For U.S. business leaders to convince legislators that they have the answers to educational challenges is not only inaccurate, it can even be considered dishonest. To assume that all children can be treated as cars going down an assembly line is false and naive.
The root causes for problems in government, business, and education are all different. Yet, one often hears that if education were run more like a business, many of the problems of education would be eliminated. This infers that business does everything right and education has it wrong. The numerous examples where businesses display poor practices are simply too numerous to fill an entire book. The proof of this statement is the plethora of business books topping best seller lists every week.
Business is so different from education that in my book the only place I use the term, “work,” is in the index where the word, “homework,” is referred to as “home tasks” or “home asssigments.” This is a deliberate attempt to differentiate effort in learning from effort in employment.
The entire epilogue of the book is how business is so different from learning that the two should not even be used in the same sentence. The opening paragraph concludes, “Using a business model for learning is a practice that has been described by the comic strip character Dagwood Bumstead: “You know, that makes a lot of sense if you don’t think about it.”
