Walter Russell Mead has an extended article in a vein similar to what I posted a bit earlier today:
Fordism was once a term of abuse hurled at the factory system by Marxist critics who, rightly, deplored the alienation and anomie that mass production for mass consumption entailed. Has the Fordist factory system and the big box consumerism that goes with it now become our ideal, the highest form of social life our minds can conceive? Social critics also denounced our school system, justifiably, as a mediocre, conformity inducing, alienating, time wasting system that trained kids to sit still, follow directions and move with the herd. The blue model built big-box schools where the children of factory workers could get the standardized social and intellectual training necessary to enable most of them to graduate into the big-box Ford plant and shop in the big-box store. Maybe that was a huge social advance at one time, but is that something to aspire to or be proud of today? Don’t we want to teach our children to do something smarter than move in large groups by the clock and the bell, follow directions and always color between the lines?
What’s the “post-blue model”? We don’t know but we’re hurtling towards it.
The success of our institutions and ideas has so changed the world that they don’t work any more. We cannot turn back the clock, nor should we try. America’s job is to boldly go where none have gone before, not to consume our energies in vain attempts to recreate the glories of an unattainable past. We need to do for our times and circumstances what other Americans have done before us: Recast classic Anglo-American liberal thought, still the cultural and moral foundation of American life and the source of the commonsense reasoning that guides most Americans as they evaluate policy ideas and party programs, in ways that address the challenges before us.
Read the whole thing.
What’s the “post-blue model�
Didn’t the Tofflers write several books on that very subject?
America’s job is to boldly go where none have gone before, not to consume our energies in vain attempts to recreate the glories of an unattainable past.
Easily said by a man who has tenure in the old blue box system of education, and who gets paid as a bloviator otherwise. Try living that shit on the front-line, asshole! Consider him as opposed to Sebastian Thrun, who actually IS trying to create a different model of education for the future, instead of bloviating about the need for others to do the hard work.
I was struck by the Marcusean overtones of this:
I’m thinking of One-Dimensional Man.
sam:
I would also point out how congruent his ideas are with those of people like Paul Gilding and Richard Heinberg.
“Didn’t the Tofflers write several books on that very subject?”
Yes but they, like fantasist Arnold Kling, have been eating alot of dirt since 2007 blew their inevitable hyper-wealthy, hyper-specialized and hyper-To The Moon! society into another orbit.
Been a long time sinve I read their books, but did they state that economic disasters of a man-made nature weren’t possible in THE FUTURE?