The Dehumanisation of Work

The Dehumanisation of Work

Reading the paper yesterday, I sadly trawled through an account of some burned out, helpless, frazzled young teachers who have been overburdened by the doctrine or rather indoctrination that we call our education system. Set impossible targets, given a curriculum that they have to teach without any additional flair or innovation from their alleged educated selves, teaching according to attainment graphs and statistics rather than considering the individual needs of the young people in front of them – they’ve lost the plot! According to the writer of this piece, a teacher himself, they probably lost the plot in December, exhausted by the lengthy term, never really regaining their equilibrium and purpose. Sapped, lost, forlorn.

Some people don’t appear to believe there is any correlation between this sorry situation and the pupil attainment. Some people don’t seem to get it that if the teachers are disillusioned and bored with what they are offering to the children, it is expecting a hell of a lot from the young people themselves to suddenly be inspired.
Some people have not looked at the neurological evidence about social interaction and mirrored behaviour – boredom breeds more boredom and multiplies plenty fold.

There are many ways of improving the educational experience for our young people. Giving them an exciting, innovative curriculum is one way. Getting them out of the classroom and experiencing the world around them is another. Giving them a truly broad and balanced curriculum that reflects their entire needs and not just the straight jacket of intellectual standards is yet another, and supporting the emotional wellbeing of their carers, their teachers is another.
One solution won’t work. Holistic change, supporting all within an institution, nurturing and guiding, caring and feeling, educating and giving opportunities to extend learning are all part and parcel of organisational change, and this cannot be restricted to the pupils alone.

What we have done is forget that these are real people. They have real lives, real needs, real desires and passions. Try being passionate about anything when your work schedule and expectations are unrealistic, unachievable and unworthy!
I am not saying that attainment is unworthy. Learning to read, to write, to become numerate is vastly important. But there is more! There is a hell of a lot more, and to leave teachers in situations such as these is abhorrent.

By giving them unrealistic “floor” targets, by categorising the children as though they were a piece of statistical data that they have to manipulate, by constraining their innovation and curbing their imagination, we have made these teachers androids.
The irony is that there are actually some people who enter into education for genuine vocational reasons. They want to make a difference but the current system negates any possibility of doing just that. The TDA advertising slogan “Use Your Head – Teach” would be laughable if it wasn’t so bloody tragic!

And that is just the teachers.

My mother has just been telling me about my cousin’s child who is currently doing her GCSEs. Prior to her exams, she started getting unusual headaches, tremblings, fainting fits and general obvious signs of angst. The school, fearful for the wellbeing of this straight A student, asked her parents to take her to the doctor. Checked out for signs of diabetes, eating disorders etc, she was declared physically fit but clearly reacting emotionally, mentally to the strain of examination and expectation.
Such is her ailment, such is she a precious being to their league table, the school is bending over backwards to support her needs. They have graciously decided that she requires an individual room and a personalised invigilator in order to take her exams.

Ironically, she is not alone.

You hear the occasional horror story of the child led to suicide due to the pressures of the exams. You hear the more frequent stories of self-harm. You can see the harried look on many sixteen year olds faces as they feel the needs of the world, their world, on their shoulders. They don’t want to let their school down. It has been their home for five years. It is important to them, and that is before they begin to worry about themselves, their parents, their teachers, their futures.

We have dehumanised these children, for that is what they are, and have forgotten in the league table mentality that we are not talking about a 0.535% or 2.75% of a league table point but a real person; a real living thing.

The eighteen year olds are no better. The additional two years has not made them more realistic about the burdens of examinations. They have narrowed their education to such an extent that it is wholly restricted to the three or four subjects that they are taking for formal examination. Choose French, English and History and you can forget about the joys of walking along Chesil Beach, understanding and appreciating the magnificence of this incredible geological formation. You can forget about the love of reading a book because you damn well want to. Rather, you have to confine literature to the course books, inwardly digesting every line, quoting and contextualising, analysing and interpreting. You may be studying 1984 but there’s no time to read around at Blair’s other books, unless it will make a difference to the paper. And if you are studying Orwellian theory and dystopias in general, there’s no point in having time off to watch an unrelated, peripheral film. You haven’t got either time or energy for such distractions.
You might, just might learn a musical instrument if you are lucky, if your parents are well off and see the benefit, but you’re probably only doing this to single you out on the UCCA form.

