[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> Hello!
> I have been away for a long time now.
Good to hear your voice again, from the land of,
according to your reports, at least some hope.
> And I will go on writing about the things that I used to write about.
> I have written several times about the plans to transform at least
> 10% of the paid working hours of everybody into education.
[snip]
>
> In many European countries they go for shorter work weeks.
> In Norway the trade unions say that only parents with children and
> other persons that take care of people who cannot make it on their
> own ought to have shorter work weeks.
> The ordinary thing shall be that the workers take more and more
> control over their own working time by transfering it to time for
> education and development according to their own wishes.
> Looks nice to me! What do you think? Should the workers go for
> shorter workweeks or try to take control over their paid working
> hours and use them for their own learning and development?
>
[snip]
This seems an interesting issue. If workers go stright for shorter
working hours, then they will have more "free hours", which sounds
like they will have more freedom (but freedom for what? freedom in
what overall economic/social context?).
If workers are *required* to
spend 10% of their work hours educating themselves to become
more self-managing in the work environment, there is a sense in which
they have been *coerced* to do something with a part of their
otherwise disposable time, yet they may in reality be making
themselves more truly *free* in the strong sense of shaping the
important aspects of their lives rather than having those
aspects be shaped by "masters" (no matter how few *labor hours*
those masters demand in exchange for determining what kind
of world the workers will live in).
Continued deskilling versus increased self-management of the
work process. While I am not an expert, it seems both roads
are possible, at least for a while. Those who favor increased
involvement of workers in the management process need to
enlist *research* to show the possible outcomes of their
road, and to compare the world they would shape with that shaped by
management by managers and workers doing what they're told.
Many things are required of most of us by public and private
and quasi-private/public (corporate) institutions. An experiment in
which workers tried the education-as-part-of-work proposal
would certainly be interesting, and I would imagine
a country like Norway could even get enough *volunteers* to
not have to coerce anybody.
It sounds exciting and hopeful to me.
>
> All the best from
>
> Tor Forde
> email:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
and from
\brad mccormick
--
Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(914)238-0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
-------------------------------------------------------
Visit my website ==> http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
