What is it to be “of service” to another person? Is this something that can be paid for? If it can, how does that payment change the role of being “of service”? Are there some needs of a person that cannot be met by paid service?
As we moved from an agrarian society to an industrial society in the last “sea change of societal structure”, the service relationship was changed to look somewhat like the specialised factory that Henry Ford hoisted upon us. Nothing seemed exempt. Schools shifted from 1 room, multi-aged forums to large institutions with all of the schedules, sorting and grading and even the bells to train workers about being on time. The value most highly prized by the factory and its social mimeographs was duplicable conformity -sameness.
What did this indust-reality mean for labelled people?
The most advanced saw assimilation and integration of those of diversity as the goal to counteract the dominant view of segregation as the primary tool to bring sameness. Those in the first wave of advocacy against becoming the “school-factory rejects”, worked to assimilate –bring all into sameness in a mass society of similarity of interchangeable parts. New immigrants, women, people of colour, children with significant diversity challenged this sameness and in turn were more or less integrated. Some were caste out, much like the factory model that characterises the time.(1)
Our families shifted from extended to nuclear as they shifted from the farm to the factory floor and in this shift created the embryo of the metamorphosis that became the post-indust-reality, service society. Almost without notice 90% of the industrial workforce have laid down its factory tools and picked up the tools “of service”. Whereas our farming ancestors and all of those before them relied upon extended family and community to comfort and attend to those who were dying, sick, injured, hungry, sad and impaired; the shift to the factory uprooted us from this service tradition and condition of primarily voluntary service and cast us adrift in the sea change to nuclear family that allowed the shift off of the land and into the cities and factories. Paid service, designed much like the factory, began filling the gap left by abandoning the extended family and community tradition and when the factory work shifted offshore and onto computerised machines, there was a rise in the tide of human services like no other in human history. Modern economies are now primarily service economies. The economy first needed us to entrust our children and elders and needy to the care of factory-services so that we could fill the factories. These old factories are all but gone. We now need people to be in need of service for the new factory to shift its workforce. This is a first. We are therefore faced with a question that past generations did not ask, primarily because the act was then was a voluntary one:- Is what we do actually “of service” to the person or is it to give those who would otherwise be unemployed, a job? Now, as in no time before, we need to ask: - is the service to another, to ourselves or to our society?
Is this how we want to be needed?
While we contemplate the magnitude of these questions, let us return to the notion of integration as it was during the factory years and what it may now have become (or is becoming). Those that once fought to be integrated into the mass of society, (For example, well recalled is the civil rights movement of America’s disenfranchised African Americans), now view a modified goal, more in tune with the social shift around us. We no longer seek to “melt in”. Rather we seek to honour and celebrate our uniqueness.
Diversity, in a society of former conformity is “in”.
We need to be needed FOR our diversity and the gifts we bring and not for our impairment and the jobs they create.
These societal transformations force us to move our goal from integration to inclusion. Much as the culture has revalued uniqueness in response to the blandness of plastic conformity, inclusion must seek to honour and revalue difference as one’s uniqueness rather than cover over the differences as we have done in the past. It is more. It is not being valued for being the object of service.
It is losing the “special” and becoming ordinary.
It is losing the “special needs” that you serve and addressing the ordinary needs that make us all together in this shift from an indust-reality to a human reality. Taken together, this means that we cannot seek to be “of service” to someone with values of “inclusion” if we do not understand:
- The valuation of the person’s individual difference as viewed by modern society. History is the richest source of discovering such valuation and yet history is not, itself, valued highly in modern society and so the human server must walk against the tide to uncover these insights.
- What the shift to a service society means
- If we keep the industrial view to being “of service”
- If we determine to shift to an ordinary, “new reality” of someone who needs to belong, to be loved and have friends – all beyond what can be purchased in a serviced economy.
So what about the sheltered workshops?
