weeds. In one case the sidewalk is covered with dust and dirt.

Most houses have large stone walls around them. The sidewalks are public, so
the attitude seems to be: who cares?

Then I get to a stoplight. Before I can finish crossing four lanes, the light changes.
The driver opposite is considerate enough to wait for me to cross. I am not walking slowly,
but I would have to run in order to cross before the light will change.
Behind the patient driver, another car starts honking from impatience.

I would like to say to that driver: Am I supposed to fly across the street?
Why are you in such a hurry?

In El Paso Texas, pedestrians have no rights.
Cars don't like us.
The city does its best to discourage us.

Unfriendly, unpleasant El Paso, Texas.

See also my 18 August post for another story about unfriendly drivers.

Drive friendly? Ha Ha Ha. What a joke.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

El Paso, Texas

I've been surprised at how often people in grocery stores say
"excuse me" or some such thing.

It is as though there is an invisible fence around everyone which is
I guess about 3 feet away.  When they get within four feet, they say
"Sorry" or "Excuse me".

This seems strange to me.

I guess in ten years of living in Central Europe my experience was different....

This is consistent with research by the psycholinguist Aneta Pavlenko.

However, it is surprising to me, in a way.  Latin cultures touch more than
Anglo-Saxon....and most people in El Paso are Spanish-English bilinguals...

Thursday, August 20, 2009

les autres

"l'enfer, c'est les autres"

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

today

Today I went to Wal mart.

It was not pleasant.

I found myself wondering why stores in Europe are smaller, and
thinking about how just the size changes things...

and makes it less unpleasant to shop.....

not to mention:  a McDonalds at the entrance!!!!

but I did notice the Mcdonalds had free water with cups.

The unpleasant heat is a reality that even the worst business has to recognize
and deal with

And I do find the heat unpleasant, increasingly so.

But I have a theory that it would be better if there were no air conditioning,
and if houses were designed more intelligently.

I think the basic design of many houses was copied from houses located in
more temperate regions

I wonder if with a combination of proper ventilation and shade, the heat
could be tolerable without air conditioning...

As it is now, the constant change from freezing cold to burning  hot is very unpleasant.

Often I am glad to get out of the air conditioning.

Yes, I do not like El Paso Texas, and I am not enjoying my stay here.

I hope to leave soon...



Tuesday, August 18, 2009

angry and primitive

I am finding the USA to be a very unhappy country.

I note with sadness the absolute lack of grocery stores in El Paso.

Contrast that with the enormous number of purveyors of junk food.

Exercise for a sociologist:  what is the proportion of junk food shops to real food shops?
I predict that the higher the ratio of real grocery stores, the healthier the population.

Angry?

Yesterday I crossed five lanes of traffic to reach my bus stop.

Of course, I waited for a gap in the traffic.  I am not suicidal.

When I reached the bus stop, as a car sped past on the opposite side of
the street, the driver screamed at me at the top of his lungs:

"XXXX****!!! Get out of the f...ing street!"

By that time, I was out of the street; so his anger was directed at an activity
of mine which had terminated.

I had not interfered with his contributing to global warming.

So, why was he so angry?

It was very disturbing.

REally, between 300,000 and 400,000 people died last year as a result
of global warming.  I should be mad at him.

But it seems to me that people just don't care.

Anyway, it was unpleasant, and I never had such an experience in Europe.
Are Americans really so sick as to believe they have a right to drive cars?
And to drive cars fast?

Are pedestrians really people with less rights than global warming fans?

And the guy yelling at me, to judge by his accent, was another gringo....

The sort of thing that makes me eager to leave this country asap.

Monday, August 17, 2009

freedom my ass

el paso texas = barbarism

when you have no grocerystore within walking distance
when the nearest grocery store is two or so miles away

that is not civilization

that is b.s.

barbarism

land of the free my ass---land of capitalist exploitation and corruption

Sunday, August 16, 2009

out of fairness to Europeans...

I'll continue, at least for a while, to write from El Paso, Texas under the Wien heading,
since I have fresh memories of Europe....

Yesterday I had a long conversation with my older sister.

During the conversation it emerged that she is cynical in exactly the way my former
students in Vienna were...

And, out of fairness, it is important for me to acknowledge that.

Cynical in what way?

Cynical in the way that she doubts the motives of anyone with political opinions.

