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Sunday, 20 July 2008
Social engineering
I always find this a very interesting topic. The ways and means people will use to get others in a society to behave a certain way. It can be as simple as the speed limit for driving a car, you get them to behave by taking their money away. I recall in Singapore many years ago they had a law where if a university educated man married and had a child to a university educated female then he got taxation benefits that non-university educated parents did not.
Haven’t governments tried that throughout history - apartheid and the aryan race just to name two - and fortunately it has never been successful. Imagine what we would be like now if governments could actually be successful in engineering who mated with who in a society.
I heard a most interesting talk on the radio the other day about China’s one child policy. The man stated that it is now estimated that there are 50 million children in China who are a second child. Yes, there are 50 million people in China who have no birth certificate, who can never get a passport and who officially do not exist. Imagine the impact of that. Firstly they will be ripe for exploitation - unless you do what I want then I will dob you in - and they are going to have to have a massive black economy to support them all as someone who does not exist can’t pay taxation. It seems that governments cannot engineer the human sex drive but I suppose that wont stop them trying.
Anyway closer to home they are bringing in a new law in the state where I live. They want to reduce teenage truancy which is closely related to crime in the community. Another piece of social engineering who’s goals are most meritorious in my view. How they plan to do it is by withholding welfare payments from parents who’s teenagers do not attend school. Well fancy that!
Now there is some good engineering!!
Firstly, its discriminatory in that it only effects poor parents and not the ones who have a job. And I can tell you that there are plenty of rich kids who are truants. I see them regularly in my work. A mother will bring her 14 year old highly rebellious daughter to see me, to get her repaired. This child’s sole goal in life is to defy authority and of course that includes not going to school. Indeed just getting the child inside the door of my office is a major logistical exercise as in the teenager’s eyes I am authority even before we have ever met. Often I ask the mother how she managed it and sometimes you get an answer like she paid her daughter $20 to get her to come to counselling!! Yes that is right. The parent pays the counsellor to counsel the child and pays the child to be a client!!
I tell you what, you earn your money when you counsel such very rebellious teenagers. They are not easy clients. It truly tests the counsellors skills. If you can just somehow manage to weave your way through all the rebellion and get underneath it and make some real contact with the child then you have made it and some good changes can occur. Sometimes you get there and sometimes you don’t.
Unfortunately this welfare withholding piece of social engineering is based on a faulty assumption. This is no better articulated than in the editorial of the “West Australian” newspaper where in discussing this program the editor states, “The aim is surely unobjectionable: to get children from such families to attend school regularly. Education is the means by which such children are given the opportunity to break the pattern of welfare dependency”
And the faulty assumption is? School = education. You can make a child go to school but you can’t make it learn. You can make a child sit in a classroom but you can’t make it get educated. Oh well!!
He looks rebellious. Apparently if he is made to go to school that means he will learn. According to the Australian government one causes the other to happen.
Furthermore who would want to be a teacher now! They are going to watch their classrooms start to fill up with children who don’t want to be there, who don’t want to learn and who angry about it all. You don’t need three guesses to work out who is going to take the brunt of that anger.
Then there are the other children in the classroom who do want to learn and they are going to be adversely effected because the teacher is spending all the time coping with the welfare driven disruptive student.
And finally there is one other point. People are usually attracted to those things which they are good at. They will naturally seek them out like skills in art, or music or sport and yes academic ability as well. The vast majority of truants aren’t good at it. They are academically challenged or they are dumb as they have been called numerous times before and as they call themselves. Putting such children back in the classroom will only further reinforce their “dumbness” to themselves and their self image is further crushed into the ground. And that is one common feature in many social experiments. The people effected, end up worse off than before the social engineering was implemented in the first place.
He is good at taking baths so he will naturally do it of his own volition.
I am all in favour of getting truants to do some structured activity. A very good idea for sure. Putting them back in the classroom is a very bad idea.
Graffiti
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