(Page 15 of 15) - Active Learning, Critical Thinking, and Personal Responsibility in a Multicultural, Self-Organizing Course on International Relations authored by Chadwick, Richard.

and I’m going to succeed even though you want me to!” That brought to mind another experience I recalled
having as a child with my younger brother. We were in the middle of a knock down, drag out fight when he
picked up my piggy bank full of pennies and threw it as hard as he could straight at my face. I didn’t move
quite fast enough and it grazed my forehead as it flew into and broke a window, continued across to the wall of
the next-door tenement, crashed and scattered a few thousand pennies down below. I swore the bluest streak I
could imagine. He looked stunned, dumbfounded, and frightened all at once, but then burst out: “I don’t care
what you call me Dickie, as long as you give me a title!” We looked at each other and suddenly started
laughing ourselves silly. We could never fight again without a twinkle in our eyes. These are two examples of
spontaneous creativity aimed at driving out fear. But for all these decades, until Deming I had no theory of
system, no “theory of profound knowledge,” to adequately interpret these experiences. Without theory, I could
puzzle over them but not intuit their implications, except somehow, now and then, employ them as analogies.
As Deming himself said, without theory you learn nothing from experience.

It is a matter of some irony to me that Deming's approach can easily be characterized as postmodernist. See

for example, "What is Postmodern?" by David M. Boje and Leonel Prieto, available at

http://www.horsesenseatwork.com/psl/pages/postmoderndefined.html

. Their checklist of the "postmodern"

organization is quite consistent with many of Deming's dicta.

Arthur Goodfriend, The Education of a Survivor. 1989: University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu.

Cf. Atherton, op. cit.

Goodfriend, op. cit., p. 100.

William Lederer, The Ugly American. 1958: Norton, N.Y.

J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power. 1966: Random House, N.Y.

Erickson, op. cit., p. 226.

John Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War. 2005: Thompson Wadsworth, N.Y.

There is an excellent article—the introductory chapter to a book actually—on the web on the uniqueness of

American democratic faith and western science, by Deneen, “Democratic Faith,” 2005. Available at

http://www.princeton.edu/~pdeneen/deneen_faithintro.pdf

Ruminating about this issue brings to mind Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics and The Human Use of Human

Beings and B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity and Walden II. We have long understood that system
structure matters, as these authors illustrate, yet in universities for the most part we focus on the learning
characteristics of the individual to explain performance rather than the norms put in place in the educational
setting.