gat

Stop Four: The RPM collects ALL the work orders in the city, sorting them
according to priority codes and available resources, and selects a Resource
Planning Team (RPT). This team then enters the P.O. 18 in its own computer.
A repair sequence is arrested at Stop Four for a period of weeks.
Stop Five: The P.O. 18 is relayed to the Integrated Purchasing and Inventory
System (IPIS), which spits out a Work Order and sends it to the Supervising
Supervisor. Three months have passed, and used toilet paper is raining down
into the airless cell beneath John Gatto’s English class.
Stop Six: The Supervising Supervisor has one responsibility, to supervise the
Trade Supervisors and decide which one will at some time not fix but supervise
the fixing of my floor. Such a decision requires DUE TIME before an order is
issued.
Stop Seven: The Trade Supervisor has responsibility for selecting service
people of flesh and blood to actually do the work. Eventually the Trade
Supervisor does this, dispatching a Work Crew to perform the repair. Time
elapsed (in this case): five months. Some repairs take ten years. Some forever.
I was lucky.
Stop Eight: Armed with bags and utility belts, tradespeople enter the school to
examine the problem. If it can be repaired with the tools they carry, fine; if not
they must fill out a P.O. 17 to requisition the needed materials and a new and
different sequence begins. It’s all very logical. Each step is justified. If you
think this can be reformed you are indeed ignorant. Fire all these people and
unless you are willing to kill them, they will just have to be employed in some
other fashion equally useless.
At the heart of the durability of mass schooling is a brilliantly designed power fragmentation
system which distributes decision-making so widely among so many different warring interests
that large-scale change is impossible to those without a codebook. Even when a favorable chance
alteration occurs, it has a short life span, usually exactly as long as the originator of the happy
change has political protection. When the first boom of enthusiasm wanes or protection erodes,
the innovation follows soon after.
No visible level of the system, top, middle, or bottom, is allowed to institute any significant
change without permission from many other layers. To secure this coalition of forces puts the
supplicant in such a compromised position (and takes so long) that any possibility of very
extensive alteration is foreclosed.
Structurally, control is divided among three categories of interdependent power: 1) government
agencies, 2) the self-proclaimed knowledge industry, 3) various special interests, some permanent,
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