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The American "education" machine is broken!

Sunday, April 4, 2010

How Attitudes And Culture Influence Economic Prosperity
  Economics piece by Malcolm T. Hedges

To be sure ability, education and intelligence are considerable influences - but I suggest Attitudes And Culture Influence often are more significant.

Up front I will state that I was raised as a “farm boy” in the 1950’s.  I started voluntarily working doing manual labor at age 13 on the farm to make some money to pay for school needs and some personal wants.  It was not slave labor just good ol’ fashioned hard work for a minimum wage. I learned a lot as time progressed.

Additionally I was blessed by birth to have a pretty fair IQ even though I often refused to make good use of it.  Some of my grades in school were frankly abysmal.

And so we will now discuss “How Attitudes And Culture Influence Economic Prosperity”.

Some cultures consider education and knowledge as BS while other essentially worship it.  A little research on your part will reveal who and also the “general results” of those postures.

Attitudes are generally more driven by “peer pressure” however cultural influences are still considerable.

As in most any High School class our membership went onto widely varied careers and lives.  Some became engineers, teachers and professors. Some became business owners, editors, Radio/TV personalities, publishers, mechanics, etc, etc.

A few became nothing but economic and social slugs.

The point is that ~99% graduated from High School and that was a challenge in 1961. Some of the people most expected to be a failure went on to very respectable and successful careers while some surprisingly never matured after that period in their lives.

That is where attitude comes into play. To be sure attitude includes perceptions of capabilities, goals and obstacles.

Even the “Hard Worker” has little value to the employer unless that “work” produces an economic benefit.  My tasks at age 13 and 14 during the summer fulfilled a need for my employer while producing some spending money for me.

A lot of people “doomed to be economic failures” have risen far above that status and become successes beyond even their own wildest dreams.  Often that has been despite the cultural pressures and attitudes impressed upon them.

Every person needs to discover their own niche in society.  In the course of that discovery they need to make their own decisions trying to ignore the cultural pressures that are contrary to their personal aspirations and needs.

My parents and my best friends parents tried to force us into a college degree even though we had no interest. We both succeeded in our own ways without a BS degree.

Now the person with a “skater attitude” is another story.  The “skater” has no intention of being productive, the idea is to gain employment and do as little as possible while being as inefficient as possible and getting paid for doing such.  I’m sure you have worked with some of them.

There are a lot of influences on the economic prosperity of an individual, I submit attitude and culture are the basic factors.

Malcolm T. Hedges

Posted by Malcolm T. Hedges on 4/4/10 at 05:04 PM
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UPSSA United Progressive Socialist States of America

UPSSA United Progressive Socialist States of America