Vorsprung durch Technik

A recent ABC Background Briefing radio documentary looks at the role of MBA education in the current financial crisis: MBA: Mostly bloody awful.

What we taught were very simplified and not necessarily accurate models of human behaviour, that over time become self-fulfilling. And so there was this model that in fact by basically being self-interested to an extreme, that was the appropriate way to behave and act. And what that does over time, because this is not an innocent exercise, it actually over time because it is a professional school, comes to shape the identity of those individuals. That is, they begin to see themselves in those views. And one of the consequences of that is that if you look with respect to executive compensation for example, and the incentives around that, the view becomes that I actually have to be compensated to do the job I was hired for, and on top of that you have to bribe me with stock options to make sure I do that job. In no other occupation or profession is that part of the modus operandi.

Nigel Stewart Australia, Commentary, USA business, education, leadership, mba, podcast

As reported in The Age today, plans for humanist philosophy classes to be available as an alternative to Christian, Muslim, Judaism, Buddhism and Baha’i religions.

Religion in schools to go God-free

Victorian Humanist Society president Stephen Stuart said: “Atheistical parents will be pleased to hear that humanistic courses of ethics will soon be available in some state schools.”

However, Access Ministries and Salt Shakers don’t seem to appreciate the intrusion on their turf:

Fundamentalist Christian group the Salt Shakers panned the idea of humanists being given religious education class time. Research director Jenny Stokes said: “If you go there, where do you stop? What about witchcraft or Satanism?  If you accredit humanism, then those things would have an equal claim to be taught in schools.”

So humanism equals satanism and witchcraft?  Yeah right.

Ms Stokes said humanists could not expect to have it both ways. “It doesn’t make sense because they proclaim themselves not to be a religion,” she said.  Religious instruction in state schools should be Christian because “basically we are a Christian nation”, she said.

Perhaps Ms Stokes should be informed that humanism is not a religion by definition, not by proclamation.  But, the real point of their opposition is maintaining the illusion of a Christian monopoly on matters ethical and moral.

At best that amounts to willfull ignorance.  At worst it represents repression of the non-religous.

Follow up in the Letters to The Age:

The anti-God crusade

THE humanist/atheist brigade will soon have the right to present its anti-God/anti-Christian doctrine in the religious education time slot in state schools.

I thought it already had its allotted sessions in the school science curriculum, where its evolutionist dogma is so forcefully entrenched that it prevents any other viewpoint from even being considered, let alone discussed.

DAVID G. WESTAWAY, Navigators

Sigh.

Nigel Stewart Australia, Commentary Australia, education, humanism, religion, religous instruction

As reported by the Austin American Statesman and Texas Freedom Network, the religous right have nominated several evolution deniers to a curriculum review panel.

“It’s simply stunning that any state board members would even consider appointing authors of an anti-evolution textbook to a panel of scientists,” she said. “Are they coming here to help write good science standards or to drum up a market for their lousy textbook?”

The textbook, Explore Evolution, is intended for secondary schools and colleges, according to its U.S. distributor, the anti-evolution Discovery Institute in Seattle.  Because of that, the State Board of Education could consider it for the state’s approved list of science textbooks in 2011.

The decisions made by the curriculum review panel may well affect what is taught to our daughter in biology class here in Texas.

Nigel Stewart Commentary, Texas education, evolution, science, Texas