International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling 14: 163-179, 1991. © 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Individual differences and institutional constraints

F R A N K D U M O N T

McGill University, Dept. of Educational Psychology and Counselling, 3700 McTavish Street, Montreal, Uanada

Abstract. This article develops a multilevel examination of the structural changes in schooling and employment counselling that are necessitated by rapidly evolving conditions in the job markets of postindustrial as well as developing economies. International and national macro-structures appear increasingly fluid in the altered political and commercial environments of the 1990s. These alterations place wrenching constraints on national and regional institutions as well as the individuals who are seeking a job niche that is not only personally satisfying and rewarding but stable. Distinct regional and provincial structures need to be understood idiographically and modified as global changes amplify at all levels. At the school and jobseeking end of this continuum are the legions of confused individuals of widely varying aptitudes, competencies, and interests who avail themselves of govemment programs of an educational, counselling, and retraining character. Major developmental and career psychology issues that flow from these conditions and structural changes are addressed. Issues seen to be of major importance that will be examined are (among others): correspondence between the demand characteristics of schools and regional job markets; discrepancies between the givens of physical anthropology and institutional demands on both children and adults, poorness of fit between individuals and the institutions in which they work and are trained, and the threat of a cultural entropy that banalizes institutions and standardizes all dimensions of life.

Human diversity

M u c h o f the e x c i t e m e n t and b e a u t y o f l i fe sp r ings f r o m the d ive r s i t y w h i c h

w e f ind in the w o r l d a b o u t us, a d ive r s i t y that w e p r i ze as m u c h in p e o p l e as

in the m a r k e t p l a c e , in art as in nature . M y concern , w h i c h I wi l l a t t e mp t to

p e r s u a d e y o u to share , is tha t u n i f o r m i t y and e n t ropy are in the a s c e n d a n c y ,

a n d tha t t hose o f us w h o se rve as counse l l o r s to adul t s as we l l as to you ths are

p r e s s u r e d to c o l l a b o r a t e wi th the d o m i n a n t ins t i tu t ions o f ou r soc ie t i e s in

a s s i m i l a t i n g t h e m into an i n c r e a s i n g l y bana l and s t a nda rd i z e d w o r l d cu l tu re

and e c o n o m i c order . M y g raves t fears sp r ing f r o m the e x c e s s i v e ins t i tu t ion-

a l i za t ion o f our l ives - and e s p e c i a l l y the l ives o f our ch i ld r en in a p l a c e

c a l l e d school .

T h e ideas that I p r e sen t are m e a n t to con t inue a l o n g - t e r m and p a s s i o n a t e

deba te . The a r g u m e n t that wi l l u n f o l d wi l l focus on the p e c u l i a r o r d e r and

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complexity with which the lives of even little children are being organized, on the one hand, and the banalization of the world culture into which they will be inserted, on the other. The human instruments, par excellence, for realizing this, as such notable commentators as Lewis Mumford (e.g., 1970) and Jacques Ellul (1964) have argued, are the institution - and its hand- maiden, technology.

The major thesis of this talk is that a coercive institutionalization of the lives of young children, abetted by mental health practitioners, has moved in a direction that standardizes behaviour and reduces freedom of action. The process by which this is done is not natural to the psychophysiological constitution of the human organism; for people crave diversity of activities; they are curiosity-driven; they mature, if given the opportunity, with a diversity of interests, tastes, and affections. The stupor induced by boredom may be the greatest threat to 'industrial man's ' mental wellbeing, and he flees from it even at the cost of engaging in self-destructive activities. In the workplace, nonstereotypic behaviours have been tolerated only in the measure that they could be matched by a corresponding need of the production process. This ensures the production of wealth and economic growth. Growth and prosperity are enhanced by achieving minimal econo- mies of scale and by the standardization of production methods. The counsellor has been forcibly enlisted in promoting this process. It will be of interest to look at the interplay of some of these variables.