Cynical in the sense that she thinks it is pointless to be in any way or at any level
engaged in political activities.

But, the disturbing element for me is that she enjoys a level of comfort not enjoyed
by most of the world's inhabitants....

so for us, who are so comfortable, it is part of our comfort to do nothing.....

Am I better?  

Well, my sister seems to doubt the very foundation of democracy:   the ability of ordinary people to make wise moral decisions.

I admit this is a difficult question, but I am not convinced that ordinary people are incapable of making wise decisions.  Of course, if they have been manipulated by the media, then they are at a severe disadvantage.

Friday, August 14, 2009

writing from El Paso

the food in this country is a disaster

and it is not cheaper than Wien

bread?  unbelievable.  so called healthy bread: tasteless and as expensive as
good bread in Wien

tomatoes:  tasteless and not cheap

etc.

too many chemicals 

this is barbarism

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Civilisation Versus Barbarism

Now writing from El Paso, Texas...

It just occurs to me that all of the grocery stores in El Paso are surrounded by enormous parking lots.

If I, as a pedestrian, wanted to buy groceries, I would have to enter the large
parking lot, and cautiously navigate through parked cars and trucks
(mostly trucks and SUV's)  ...."cautiously" because there are cars and
trucks driving around....

By contrast, the grocery stores in Vienna are simply on the street, and are not
surrounded by enormous parking lots.

Which do I prefer?  You got it!  Vienna....

and I'm saying nothing about global warming and other harmful side-effects
of the automobile....

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

the stupidity and inhumanity of AT and T

today I got internet service through the company AT&T

In order to get this service I had to pay in advance, and endure numerous
phone calls where I was forced to listen to a computer generated voice with
an obnoxious sickeningly sweet tone of voice...

I also had to endure the idea that every conversation I had with an actual
living person was being recorded...

a violation of their and my rights...

and every one who spoke with me had to worry that they were being overheard...

and I don't like being asked to assess every one i talk to...

I do not like to perform their task of monitoring their employees.

It puts too much pressure on the employees.

Last of all, to get my service today,I had to endure numerous
idiotic questions in order to set up the account.
Ihave no childhood heroes.  and I have no hobbies.  What I do, I do
seriously.  And my childhood resists descriptions by such cliches
as 'childhood heroes".  When I am forced to employ such cliched 
mindless language, and to actually use it to describe my own life,
my personality is being robbed from me.

This is a perfect example of how capitalist corporations destroy
creativity and encourage uniformity and stupidity. 

All in all, it has been a thoroughly unpleasant experience.

An illustration of Chomsky's remark that corporations are nothing
more than
PRIVATE  TYRANNIES

Cao for Now....

I hope to come back, so let's not say goodbye; just, cao for now...


Dear Friends and Colleagues,

 

As I come to the end of my stay in Austria, I am filled with many ideas and suppressed longings.  It is hard for me to find words, but I feel I must say something.  Please forgive me for the inadequacy of my language.  I hope you will get some inkling of my true thoughts.

The last year has been difficult.  I have been living in a cold, noisy apartment.  It was not cheap.  My earnings have been so meager I have found it difficult to pay bills for basic necessities such as heat and health insurance.  Sometimes CEF forgot to pay me.  And, oddly enough, I got no apologies from the woman who likes to say that she is the boss, the person with ultimate responsibility for everything.  I did, however, get profuse apologies from an individual who seems to work very hard—and who doesn’t scream or shout or self-indulgently guffaw.

What I have I learned?  Am I better?

 

I have learned that hard work does not necessarily pay.  I have learned that one should

 

never move to a country trusting the good will of an employer.  One should always have

 

a contract. 

 

I have seen students who genuinely wanted to learn English, for a variety of

 

reasons.  Sometimes their reasons were confused, and sometimes the only reason

 

was that it was what the boss wanted, but I would not say that most of

 

my students have a slave’s mind-set.

 

On the contrary, it is not primarily the students I met who fail to understand what

 freedom is.  That failure rather belongs above all to the upper level managers at CEF 

and, indeed, those who run the other companies where my students are employed.  I say

that managers fail to  understand freedom (and the correlative notion of responsibility)

because they engage in excessive control of their employees.