Dehumanisation! Work, work, and more work. That is all.

What an indictment! What is this teaching our children?

But it doesn’t stop there.

I have just come back from spending a few hours with my brother; my bright, funny, clever, thoughtful brother who has always bucked the trend and done things his very own, unusual way.

As a toddler, he developed a debilitating disease that he still suffers from today. Somewhat mummy coddled by parents and elder siblings alike, he ‘enjoyed’ his status as “the little one”. One could certainly argue that he abused this role and still does; having us all running around after him in good times and bad.
We lovingly oblige and he rewards us with untold gratitude.

He was a born actor, a great orator, an intellect with a huge amount of wit. To this day, he charms people, plays the networking game to perfection.

Struggling in an education establishment where previous siblings had made their mark and suffering from absurd comparisons, he underachieved academically. With little or no qualifications he went to a local college, only to be embroiled in Student Union politics to the detriment of his own learning. I was going to explain his every step to his current position but do not want to risk his anonymity. Needless to say, he employed his over exaggerated gift of the gab and took a meritocratic rise without the need for the qualifications that would label and categorise his capability.

He then went to work as the head of a national organisation, saving the company from oblivion, providing financial and strategic lead that was admired by all concerned within and beyond the company. He had vision, based on an egalitarian ideology that one could loosely relate to socialism!

All sounds good. He cared, he cares. He thinks and wants to make a difference, just like the aforementioned teachers who are washed out and wasted.

Only my brother is washed out and wasted too.

He got angry with someone at work because they weren’t as competent as they should be, and did not live up to his expectations. He was asked to take some gardening leave, fully paid until the matter was sorted. Only the company found other things to worry about. Nine months later, there is no solution. He has neither been fired nor reinstated. He is living in a land called Inertia in the continent of Limbo.

And guess what? He is a diagnosed depressive.
He cannot cope.

Now of course, one could argue that in this particular case, he has brought some of the sorry situation upon himself. But that is somewhat immaterial. Guilty or not, the company has forgotten that he is a human being, with relationships and feelings and a life. He cannot function at present because he is stymied. He cannot apply for other jobs and has been sapped of energy by the indecisiveness and inability of his employer’s to bring some sort of conclusion to this issue.
Being selfish, not only has the company forgotten that my brother is a human being, but they have detached themselves from the idea that this human has connections with others and that what they do to this man is then transferred to those who are caring for him with his many needs.
Obviously, companies employing people cannot be responsible for an entire extended family of people but they lose sight of the humanism involved.

I have a friend who was treated unfairly beyond belief in a contemptible manner that would probably stand in a court of law in his favour, should litigation ever be considered. Steadfastly, innovatively, determinedly shaping a place of work where clients and employees alike would benefit from the insight and forethought that my friend had to offer. Vision? Oh yes, there was plenty of vision and a damn good one at that. People? Yes, they were catered for in a wholehearted holistic way. The organisation had evolved and developed despite external constraints that attacked and belittled, always considering the needs of every human being who lived, worked and was associated with the place. Environment? Thoughtful, considered, needs led that once more accounted for individuals and their requirements.

Such organisations do not make themselves. They grow under great leadership and skilful management and they cannot be disentangled and eradicated in a hurry. Recent history is showing this to be the case.
My friend worked studiously, vociferously, selflessly, with an extreme focus on the needs of the people involved. He gave abundantly more than was necessary in the two decades and more that he lived at this place, and I choose the word “lived” quite deliberately.

And how did his employer thank him? They bombarded him with impossible targets that he managed to achieve without diluting his true purpose and ideology. They robbed him of the opportunity to complete the task in hand, ridiculing his methodology and placing unnecessary and deliberately contemptuous obstacles in his way. They plotted and schemed to be rid of this maverick that wouldn’t play their tired and sorry little game.

They tried to dehumanise both my friend and his organisation.
There is an important differentiation here. I did not state that they dehumanised my friend. They tried, and they would have succeeded had it not been for his strength and resilience in ensuring the bastards wouldn’t finish him off completely. They tried to dehumanise the situation by replacing him with a zombie devoid of thought who didn’t “do” vision, and whose methodology was so diametrically opposed to my friends that again, it would be laughable if it wasn’t so utterly despicable. His clients were resistant to change, even though the Zombie’s ways were supposed to be transferrable to any organisation; tried, tested and signed off with a big congratulory tick. They were resistant to change because my friend had showered them with the knowledge, skills and values of humanism that will not be eradicated if understood, appreciated and enacted. And love. Yes, they were loved.

