Posted on 12/18/2004 6:12:31 PM PST by NMC EXP
You see it in daycare centers, and you see it in the public schools, from kindergarten to high school. Group projects abound, shoving together individuals who have no formal bonds, yet are banded together for the purpose of collective decision-making.
Universities, both public and private, are not immune to this affliction. In fact, if you attend a business college today, you’ll think it’s the newest rage, but it’s been the rule for decades.
Most university programs may not use group projects, but undergraduate and graduate programs in business are full of them. It is our contention that group projects are criminal in themselves and should be abolished on moral grounds, in that they function as collectivist indoctrination. Like government schools, group projects homogenize thought and neuter high achievers.
Individuality is forced out of our kids at an early age. After all, group projects are often the standard for young children in childcare situations, where the young ones are often taught that individuals don't do things or go places, groups do. By college age, the collective cast of mind has only gotten more oppressive. Groupthink is a process of gradualism that seeks to gently merge the followers into a pack with leaders, the hope being that the leaders will pull up those who typically reside on the low end of the motivation and achievement scale.
For example, a professor assigns an innocuous academic exercise, such as a term paper, communications presentation, or marketing proposal. It is turned into a group project by fiat—the professor segments the class into groups. More often than not, these groups are not even voluntary. When the students turn in their papers, the professor usually assigns the same grade to everyone in the group.
Another common stratagem in this setting is to have group members grade one another and develop useful constructive criticism for fellow teammates. However, this commonly dovetails into grades by mutual agreement. If one member doesn't go along with this forced "agreement" by granting the agreed-upon concessions, he is usually excoriated by his fellow groupthinkers for doing so. This is a pact where honest evaluations take a back seat to easy A's and phony feel-goodism.
Shirking is the most immediate danger within group projects. Usually, the group members with some semblance of a work ethic labor hard and often to take up the slack from the free riders. There are other dangers as well. In a case experienced by one of us, for example, a group member simply cut and pasted text from the Web instead of writing up his share of the research. Thus, the final version of the paper given to the professor was 20 percent pure plagiarism, unbeknownst to the rest of the group until it was too late. The slacker got a grade of 98 for the project, as did the people who actually worked.
In other cases, the shirking of duties simply cannot be overcome. High achievers are forced to relax their standards and accept being reduced to the lowest common denominator in the group. This can have a dreadful effect on work ethic and attitudes through the following insidious lessons instilled by group projects:
Lesson 1: You will learn cooperation, not competition.
Lesson 2: The achiever will be taxed: The reward of his efforts will go to others, so the low achiever who exerts little effort and contributes almost nothing will be taken care of by the professor (serving as the government).
Lesson 3: Individualism will not be allowed. The individual with the best ideas will do what the group decides. If you have an original or daring thought, forget it. The group will write up a bland sack of platitudes that represents the thinking of its lowest common denominator.
Lesson 4: Conservatism and caution are the name of the game. Whereas high achievers constantly strive to better themselves and have the room to operate in a more daring realm, the low achievers want things quickly and easily as they conform to less strict standards for excellence. The result is likely to be one of mediocrity.
Lesson 5: Get used to the emotional feel of a collectivist, totalitarian state. If you are an individualist with a work ethic and a drive to excel, you will be pounded down until you adopt the debilitating, depressing learned helplessness that socialism produces. If you are a slacker, however, a free rider with no qualms about living on the purloined toil of honest people, you can feel relieved, satisfied, secure; if you are a thoroughgoing scumbag, you can even feel pride in any good grade given you on the backs of your teammates.
Business programs, in forcing group settings upon (previously) ambitious students, are responding to the demands of the business community. This can be dangerous.
First, the business community isn’t always the only entity to ask for the secrets of success. Successful businessmen such as Ted Turner and Warren Buffett have proven they don’t understand well what makes success possible. They know how to make money in ignorance of the economic principles that make it possible. This is due in part to the fact that most tycoons have navigated an ocean of government regulations in making their fortunes, and they mistakenly conclude that the government therefore had something to do with their success.
Second, and more ominous, business schools are usually the only programs on campus employing any right-wing (if mildly so) professors. Having the only campus department that makes extensive, mandatory use of group projects, business programs subject and desensitize their hapless students to the most realistically socialist experience available at most universities. Administrators are probably comfortable in the knowledge that the group project experience more than compensates for professors who occasionally dare to admit publicly that market solutions are better than government dictates. And students aren’t the only ones ruined: after enough years of being commissars, professors may slowly convert to the leftist mentality as well.