           Excessive control suggests distrust, and a failure to respect the autonomy of workers.  And, I confess, I simply think we don’t need any bosses.  People are capable of that degree of self-control.  I can see what needs doing, and I can do it—without interference from above.  And if a manager is excessively on the look-out for “mistakes”, eager to point them out, that takes away an employee’s respect and diminishes everyone involved.  In fact, I would say it is petty and mean-spirited.  Someone of a psychoanalytic bent might say that it shows that the manager, sub-consciously recognizes that the situation is unfair, that the worker or teacher is being exploited, that the profits are not being shared fairly, and so the manager knows very well that the employee is being asked to do more than the company is owed.

            Two examples of what I mean by excessive control:  At CEF, the lady who calls herself my boss goes nuts every time I am late.  Actually, I have rarely been late.  But, she does not know that.  And, every time I am late, she gives me a little lecture as if I were thirteen years old and had never had a job in my life.

            Well, actually, now that I think about it, it seems like she lectured me twice on each individual occasion that she knew I was late. Every time I was late and she knew it, I had to endure a condescending lecture twice.   The last time was the most irksome, “Mark, I know you have a problem, but you are cutting into my profits!”.-- NO!! (-: o-: Ha! Ha! Ha! (-:  she didn’t really say that bit about profits, but it was just under the surface of what she did say.  The truth is that she did say that I had a problem—referring to the fact that my father was sick recently, and for that reason I felt obligated to return to the United States.  I also note in passing, that this one oblique reference to my father’s health condition is what passes for sympathy and human understanding at the Vienna Branch of the Institute Christian Ernst Fuchs.

            Is it possible that I am overly sensitive?  Perhaps the lady who would be called “boss” had only made a bad translation from German.  Perhaps her thought was indeed kind.  My response:  Not likely.  And, if somehow it was a sort of mistranslation, all the more reason to doubt the lady’s competence to be running an institution which represents itself to the world as a language school.  Competence in a second language is precisely measured by one’s ability to respect such niceties.  If Frau Boss can’t manage to speak polite English, then that tells you something about the Institute Christian Ernst Fuchs.

(And it’s not just me who doubts the lady’s sincerity.  As one student said to me after a conversation with Frau Boss:  She’s only pretending to be nice to me because she knows I work for a big company and she’s thinking about money.)

            But I have to add:  My experience in Central Europe in the past twelve years has been that people do not know what respect is.  My so-called boss at the so-called Institute Christian Ernst Fuchs cannot possibly treat me or anyone else at CEF with the respect I or they deserve because she herself probably does not know what respect is, and has probably never experienced it.  Respect comes from working together with people as equals, and is incompatible with constant paranoia about who is doing more or less work.  Respect means trust; and an obsessive concern with profits destroys trust.  (Here in my own words I have just endorsed the traditional leftist value of solidarity between human beings, the value of our common humanity.)

            A second example of excessive control:  at a large insurance company where I have taught, the students tell me that their performance is frequently monitored.  They must set goals and they must meet them.  They must make constant “improvement”—that is improvement measured by the Procrustean measure of benefits to the stockholders of the company—not the society at large.  Oddly enough, this mechanistic and anti-social mind-set was applied to the teaching of English.  After forty hours of English lessons, every student must prove progress by scoring higher on a test.  Even more oddly, the test they took was the very same multiple choice test that they took before they began their course.  (A university linguistics professor who I happen to know, a teacher with many years of experience teaching English as a Foreign Language has told me this is bad pedagogy:  You never give the same test twice.)  Of course the test itself is also degrading.  Intelligent educated adults who have genuine abilities in English are having their skills measured by the most reductive, idiotic, mechanistic of tests.  The idiocy and cruelty of that fact takes my breath away.  And the way in which we administered the test was also insulting and degrading for everyone involved—behaving as if the students would cheat if they were not observed! That fact alone is enough to show the extremely anti-cultural nature of CEF.

However, there is a second way in which the Austrians I know seem un-free, and here they illustrate a general phenomena of modern society pointed out by the Frankfurt School, so we shouldn’t think this is a uniquely Austrian problem.  (I have in mind Adorno’s classic essay on “leisure time”, and Fromm’s “Escape from Freedom”.)  The basic point is this:  if you spend your life doing a job that doesn’t bring you respect, you can’t get it back in your free time.  I’ve known students who delighted in their holidays, and no other subject interested them so much—except talking about how at work they were not treated with respect.  Most people in Austria seem to live for their generous holidays and the weekends.  Some of them collect cars or motorycles.  But such pursuits cannot win back your self-respect if you lose it during the work week.  (In truth my car-collector student seemed happy at work, but in my mind there still remains the question whether his leisure time activity isn’t deeply frivolous.)