We have, like so many modern societies, retooled and reshaped our workforces. The name, the design, even the social purpose of sheltered workshops reflects the past. If they were ever relevant they are certainly now past their use-by date in a society that has move beyond the indust-reality. Brown’s work describing in much detail the last 20 year work histories of 50 workers, who would typically be in such “workshops” most elsewhere in the world, sets the direction clearly away from the segregated factory and into the businesses of Madison. Lou shows us that it is not only possible but imperative. Even if the workshops had been good at preparation for transitions in the indust-reality, the model would not suit a society shifting at breakneck speed away from the factory model. These dinosaurs, much like the big industry factories, have past their use-by dates and no amount of government subsidy or intervention will ever “fix” them. In their place, as Brown, Wehman, Sailor, Talis & Will and Ford so graphically describe(2), we need to build not a business or a day service – but an ordinary life. Inclusion is about ordinary, not special lives. What is the ordinary life of a young adult? Ordinary lives, not the sheltered foundry, are the analogue of the future post-school planner. What shall we do with the workshops, the infra-structure, and the workers? These are not new questions. The shift from mainstream foundry floor to keyboard is now complete, against the 70’s cries for increased subsidies and tariffs and indust-reality thinking “it will never happen”. But it did. The path is clear. And yet the decision to take what is now the ordinary path lags as “the service industry” attempts to keep ordinary out of the lives of people they have claimed as the raw material for their “industry”.
Ordinary lives or special lives hang in the precarious balance of the willingness of the service industry to reshape itself and “tool –up” for inclusion.
So what about the special schools preparing children for the workshops?
In 1980 the idea that we might actually need to move away from the factory model, away from mass production and away from the indust-reality built upon cheap oil may have seemed a bit far fetched for some, but today it is becoming pretty clear that cheap oil (then about 30c a litre at the bowser(3)) is passing. Over the quarter century we have seen the factories close or drastically resize and mass production is fading. The move from factory floor to keyboard in a few generations has characterised most “developed and developing nations alike. It is not so surprising within this shift that preparation of children for a new reality is not going to be well served by the old reality. And yet that is what dominates the landscape of preparatory and “factory solutions” for people with labels. While the world has moved on, factories died, moved off shore or modernised, those in design of future jobs and the schools that prepare them, see people with labels stuck in this time warp of the old indust-reality.
Wecreated special classes and schools that later fed into the sheltered workshops. But what if inclusion came to the schools - as it has in recent times?
The “disconnect” between school and later life was a feature of “division of labour” associated with industrial-think but cannot survive in the next wave of school leavers. Parents of the young children are now enthused and excited about finally achieving an inclusive, ordinary life for their sons and daughters who were formerly segregated and streamed out of ordinary lives and into special ones. School as we know it is a social experiment with the jury not yet in. It needs to re-connect with the vision of post-school lives, ordinary lives. Inclusion requires crossing the artificial barrier created by the industrial designers as part of their reality – “division of labour” and work to a new reality based on interconnectedness, interdependence and inclusion.
Endnotes
- Alvin Toffler described the future as the struggle between those hanging onto the second wave and those creating the third. For a futurist in 1980 he did an incredible job of “seeing” what changes were about to occur in social, political, economic and other walks of life as we moved away from the peak of the industrial reality to a build a new reality. He was more than futurist. His book was a capsulation of history and an elegant description of the impact of the industrial revolution to create an indust-reality. He described how mass production and the fine tuning of the machine called the factory became the “gold standard” by which every aspect of human life was both measured and designed. Schools were not exempt. Although others (myself included) have pointed out the correlations between school and factory scheduling around sirens and bells, school and factory mass product sorting & grading; Toffler does this as only a small part of a larger model of reality described as the second wave indust-reality. In so doing, he helps us see from a removed, macro-perspective the “naturalness” of the indust-reality of segregation of people deemed “unfit”.
- Brown, L., Shiraga, B., Kessler, K. (2006). The Quest for Ordinary Lives: The Integrated Post-School Vocational Functioning of 50 Workers With Significant Disabilities. Journal of the Association for Persons with Severe Handicaps, 31-2, 93-121.
- Parliamentary Library, Research note 7, 2000-1, Petrol Prices-The Statistics, Greg Baker & Stephen Barber, Statistics Group. www.aph.gov.au
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