“Children – Today’s lesson is compliance. Sit down!”
This, of course, is not true. In most schools, every day is compliance day.
Why? Because the industrial era needed compliant workers. Workers who are unlikely to take matters into their own hands, and go ‘off piste’ from the operations manual perspective.
The primary objective of primary education is to produce compliant factory workers, whether the factory is strewn with conveyor belts or furnished with cubicles.
“Sit still” (no mobility),“don’t talk” (no sociality),“copy the picture” (no creativity),“this is what we are learning” (no empowerment).
And of course that is what we needed in the industrial era. But the world is changing, and changing rapidly.
‘Compliance indoctrination’ eventually kills creativity, teaches learned helplessness, promotes activity over productivity, and causes the victim to seek the refuge of balance (as in work-life).
Compliance, like smoking was and sitting is, is a cultural cancer in the digital age. The inability to take risks, be opportunistic, and even be passionate, will lead to personal, corporate and eventually societal death. At least economically.
So what are you, your organisation and your society doing to cure compliance?
We need to address this as a priority, otherwise the next generation, through their schooling, will arrive in the workplace with obsolescence being their primary characteristic.
Compliance in the digital age is an oxymoron.
