How to create a deviant

Quick review:  Psychs wanted to be respected as "scientists.". Behavioralists created "reasons" for learning nonsense, or learning nonsensically, depending on how you look at it.  Now here's another interesting development--enter the number crunchers!
Now, first, I have to say that number crunching is fun.  I know you math-phobic people don't believe that, and that's okay.  But I think it's great fun to find patterns like "square root day" (3-9-81 when I was a kid, or maybe 2-4-16 coming up in a few more years).  It's fun to prove that the "economy size" isn't necessarily the most "economical" per ounce.  It's fun to "count cards" and try to beat the odds in blackjack.  Shoot, it's just fun to even understand the odds in blackjack!  And it's even fun to answer simple questions with long calculus based explanations!  Math is way cool!

And I'm not the only one who thinks so.  Businessmen think so, because they want to calculate risks and measure success and minimize loss.  Environmentalists think so, because they want to calculate risks and measure success and minimize loss too.  Politicians also think so, for the same reasons.  Even Sly measures risks and opportunities and tries to make the most of his calculations and deliberations (thus his refusal to subscribe to some online game because it was just that--an ongoing commitment to continuing to give up money for access, rather than a one-time "you own it" purchase.  I had nothing to do with it!).

Even math phobic people like to see numbers that "prove" something or that back up their thoughts and values or that tell them what they did right or what they should do next.  

Enter the testers.  I found this fascinating.  When the US entered WWI, they had a huge number of recruits that they had to sort through and organize to fill jobs and roles in the military in execution of the war.  In order to manage the task, evaluators and testers were hired to figure out who should be officers and who should be infantry and who should be artillery and so on and so forth. They did the job, and the war eventually ended (on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, btw, for you number people. And obtw, no one "won" the war--everyone just agreed to go home and quit, basically.  But that's another post--sorry!). 

So, the war ended and there were all of these newly unemployed evaluators and testers who enjoyed determining people's military assignments for them.  Guess where they found a new set of subjects?  In the schools, of course!  There were all these captive kids with disconnected "nonsense" to learn at prescribed times in prescribed grades in prescribed ways--perfect fodder for testers and evaluators! 

The testers want people to test and categorize.  The mega-employers wanted warm bodies to fill factories and jobs and be "good employees."  The politicians wanted to know how to spend money and on whom to spend money to make suitable employees and suitable (manageable) citizens.  The testers and evaluators were willing to calculate and categorize the students for them, some for menial labor, some for academics, some not worth either, and so on.  

Thus also began "tracking" in schools.  It was a win-win for everyone!  "Smart" kids were the ones who tested well.  They were the ones who could more easily learn the prescribed "curriculum" in a detached, artificial, classroom environment, regurgitate the "right" answers for the test, and not rebel at the system in general.  They were the good kids, the ones that were teachable/trainable, the ones that got A's and gold stars and smiley faces, and followed the rules and colored between the lines and stayed inside the prescribed box.

Then there were the other kids.  They weren't on the same time line.  Or they were bored.  Or they didn't learn the "right way," which strangely enough was this new invented way of "learning" and not the classic way of learning (by interest and collaboration and in the real world with real relevance).  Those kids were "behavior problems" or "problem children" or "learning disabled.". The tester and evaluators (and employers and politicians) were more than happy to create new "scientific" groupings for these "deviants," and to be able to "allocate resources" accordingly.

Fast forward, and we have federal govt dictating national standards and rewarding and punishing performance of not only individuals but of entire schools and systems, and it's all based on a very un-natural/artificial system of measuring the learning of "nonsense.". Kind of makes you stop and think (if you didn't unlearn how to think when you were in all that schooling!).

Okay, enough for now, and sorry this post has been more "disjointed.". Between flu recovery and baby-brain, it's what I'm capable of at the moment!