Now, here's a thought

When I taught English in Austria, I recall hearing from students at a large insurance company that they were subject to frequent evaluations and controls. They had a performance quota which they were expected to reach.  And, they apparently were able to negotiate with their bosses or supervisors in order to arrive at a realistic quota.

That last fact gives me pause.  I wonder to what extent each employee could actually decide for him- or herself; but as I never really asked at the time, I don't know.

As a teacher of English I wasn't exactly subjected to quotas, but it was clear that I was being watched, and that if a student complained about me, I did hear about it.

As a professor of Philosophy, there are, of course, student evaluations.  And colleagues (or sometimes administrators) do visit the classroom in order to evaluate a colleague's teaching.

Worst of all, when I was employed by one private high school--a so-called "International school"--I once had five or six unannounced visits in the course of a period of something like six months.  At the time I remember recalling that as a Visiting Assistant Professor in universities in the USA, I had never experienced such harassment.  Nor had I even experienced that degree of intrusive inspection even at that very institution under a previous manager.  (Though, in these international high schools they call it a "Director" or some such thing.)

And, at this particular International School, there were extremely fine-grained attempts to weigh and measure the students--not merely academically, but in other ways.  Frankly, the whole thing struck me as fascistic from the first day.  Or, you might say it was "communistic" since from what I've read it wasn't enough to believe in the bright future of a "socialist" society, but one also had to be openly and publicly enthusiastic about it at the right moments.....

So, I think I can say I am familiar with the various sorts of control and measurement applied to human beings today.  Most of them seem to me to be misguided (at best) and abusive and degrading (more commonly).

And against all that, I want to set the fact that large entities responsible for large amounts of money were recently shown to be operating without any sort of genuine control or audit.  Those who were supposed to be doing the controls or audits actually were "cooking the books".

As a matter of fact, one might wonder whether all of my employers abroad (or, to be safe, most of them) did not face some such similar internal tension.

But none of this is my chief point.  It i s all the "wind up", no the"pitch"---to revert to an American baseball image.

Consider the health care workers who were coming to my parents' home to give my father physical therapy. My question is whether they were looking for progress to justify their activities.
And, insofar as they had to look for signs of progress, were they less inclined to think through the consequences of their actions?  Were they less inclined to set my father's increased physical strength in the context of his daily activities, his daily needs?  Just as the would-be athletes I hear talking about their activities at the local YMCA seem to take an incredibly mechanistic view of health when they talk about how many repetitions they've performed or how much weight they lift and such. Where is a view of how these exercises fit into their life as a whole?

As a concerned son who doesn't want to see his father fall over and injure himself, I am very sensitive to any sign that he is about to lose his balance.

However, on at least one occasion, when a physical therapist was present she said, "See, he regained his balance....."  To which I thought but did not say, "Yes, this time he did....."

We also know that health care is obsessively weighed and measured to guarantee that profits are made for--here I will be controversial--- those who don't deserve them.  (Yes I do make that judgment:  I do not believe that merely because someone possesses an abundance of resources, wealth earned who-knows-how, that they therefore deserve to increase those undeserved profits.)  So, I am afraid that whatever the intentions of any particular home care individual, I don't believe in the system.  I think I can imagine that any individual would do a better job without the class of individuals who demand a profit for their investment.

As I think about it, every high school I've know has been a cruel place---not a place where students were treated with full respect, and a place where being a teacher meant inevitably to be part of a degrading system.... And with that fully at the forefront of my consciousness, I recall the suggestion I heard recently from a brother-in-law, a professional man, an engineer, that I should seek employment in a high school.  What monumental ignorance!  To be blind to the cruelty of these institutions!  What sort of blindness.  A sad fact, and an overwhelming one......