What they did do was ignore that there are human beings involved, or in this case, they were probably very sure that there was a human being involved but they didn’t give a toss about him. But just as with my brother, they didn’t consider the other human beings involved; the clients, the employees, the family, the friends who were all deeply affected by this travesty.

And then there is me.
I work in a factory. I try my best to humanise the system but it is too big for me to take on. It is too flawed and corrupt. It is too resilient to change, unless that change is sprung upon them from way above in No Man’s Land.
My factory has produced improvements. It has refined its product and automated its employees. It has taken away individual thought and yet again ridicules those who think. Or even worse, it pretends that the thoughtful are considered but provides no infrastructure to enable them to put their vision into practice.

My factory is soulless, spiritless, emotionally bereft, intellectually incompetent.

It is dehumanising me……. if I let it.

So what does this all mean?

Work is an exceptionally important part of our lives. We spend a considerable amount of time, and possibly even more energy and thought on our work. Why the hell should people settle for a dehumanised existence that saps them as soon as they walk into the working environment? A work place is frequently full of people. They are places that should be about people, about humanity, about humane-ness.

We lost our mining industry some decades ago. I think that is a job that I couldn’t bear to have done but the camaraderie, the collegiate mentality, the community that sprang from such devastatingly difficult places to work shows that at the heart of even the most trying jobs, there is humanity. Why did the miner’s strike last so long? Because that woman and her cronies had not accounted for their inability to dehumanise the situation. In the depths of despair, they would not let work dehumanise them, though some sadly succumbed.

Work is important but so is the rest of life. Balance is important and we are not giving our children and young people balance. They look around and see the dehumanisation of work, exacerbated in the type of economic climate in which we now live. The functionality of exams and processes of employment and working is a straight jacket that our young people are slowly slipping into, often devoid of the skills and values of real living.
I mentioned Orwell’s dystopia earlier. To misquote a pretty dire film “You don’t believe in dystopia my dear….. believe me, you’re in one!”

And what of the commonalities? What do the teachers, those pupils, my cousin’s daughter, my brother, my friend and I all have in common?
Pretty obvious really – we all work in education.
We all contribute to the development of young people. We all work in the most human being orientated place of work feasible. We work in an environment that helps people to learn and grow and “prepares them for life”. Some of us like to think we are helping them to enjoy their childhood too but the essential issue is that we are in the people industry in a way that no other job is. Others such as the health service work on people, keep people alive, but it is the educationalists who have the wonderful challenge of shaping our future.

And dear Lord above, are we letting them down?

How can we break the dehumanisation of the workforce if we are constantly showing the next working generation the dehumanisation of people through the very system that is supposed to nurture and humanise them? How can we sit by and watch disillusioned, dehumanised teachers teach our restricted, dehumanised pupils with a contrived, narrow and dehumanised education system?
How can we revolutionise ways of the (w)bankers and the politicians if we are controlling and dehumanising the next generation? How can we make work better places if we do not give our young people the opportunity to be fulfilled as youngsters?

We need to consider this very carefully. The revolution that is being whispered about in Middle England needs to think. And think now!
It doesn’t start with toppling a few errant politicians because they bought a wooden spoon too many for their second home. As much as electoral reform would be welcomed, our future does not depend on this and this alone. It doesn’t start with making the much needed workforce reform to ensure rights of pay and working conditions are considered, though this too is also extremely important.

The dehumanisation of work will only come about if our young people are educated in a manner that considers the whole of the child, the entirety of the young person, the needs of the individual and the collective. Unless we look at the social, spiritual, emotional needs of these young people, unless we drive their passions and nurture their ability to empathise, unless we give them the intellectual and creative and physical stimulation they deserve, unless we allow them to look up and see and think and feel, we will perpetuate this dehumanisation, this lack of consideration, this thoughtlessness, this contempt.
Unless we act now, there will be more disillusioned teachers in the next batch they churn out from colleges around the country. Unless we consider now, we will have more bosses, like those responsible for my brother, my friend and I, that don’t give a damn about the human factor. Unless we think now, we leave a legacy of dehumanisation in work for our children, their children and further generations to come.