In truth, groupthink has become a chronic problem in universities; it is a consensus-seeking process that does not allow for the preservation of individuality. It stifles creativity for the purpose of compromise and agreement. The university—through its group-project mentality—has become a test lab for socialization skills. The fostering of such rigid cooperation and coerced integration can be had only at the expense of lesser accomplishment.
Ayn Rand had it right when she said that any collectivist system is necessarily self-defeating no matter what its specific policies or leaders. After all, if Johnny is in your group and he can't read or write very well, you'll be getting Johnny's grades.
The "6-Sigma" cult being the worst example.
This is like those crappy team-building exercises some companies force their employees to attend. Falling back and letting some shlump catch you, walking on hot coals...what a waste of time and effort.
not exactly sure why - but i feel strangely compelled to agree ....
Request denied.
My frame of reference is as an engineer (a mere "green belt") and 25 year vet of a Fortune 100 manufacturer.
I have seen all of the other schemes pedaled by every consultant to come down the pike come and go and this is the worst.
Even the green belt traing contains a bunch of sociological techniques on how to quell dissent in the team to reach the holy grail of "concensus".
Engineering should not be a democracy.
SS has taken on the aspects of a cult in my corp.
When I was in college, EVERY single time I was given a group project I told the other members that I will do the whole project and 'we' will get and A. The offer was never refused and I always delivered.
Long time no debate, JimRob.
Your remarks are a jab a libertarians I assume. Well I must agree that libertarians are (collectively) their own worst enemy.
Thats what happens when a bunch of people who prize individual liberty above all else try to get organized.
Its like trying to herd cats.
However, that fact does not mean that (1)individual liberty is not a worthwhile goal and (2) compromise is not an option.
Regards,
J.R.
LOL. Just though the article to be a bit ironic. Perhaps we should all become groupees of the Ayn Rand Institute of Libertarian Thinking and thus avoid falling prey to groupthink.
I went back to school a few years ago as an adult. It seems that about half the classes had group projects but there were always slackers.
On one project the others were too tired or they had to meet their boyfriends, etc. I tried to tell them we needed to do more before we turned it in the next day but it was a Thursday (The new Friday) and they all left.
I worked all night on it and brought it to class the next morning. When I gave it to the girl (the one with the boyfriend)who had randomly drawn the role of president of the corporation we were running, she was dead set against turning it in.
The teacher heard the argument and let me turn it in and them turn in the group one. I got a 100, the group got 79. I had E-mailed the instructor that if mine was better to give it to the whole group, if it worse just give it to me.
Some of the group (those who needed the points) were appreciative but the others were resentful and excoriated me on the peer evaluation. It just goes to show that success is based a lot on merely getting along, not doing good work.
I know what you mean. It is ironic from both directions. Hard core libertarian types will never get organized and libertarianism will never grow until they get organized.
Not just ironic, its a paradox.
Regards
J.R.
Ah yes, the Bay of Bigs and the Leftist version of history, the predominant one, what else, that you, like most, seem to have swallowed hook line and sinker. Peggy Noonan's brief version: (there are others.) (emphasis mine)
"Forty-two years ago this spring, in April 1961, a young American president launched an amphibious invasion on a foreign shore. It was such a thorough failure that to this day the words “Bay of Pigs” are shorthand for “American military fiasco.” The American-trained Cuban exiles who stormed the beaches of Cuba in hopes of liberating their homeland were, essentially, abandoned and left to die, denied the support they’d been promised by the U.S. government. Fidel Castro crushed them. The Bay of Pigs invasion was badly planned, poorly executed and almost wildly unrealistic. (Months before it began former secretary of state Dean Acheson told JFK, in a private Rose Garden conversation, that you didn’t need Price Waterhouse to figure out 1,500 guerillas aren’t going to beat 25,000 Cuban regulars.) And yet after the invasion, when Kennedy both acknowledged the failure and took responsibility for it, he won the support of the American people. His approval rating jumped to 82%. He rallied. History, and his administration, went on." Link
I love studies of individuality done by a team of writers.
Yep. I found group projects so loathsome I simply did them all myself as I wanted everything done the way I wanted it.
Actually I remember in 3rd grade after reading an Apollo 13 story we were assigned to make a timeline as a group project. The other idiots simply started putting the sequence of events equally spaced apart on a strip of paper even if they were 5 seconds or 5 hours apart. I flipped out and told them you had to space it proportionately timewise. Teacher finally let me do my own timeline. :-)
I am fascinated by the insightful and in depth analysis of the subject matter at hand provided by some posters.
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