Culture Re-creation

What does it mean to change a culture? "Culture" is a hot topic in corporate life at the moment as a result of high rates of merger and acquisition events. One company dresses casual; another is tolerant of gender discrimination. One group hates meetings; the other hates email. One group is ivy league and arrogant; another, midwestern and egalitarian. These groups must jostle and adjust to accommodate the needs of new teammates. In reality, those new partners rarely feel, or act, like teammates. Nevertheless, the culture changes.

Cultural transformation is different. When a culture transforms, it literally changes its shape ("form"), its gestalt if you will - to allow a freer flow of spirit. This is what distinguishes transformation from change: this commitment to take the collective to a higher order of functioning.

Let's take public education, for example. A hundred years ago, when most of us worked by the sweat of our brow, when America was over 80% agrarian, the first forms of education were developed. It was a massive social struggle to simply mandate reading, writing, and arithmetic. Farmers were worried and resistant, knowing that less labor put their crops at risk.

What we often don't discuss about the changes between then and now, in those short hundred years, is physical activity. Back then, sitting in a classroom was a luxurious break from manual labor. People had to work to get to school, and they had to work when they returned home. Not homework, but farmwork. Or millwork. It was a hands-on world.

Now, we have laptops and cellphones and portable video games. We are living life at our fingertips. A proper school today would have kids doing farmwork, cutting timber, and building furniture (and computers). We educate the vast majority of our children in ways that create stagnation of their spirits, and do not allow proper flow of their creative (and recreative) energies. Most schools now don't even include PE daily. As a result, basic health and common sense have become optional, while working and striving like lemmings to flourish at standardized testing has become a national epidemic.

This is the heart of culture change: recognizing, collectively, that certain well-established patterns - which were once the best ideas going - have outlived their usefulness. Re-creating the definition of classroom should be a top priority. This would allow fresh creativity to flow through teachers, as well, rather than weighing them down with ever-higher standards of intellect. We must move from a culture of "smart" to a culture of "wise." Otherwise, the No Child Left Behind policy will churn out spiritless, well tutored kids whose childhood needs of fresh air, exercise, play, and creative expression were left behind.