September 10, 2007
by Clay Barham
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Just after the turn of the last century, a new influence affected American business called Scientific Management. Led by men like Frederick Taylor and John Gilbreath, spurred on by the psychological behaviorism of Watson and Skinner, factory work on an assembly-line basis with solid time and motion studies, all but reduced the modern American factory worker to a living version of a robot.
The American worker became a human version of Pavlov's dogs. Pick this piece up and put it there, and do that all through the workday. Work was all but dehumanized. The education establishment, led by the views of Dewey and the Behaviorists, picked up the ideals of Scientific Management. They crippled the children of America by depriving them of their unique individuality and opportunity to chase their dreams...
When America got its start almost 400 years ago, individuals living the frontier life had to do every job themselves, regardless of the interests in it or the skill and talent for it. As time went on and communities grew, people began to pursue their interests and skills. Their efforts were specialized, making and trading what they produced to complete their needs. They became voluntarily dependent on each other and, in doing so, produced goods beyond their own needs. Each could reproduce their skills and efforts in others and rise to even new challenges.
Scientific management principles proposed to push that envelope of specialization down to the smallest detail for the quickest, least time-consuming result. It narrowed the effort, created repetitiveness and boredom, and deprived each person involved of any interest in their work. It made the idea of sharing their effort, reproducing their skills in others, without enthusiasm.
Henry Ford recognized this and broke his factory work into departments, assigning groups of workers to a whole task. He allowed them to follow their own interests and skills as well as electing their own straw bosses. He paid the highest factory wage at the time. The advent of the First World War led to the streamlining of work further in even the Ford plants, and the narrowly focused tasks became the dehumanized assembly line. It became a necessity in World War II, which continued even up to today. Robots, the perfect machines for accurate, repetitive work, are replacing many of those assembly line tasks in the 21st century.
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The concept of the assembly line infected life in general, with the behaviorists setting the tone. We look upon people today as the carrot and stick generation. They are producers by initiative and incentive, instead of interest. Is it any wonder, then, that schools in America have ignored needs to spark the interests of students to build on their talents for greater individual skills?
The few who have acquired the position of elite in America see individual values, interests, skills, talents and aspirations as threats to a well-organized society. Larger corporations, well established in methods of production, spend great effort in defending what they make against interlopers on the outside. They ally themselves with politicians who promise to defend them against the challenges of a free market and the ability of individuals to serve the consumer better. The assembly line can escape internal challenges. It cannot, however, be defended from the outside by government preventing entrepreneurial challenges by American free men and women. To prevent those challenges is an Old World tradition, where mercantilists and manufacturers collaborate with government.
In America, we now have a partnership of big business, education and government, all pursuing and establishing a more manageable community of interests. It is offensive to the legitimate self-interests of individuals, both as workers and consumers.
The assembly line style of existence imposed on America is an import of ideology. It gives power to the few over the many, replacing the decisions of the many, and the free market, with the wisdom of the few. It is a shot in the foot when extended throughout our economy. Individual self-interests and the free market are the hallmarks of America, which caused it to prosper in freedom and stand apart from the rest of the world.
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Clay Barham [send him email] has been a candidate for the California legislature and a stand-in talk show host for ABC. He was educated in physical and behavioral sciences, with a Ph.D. in sociology. He is the author of five books, with his latest being Foundations of Modern American Conservatism and Liberalism: The Roots of Freedom and Tyranny. Visit his website at http://www.claysamerica.com.
