gat

We have evolved a subtly architected, delicately balanced command economy and class-based
society upon which huge efforts are lavished to make it appear like something else. The illusion
has been wearing thin for years; that’s a principal reason why so many people don’t bother to
vote. In such a bargain, the quality of schooling is distinctly secondary; other values are
uppermost. A great many children see through the fraud in elementary school but lack the
language and education to come to proper terms with their feelings. In this system, a fraction of
the kids are slowly over time let in on a part of this managerial reality because they are intended to
eventually be made into Guardians themselves, or Guardian’s assistants.
School is a place where a comprehensive social vision is learned. Without a contrary vision to
offer, the term "school reform" is only a misnomer describing trivial changes. Any large alteration
of forced schooling, which might jeopardize the continuity of workers and customers that the
corporate economy depends upon, is unthinkable without some radical change in popular
perception preceding it. Business/School partnerships and School-to-Work legislation aren’t
positive developments, but they represent the end of any pretense that ordinary children should be
educated. That, in any case, was the burden of my talk at Cypress.
Deregulating Opportunity
When I finished, Mr. Rodgers briefly took me to task for having seemed to include in the
indictment the high-tech group at Cypress. Later I learned that he had challenged Washington to
stop government subsidies to the Valley on the grounds that such tampering destroyed the very
principle that provided it with energy—open competition and risk-taking. Thinking about his
criticism on the road home, I accepted the justice of his complaint against me and, as penance,
thought about the significance of what he had said.
A century ago mass production began to stifle the individualism which was the real American
Dream. Big business, big government, and big labor couldn’t deal with individuals but only with
people in bulk. Now computers seem to be shifting the balance of power from collective entities
like corporations back to people. The cult of individual effort is found all over Silicon Valley,
standing in sharp contrast to leadership practices based on high SAT scores, elite college degrees,
and sponsorship by prominent patrons.
The Valley judges people on their tangible contributions rather than on sex, seniority, old-school
ties, club memberships, or family. About half the millionaires in my Cypress audience had been
foreign-born, not rich at all just a few years earlier. Many new Internet firms are headed by people
in their mid-twenties who never wear a suit except to costume parties. Six thousand high- tech
firms exist there in a nonstop entrepreneurial environment, the world’s best example of Adam
Smith’s competitive capitalism. Companies are mostly small, personal, and fast on their feet.
Traditional organization men are nowhere to be seen; they are a luxury none can afford and still
remain competitive. Company mortality is high but so is the startup rate for new firms; when
unsuccessful companies die their people and resources are recycled somewhere else.
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