Thinking for a Living

Thinking for a living by Thomas H. Davenport

Subtitled "How to Get Better Performance and results from Knowledge Workers", this book raises a number of good points about managing, evaluating, and motivating people who think for a living, so-called "knowledge workers". Most of the points are worth considering:

• knowledge workers value their autonomy
• they cannot be evaluated by traditional efficiency obervations
• they can be made more effective by minor systemic interventions
• above all, they can be made more effective by individualized intervention

Most of the book is aimed at managers in larger business organizations. I would like to come across a similar book geared specifically toward academics.

The pedagogy of indignation

Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of Indignation

Freire is the most influential educational theorist of the last one hundred years. He advocated hope, freedom, and curiosity. In this, his last book, he counsels us to reject mechanistic explanations of history, to cultivate hope, and to use our justified indignation to work for change.

Reading him made me realize how compromised I have become in accepting the reality that government and commercial interests argue is true and inevitable. Freire points out time and again the wrongheadedness of fatalism and acceptance of current economic/political structures and relationships as "just the way things are".

Significant passages:

Education is always a certain theory of knowledge put into practice; it is naturally political, it has to do with purity, never with puritanicalness, and it is in itself an experience of beautifulness.

It would be desolation to me if I had to recognize my absolute inability, as a human being, to effectively intervene in reality, if I had to recognize that my aptitude for verifying does not extend into modifying the verified context, leading to future and different verifications.

the more education becomes empty of dreams to fight for, the more the emptiness left by those dreams becomes filled with technique, until the moment comes when education becomes reduced to that. Then education becomes pure training, it becomes pure transfer of content, it is almost like the training of animals, it is a mere exercise in adaptation to the world.

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