            An error I did sometimes see among students was a tendency, not fully fulfilled in any student, but present as a threat for most of them, the tendency to identify one’s self totally with one’s company, and with the products one sells.  This too destroys the self and makes any notion of freedom trivial.  I told my students that they are learning English for themselves, not for their company, because once they know English they can use it for many purposes.  But if one only learns so-called Business English, one will not allow one’s self to be enriched by the potentialities of a different culture.

            Another error, presciently described by Fromm, is a love of disconnected facts, without any organizing theories or insights.  This is a deliberate artifact of so-called media outlets.  Whether it is done to make us mindless or done because journalists are themselves mindless does not matter.  The point is that people fear lively discussion and controversy. 

            In my students’ case, I sometimes witnessed a general dogmatism and fear of new ideas.  At any rate, that was my experience during my classes at a large insurance company where I tried to find interesting things to read and discuss.  To give this observation some perspective, it is also true that university students can be dogmatic, but with an older adult situated in the workplace, an older adult who has a degree (and especially a higher degree) there is a kind of confidence and creativity in finding ways to reject any new ideas.  (Indeed, there is as well a Cerebus for this Charybdis: Sometimes people are too receptive to new ideas.  I’ve seen that too—both in Vienna and elsewhere--but, oddly, it seems less prominent than dogmatism.)

When people have a degraded notion of education and its place in culture 

and when their very notion of a good life is equally degraded, then there is no chance that

they can use their powers for good.  Any good which such people may happen to create

can only be a matter of chance.  But to see education and knowledge merely as things

we can sell to a boss is to degrade them, and to degrade ourselves.  It means 

allowing our very selves to be defined by other people, people who have happened to

 have risen to the top of the heap—and heaven forbid that we should ask how they got

 there!

 

Last year I did have the good fortune to come across a German translation of Eric

 

Fromm’s classic work (which he wrote in English!!) “Escape from Freedom”.  I can only

 

recommend it to all of my friends and acquaintances.  (Erich Fromm, Die Furcht vor der

Freiheit.)  Fromm details many of the pathologies I have witnessed in Austria, and 

especially at the For-Profit Center which calls itself “Institut CEF”.

And I can also recommend Hannah Arendt’s classic work, “Eichmann in 

Jerusalem; A Report on the Banality of Evil”.  Both of these works were originally 

written (by German speakers!) in English; but there are German translations.

Arendt’s portrays Eichmann as a man who—above all—wanted success and 

social status—very much like many people we meet everyday.  Arendt’s portrait of 

Eichmann is equally a portrait of all those managers who value nothing like success, and 

are incapable of recognizing any other values.  (For those who don’t know or who have 

forgotten:  Eichmann arranged the transport of people to the Nazi death camps.  He was a 

manager and he played a key role in the Holocaust.  He was sentenced by a court in 

Jerusalem and he was hung from the neck until dead)

Indeed, what Eichmann said about Hitler is exactly the same level of 

sophistication as the ordinary person’s thinking about Bill Gates:  He must be important 

because he got to the top.  And who do I mean by “the ordinary person”?  My students in 

Austria and Slovakia have told me this.  And it would seem to be the implicit assumption 

of the American textbook manufacturers who actually include an essay by Bill Gates 

in textbooks which teach literature—an art form—to young people.   So deep is the 

universal moral degradation of our societies. 

(As one student remarked to me during a discussion about the Profit Center CEF: 

Some people get to the top by stepping over the corpse of their dead grandmother!!!) 

As I leave CEF, I find myself thinking of the other language schools I have known, and 

how they all, without exception, exploit their teachers, and all unthinkingly promote a 

hideous and barbaric ideology of profit and success. 

I am glad to be leaving CEF, although I cannot say I am glad to leave Austria or

Europe.  I regret that I did not learn German.  I regret that I could not learn more about

 Vienna and Austria. 

 

Farewell Friends!

Farewell Colleagues!

Farewell Managers!

Farewell Profit Center CEF!  I hope you get what you truly deserve!


