In Defense of Management

I mentioned a couple of days ago about James Farmer’s analysis of current learning management systems versus learning communities that may be more driven by the learners and emerge out of the interaction of the learners. I still think that this is a needed conversation; more precisely, I think that this is an inevitable conversation that needs to occur between learners and education institutions.

I’ve just read a reaction to James’ post by Cleve Miller, who has posted In Defense of Management on his blog. I’m glad that he has pointed out that the currently fashionable meme that management is bad and individual freedom is good needs to be examined critically. Education, as a managed activity has certainly made significant and generally desirable contributions to civil society over the centuries, and is definitely preferable to the lack of education. Its usually a good idea to have a variety of points of view represented in any discussion, just to keep the follow-the-mob monkey parts of our brain in check.