Are You Disgusted with Business?

    I’m so disgusted with business.  To be honest, I’m disgusted with my own business.  Once, we were “all about the kids.”  That’s the way it should be.  (And that’s the way I intend to regroup it ASAP!)  Maybe it’s the economy, but that’s no excuse.  Maybe it’s that Gallopade will be 33 this year, but that’s no excuse.  Maybe it’s that we just get our heads in the wrong place and think that the accounting, or marketing, or sales numbers, or legal wrangling, or other stuff are the Important Things.  Not so.  When it’s all about the kids we make the right choices every time; they are not easy choices and they are not always the obvious or the popular ones, but they are the right ones.

    This week I got disgusted with the business of government, broadcasting, and education all in one fell swoop when a news story featured the overt opposition to the use of the word Negro on a Georgia historic marker.  Honestly, this is the kind of thing I have to cope with everyday anymore:  so much so-called political correctness based on ignorance.  Sometimes I just wonder what it is people want our kids to learn:  the truth, or just their truth.

    The Girl Scouts of America is all over our case for writing a Carole Marsh Mystery with Girl Scouts in the title and Girl Scouts on the cover.  The book is wonderful, charming, sweet, adventurous, educational, and, most of all, an ode to Juliette Gordon Low.  I even “held the press” so we could add that she is getting an important national award.  “Legal” is the bane of my life.  To me, this tempest in a teacup is about like the recent Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood fiasco.  Whose side are women on these days, anyway?  A book basically to celebrate girl empowerment and a woman who was early and instrumental in that empowerment role; who can I possibly be offending?   I did not have to deal with you-know-what like this 20 years ago.  The world has changed. 

    I’m disgusted with J. P. Morgan; they lose billions of dollars being stupid…and I imagine that we will be expected to bail them out.  Clearly, nothing’s changed in financial improvement, learned-our-lessons land.  When Sesame Street is smarter than Wall Street…

     But most of all, in my own backyard—educational publishing, I’m disgusted that big business, uh, and medium business, and small business have not had the guts to be MUCH MORE demanding of education.  Every poll I have read for the last 20 years, inquiring of business what employees are not bringing to the table, produce the same answers.  And yet, I have not really seen any Big Time:  “Look, education, here’s what we need; you gotta get your act together and get kids to understand these things BEFORE they get to the work world.” from the folks who will most benefit (besides the kids)—business.   As nearly as I can tell, colleges seemed thrilled to take money for remedial classes instead of a real start to college.  Is that greed or just laziness? 

    What's happened to internships and apprenticeships? Why don't business and education wrangle it out what each really needs from the other? I guess I would not be so disgusted except that I sit in meetings and panels and discussions of all kinds outlining the problems, but I do not hear any list of solutions.  Afraid to offend?  To be politically incorrect?

     If it really was all about the kids, we would not have a national deficit of such epic proportions, the Girl Scouts would celebrate and elevate a book about their own (and not try to intimidate and threaten), J. P. Morgan would set a better example (maybe they need the remedial college classes?), we would not try to ban a perfectly good historical term and thus dumb down history under the guise of political correctness, business would JUMP to the forefront of solutions for 21^st century skill building in schools (starting in kindergarten), and even in my own small, sweet business we would not wimp out, kowtow, procrastinate, and backtrack. 

    My business, Gallopade, is going back to being ALL ABOUT THE KIDS.  And I don’t care who likes it.  And as far as those 21^st century essential skills:  I’d like to add Common Sense to the top of the list…and teach that skill to some adults, in business, government, broadcasting, and most everywhere else.

    Maybe next week I’ll be more cheerful after I read my new copy of TOPGUN ON WALL STREET:  WHY THE UNITED STATES MILITARY SHOULD RUN CORPORATE AMERICA.

 

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