 

APPENDIX:  Exploitation, Profit Centers, and the Value of Language Study

 

1.  Exploitation

 

I say that CEF exploits teachers.  That is a serious claim.  I will not

 

attempt to defend it at length here, though I think I could.  I will, however, give some

 

prima facie evidence. 

 

First of all, what is exploitation?  An example from my native country will serve to illustrate the idea.  Often in the inner cities, there are no normal grocery stores.  The only grocery stores you find in some city centers are very small and over-priced.  If you want to pay fair prices for groceries you have to travel to the suburbs.  And, in the United States, that means that you must have a car.  Poor people cannot afford cars, and so are forced to pay higher prices for groceries.  I think that is unfair.  It is taking advantage of the poor.

            If a teacher at CEF needs a paycheck to buy groceries and pay rent, then the teacher is in a position of inequality compared to the owner of CEF.  The owner of CEF can impose conditions upon teachers, and teachers simply must accept those conditions, not because they are fair, but because they need groceries and a place to live.  Consequently, they are in no position to argue.  (Some people reading this will say:  But you can always find another job.  Anyone who says that is, I think, living in a fantasy world.  The other jobs are usually equally exploitative.  The correct reaction to the situation is this one:  teachers need a union.)  And I want to stress:  The company CEF itself represents the resources of an individual who is not faced with such immediate existential demands; hence any bargaining between owner and worker  starts from a situation where the employee is disadvantaged.

            A further fact is relevant:  CEF does not provide teachers with sufficient work (a

 

sufficient number of teaching hours to provide a decent income.  They do not provide

 

enough money for a person to live on.  (In itself that fact needn’t be damning, but it is

once one adds the following:  when I was interviewed for the position the CEF

 

representative asked me not to take any other work.)  It is, finally, a very part-time job in

 

terms of pay and benefits,  but demands are made just as if it were a well-paid,

 

full-time job.  In my experience, there is nothing unique about CEF.  Like other private

 

language schools I have known—CEF aims chiefly at profits and only secondarily at

 

education, and fears nothing so much  as that teachers might strike out on their own and

 

give private lessons to students from the school. 

 

  1.  Profit Center or Educational Institute?  Is CEF really just a “profit center”?

 

Can I justify my claim that the main goal of CEF is profit?  Consider the following. 

 

Once in conversation, the head manager in Vienna admitted that the exams given to

 

students at a large private insurance company were not pedagogically sound—but the

 

insurance company required them.  Thus, we have a clear case where educational values

 

were sacrificed for the sake of profit.  She also said that if CEF had not agreed to this

 

demand, the students would not have had language courses.—But is that true?

 

Is it not equally probable that the client in question would simply have gone to

 

another language school, one which would sacrifice educational values for the sake of

 

profits?

 

On the contrary, the truth is that CEF would have lost this particular possibility of

 

earning money if CEF had placed higher priority on education as a value.  And, in

 

fact, the real result is that CEF lost its integrity—as I told the boss.  But she did not show

 

any sign of having understood what I said.

I have just described one case where profit overrules educational value. A second case where the profit motive triumphs is in the pay and benefits given to the teachers.  The actual policy of the school is inconsistent because professional performance is demanded but teachers are not rewarded with professional pay or benefits. True enough, here the profit motive does not win out over educational values, but wins out over justice or fairness; but in any case, that shows the true motivation of those who run the so-called “Institute” Christian Ernst Fuchs.

Why do Profit Centers fear their teachers?  (Irony:  the teachers really are teachers

 

but the place of employment is only in a degraded sense a school.)Why do Profit Centers

 

greedily guard their students from private lessons with teachers?  Why does the Big Boss

 

at CEF Vienna expend energy trying to convince me that she works hard?

 

Implicitly both the Profit Centers and the Big Boss recognize the possibility of the

 

following argument:  it’s not fair that teachers have so small a share of the profits.

 

And, incidentally, no matter how hard the Big Boss works, that does not prove that she

 

deserves to earn more than a teacher or a member of the secretarial/support staff.

 

Teachers and the other employees at CEF work hard too.  And, I would say (in

 

my humble opinion) advertising and marketing are much less respectable and honest

 

activities than teaching.  (For some further details about how advertising and marketing

 

exploit or take advantage of weaknesses of human psychology, one might consult The

 

Robot’s Rebellion by the psychologist Keith Stanovich.)

