Tug of War

Interesting discussions between two educators in an imaginary country made up of many states, no one would be harmed by listening to these discussions. This country is focused on improving education and introducing the best there is in this field. However, every state does it by itself, and compete with the other state by bringing lots of those white skinned, blue eyed consultants who go there for a temporary period with the main objective of clearing their mortgages, and saving money for their rainy days, thus they introduce products that do not match with the culture, tradition and the way of thinking of this country.

Those in important positions are busy with dreaming new dreams on a minute by minute basis (and call the dreams innovations) and forget to link performance to outcomes from those consultants, then after years of pumping funds into their pockets realize that what have been introduced is not what they mandated, so they kick the consultants out and bring new ones who would do the same thing but camouflaged with new vocabularies. Also each state has an education committee, and each education committee does the same thing, hire/fire for bad results; the education committees in each of the states do not talk to each other, instead they are competing to be better. At the end of the day the kids of this country suffer, the teachers also suffer, and more money is spent on teaching the kids at higher education level.

Two years is lost from the kids' lives, in terms of language preparation and tertiary preparation skills; the money spent on these two years is also a waste and the parents have no idea, as they are trusting the authorities. When people like the two educators who are discussing this subject suggest real, passionate and workable solutions, no one listens to them, because as I said the officials are busy dreaming up new policies, and to make it worst, the two educators just hears that one of the states had hired a top notch (in reputation and in charging) consultancy to produce "the country's public policy in Education".

Basically, this unhealthy competition is similar to tug of war, or the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing; no body is winning, every body is losing. Thus, the educators have decided that they are better off keeping quite, or moving to a neighboring country that is run by a queen who is over looking the strategy of education in a cohesive way.


As mentioned earlier, no person is harmed by this blog, the characters are imaginary, and the countries mentioned are also imaginary.