On Re-educating Our Educational System and Understanding the Cultural Phenomenon of What We Have Today Instead

"A funny thing happened on the way to school one day. At an early age, I decided I couldn't stand the slowness of learning that attending school  offered, so I quit, and that's when my real education began." - from my personal history.

I was commenting on David Campbell's Economy blog regarding all things New Brunswick and its economy, and came across his discussion with someone referring to Taylorism.

Taylorism

Frederick W. Taylor was an efficiency expert: the first modern efficiency expert in world history. Around the turn of the Twentieth Century, he developed a set of ideas designed to get employees in manufacturing industries to produce more output
.

His term for this collection of strategies was scientific management, although it is sometimes simply referred to  as Taylorism. In order to implement his ideas, Taylor contracted with companies to rearrange their production processes to simplify the tasks each employee performed. Instead of doing many different things, workers in Taylorized factories would execute the same simple tasks over and over.
This not only increased production, but reduced an employer’s need for skilled labor. For this reason, employers could cut their overall wage costs
.¹
Taylor and his disciples cited the search for efficiency, “the one best way” to do a job, as justification for such changes. Because scientific management consultants claimed they understood the “natural laws” of human behavior and endurance, they argued that the implementation of scientific management would benefit both workers and society at-large.
Nevertheless, skilled workers and their unions often vociferously protested these changes because Taylorism made their work monotonous and also trespassed upon what they perceived as their traditional prerogative to manage their own time on the job. Workers and their unions objected not only to the efforts of scientific managers to determine what workers did all day, but also to efforts to tell workers exactly how they should do it.²
Approaching the end of the Industrial Revolution, Taylor’s ideas provided a catalyst for increasing the output of American factories beyond the promise of technological advances alone. After Taylor’s death in 1914, scientific management spread throughout the world, and it has influenced everything from advice to housewives on how to do their chores to how Japanese (and later American) cars have been made. Taylorism has also shaped the structure of American education. - This quote and more info here.



Below are a few important notes to consider:

Advent of the Industrial Revolution between 1760 - 1780 (give or take).

People began leaving their rural lives behind, to go to the cities where they could be employed in a factory. They in effect were leaving cleaner, less stressful, and more self-sufficient existences for one fraught with dangers to their health, both physical, and mental along with the risks of potential poverty, and boredom as they worked to receive what they initially thought would be better pay, and a better life. Ironically, at the same time, society was also leaving its familiarity with nature behind.

Before the Industrial Revolution many tradespeople made wide use of 'hands-on skills' in their livelihoods, and in their lives in general. 'Self-sufficiency' wasn't an invented term in this era, but was instead universally accepted simply as a way of life - more individuals had more real-life applicable skills.



Today we would say such a person was multi-talented, or multi-skilled which goes against what Taylorism has done for much of our educational system.