 

 3.  The Value of Language Study

 

But what is the value of studying languages anyway?  Is it valuable merely because someone will pay you to do it or because the boss wants you to do it?  I don’t take those answers seriously.  If Austrian companies desire to set up an economic empire in the post-socialist countries, that doesn’t make studying English good.  Many of my students are learning English because their companies want to expand.  There’s nothing intrinsically good about that.  It reeks of economic imperialism.  There is, however, a reason why the study of language is valuable.

            Confronted with unexpected grammatical structures or unusual sounds the student’s mind expands.   A teacher is forced to take, at least to some degree, a more external and less personal view on that most personal of creations:  his/her mother tongue.  The study of a language should be a humbling experience.  It should make us marvel at the gift of gab.

            In the soulless spirit of commercialism that infects the world today such thoughts are not likely to be appreciated.  But there is an implicit recognition of the value of education even amongst capitalist philistines.  Their confused appreciation of reality is evident when they invoke the idea of “professionalism” in an inconsistent and self-serving way.  Thus, the big boss at the Vienna Branch of the CEF Profit Center once remarked that a teacher should be fifteen minutes early for lessons because that’s professional.  But the same manager feels no need to provide teachers a guaranteed minimum monthly salary, or paid vacation days, or paid sick days—all of which are part of really professional jobs!  That is inconsistent because it means requiring professionalism from an employee when it is beneficial for the employer, but denying employees the status of a professional when it would require expenses for the employer.  Otherwise said, the employer demands professional performance but does not reward professional performance with a professional wage or professional benefits.  That is a double standard and it is unfair.  And, since employees need jobs, it is exploitation.

The situation, finally, comes to resemble one of Aesop’s fables, the fable of the turds and the lilies:

            One day a collection of cow turds rolled down hill into a stream, and found

            themselves surrounded by lilies.  As they floated downstream amongst the

            fragrant flowers, they cried out ”Oh!  Don’t we lillies smell sweet!”

So, too greedy managers may attempt to cloak their greed in the robes of education and culture.  But no sane person will be fooled.

Vienna, Wednesday, July 15, 2009; Latest revisions Friday, July 24, 2009

Notes:  1.  “Profit center” is a term I borrow from Ted Honderich.  2.  The idea that

Managers don’t have to indulge in excessive control is something I first found clearly formulated in a paper by the philosopher Daniel M. Hausman.  Other advocates of workplace democracy mention it as well.   When workers feel in control at the work place, they work harder, and are happier.  3.  In general, anyone who works as a teacher of what ever sort must constantly do battle against an archaic stereotype of teachers which portrays them as saints who do not need to eat or defecate, and holds them to impossibly high standards.  The archaic stereotype makes exploitation easier because no flesh-and-blood human being can satisfy it.  It also aids exploitation because the mythically efficient manager is implied to be all-knowing and wise about such crude things as money and profits, whereas the teacher is considered crass or impure if he or she dares so much as to raise a question about his or her salary or working conditions.  The stereotype implies that teachers are, by definition, not competent in such a region.  Plainly, the stereotype is not only false, but also a tool of oppression.

After-Thought on Institutions, Individuals, and Wage Slavery

In Plato’s “Symposium”, sometimes translated as “The Drinking Party”, Socrates describes the soul’s progress from loving one beautiful body, to loving many beautiful bodies (because one beautiful body is just as beautiful as another), to loving, souls,

and then laws and institutions and, finally something he calls “The Beautiful Itself”.

We must not forget that the Institute Christian Ernst Fuchs is one of many flawed institutions within our imperfect societies.  Most of us are forced to rent ourselves to more powerful and richer individuals such as Christian Ernst Fuchs in order to survive.  This system encourages and invites exploitation and the abuse of power.  Despite talk of democracy, our world is very feudal.  And recognizing our backward situation, I must respect every individual who is forced by our cruel and unjust system to tie themselves to masters such as Christian Ernst Fuchs.  But, I must also protest with all my energy and every nerve in my body that this system is a cruel and unjust one.  You can call it “capitalism” and that is part of the story.  Wealth is proxy for virtue, and often identified with it.  All very sick and hopeless.  As long as it continues we shall all be less for it—less free, less noble, and less intelligent and caring than we could be.

No gods!

No kings!

No masters!

No slaves!

No bosses!

No wage slavery!