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What Henry Ford knew
*By Marion Brady
March 28, 2006
I bought a new cordless drill the other day. Walking through the hand-tool and
power-equipment store, I was struck, again, by the fact that practically nothing
on the counters and shelves came from an American production line. Many of the
brand names were old-line American, and the designs and specifications may have
originated here, but the tools themselves were made elsewhere.
Now I'm not a protectionist, and I'm sold on the merits of free enterprise, but
I can't help thinking there are long-term costs to this that will eventually
circle around and bite us from behind. Yes, the design stage is where
imagination and innovation play their most important roles, and America has long
been a step ahead of most of the rest of the world on those counts, but my
decades in the classroom tell me that separating the handwork from the brainwork
undermines the brainwork.
Personal experience tells me the same thing -- that there's some sort of
powerful connection between doing and thinking. Twenty or so years ago, I built
the house I live in. I didn't subcontract anything, just got professionals to
stop by every few days to check out my work ahead of county building inspectors.
The house is unconventional, and there were no contractors in the area who had
built anything like it. At the same time I was building the house, I was writing
the book I'm most pleased with -- one published by a respected university press.
The house and the book -- hammer and clipboard -- moved along together. And
both, I'm convinced, were the better for it. The house has remained untouched by
hurricanes, and the book is still in print.
Short-term, America's offshoring of production benefits me. I got the biggest,
most powerful cordless drill in stock at a really good price. But long-term, one
of the conclusions I draw from history is that manufacturing, engineering and
innovation are all wrapped up together. I suspect we've long had the edge in
technological innovation because we had the edge in manufacturing, not the other
way around. As a few companies have discovered, production and assembly-line
workers aren't just hands; they're thinkers, and the handwork-brainwork
relationship unleashes creativity.
One possible explanation of American industry's tendency to think short- rather
than long-term is simply that that's what corporations are designed to do --
maximize quarterly profits. However, I think there's another, less obvious
reason why business leaders think offshoring has few downsides. Nowhere in their
educations were they required to think in an organized, systematic way about
what are sometimes called "causal sequences."
Here's Henry Ford, in 1926, illustrating what I mean by "causal sequences":
"We have decided upon and at once put into effect through all the branches of
our industries the five-day week. Hereafter there will be no more work with us
on Saturdays and Sundays. . . .
"The industry of this country could not long exist if factories generally went
back to the 10-hour day, because the people would not have the time to consume
the goods produced. For instance, a workman would have little use for an
automobile if he had to be in the shops from dawn until dusk. And that would
react in countless directions, for the automobile, by enabling people to get
about quickly and easily, gives them a chance to find out what is going on in
the world -- which leads them to a larger life that requires more food, more and
better goods, more books, more music -- more of everything."
Ford wouldn't have used the words "causal sequences," but, unlike his peers, he
could see "connections," could see how short-term sacrifices could have
long-term benefits.
He'd done it before. Twelve years earlier he'd started paying his workers the
then unheard-of sum of five dollars for an eight-hour day. That was more than
twice the industry average, which was two dollars and a half for a 10-hour day.
If he wanted to sell a lot of cars, Ford reasoned, ordinary people had to make
enough money to buy them.
At a common-sense level, everybody knows about "connections." But failure to
teach students how to trace and make practical use of them to solve existing
problems and avoid future ones is yet another reason why so-called "standards"
rigidly tied to school subjects rather than to the real world, and the
standardized tests geared to those standards, fail to prepare the young for an
unknowable future.
*Originally published in the Orlando Sentinel. Published here by permission
of the author.
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