Institutionalization

For thousands of years human beings have struggled to establish order in a universe which, though governed by natural laws, gave the appearance of being capricious and in many respects chaotic. Humankind traditionally reacted by trying to impose order - on itself, on societies in general, and on 'nature' itself; history records that it has succeeded all too well. So much order has been established, especially of a socio-political character, that it has seemed to stifle the spontaneous and creative ~lan of the most gifted persons as well as the most ordinary.

Lewis Mumford stated a generation ago that 'the problem of preserving human freedom in the face of environmental, institutional, or technological pressures did not begin with the automatic machine. Custom, law, taboo, religious {ritual}, military coercion have all in the past imposed repetitive behavior and rigid conditions of performance upon earlier human commu- nities' (1970, p. 185). Some of this was needed. Much outlived its useful- ness. The scope for control and coercion, arising from mushrooming technologies that have been placed at the service of large institutions, has

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grown enormously. The disquieting aspect of this is less the existence of this power and capability than the compulsion that humans feel to use it - immediately and without judicious consideration of its consequences.

The comprehensive secondary schools of North America furnish an example. In order to assure maximum use of costly state-of-the-art chemistry and physics laboratories, electronic workstations, desktop publishing re- sources, and other technologies with which we wish to familiarize our students, we have had to build enormous schools where thousands of students move about, bundled together in enclosed spaces, tightly scheduled into activities. The awesome size and the perceived depersonalization of this learning environment have arguably contributed to the social alienation that is characteristic of many adolescent school-leavers. The psychological and human-systems consequences of forging ahead to build immense compre- hensive high schools were inadequately studied.

Counsellors work not just in schools, but in a variety of institutions. That our counsellor-trainees are largely institution-based has allowed them to become sensitive to the power of the institution to alter behavior and, consequently, personality. To none of my students has it become more evident than to those who work in hospitals. They observe highly diverse, autonomous individuals enter the hospital and, within one or two weeks, see subtle changes in their personalities as the routines and the rules of the institution begin to take hold. Their clients evidence a decline in competence, a dawning sense of helplessness, the loss - indeed, the relinquishment - of control and self-direction. Watch those who are ambulatory; they all seem to walk zombie-like through the corridors at the same slow, measured pace, without apparent purpose, faces devoid of emotion, bodies clad in institu- tional garb, robes usually, which open in the back. In brief, they have begun to act and look the way they are supposed to: like patients.

Therapeutic communities, prisons, mental hospitals, homes for the elderly - very distinct but similar institutions where counsellors work - receive clients who seem to be more resistant than average to institutional encultura- tion. As a consequence, proportionally more vigorous and stringent methods are used to ensure respect for conventions, that is, socially sanctioned and uniform behavior. In countless such residential institutions the particularly troublesome, annoying, and resistant residents are medicated into conformity. Counsellors are co-opted into that ethos. (I must add that even the schools are not entirely exempt from the use of this technology for ensuring compliance to norms.) We are aware of the reasons for this. The efficient management of an institution militates in favour of standardized behaviour. The perennial tension between the convenience and the comfort of the administrator, the caretaker, the teacher, the public health practitioner, or the apparatchik, on the one hand, and the freedom of the client to behave idiosyncratically, and

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perhaps disruptively but nonviolently, on the other, militates in favour of standardization of daily life.

The school

Let us speak of the school. School is another institution that traditionally has imposed codes of behavior, and organized activities, and exacted conformity in view of achieving a goal: the education of its clients in the image of the larger society. The right to education is now enshrined as a human right in some charters of human rights (e.g., The Canadian Charter of Human Rights. [Constitution Act, 1982]) - at a level and in modalities consistent with the needs of the political economy in which children are going to be inserted as adults. To achieve this, we have curbed the expression of many strong but normal and adaptive social, physical, and psychological needs in our children, especially primary school children and young adolescents. Activ- ities that do not fit with the enclosed, disciplined, sedentary, and detailed work of the school - especially the North American secondary-school system - foredoom such places as a training ground for legions of our children. They have been, and are, simply uncongenial environments in which to spend 6 to 7 hours of every workday.

I f we reflect on the evolution of humanoids and humans over the past million years (in the measure that we can know that) it would be surprising to discover that tribal societies considered prepubertal and pubertal individuals normal who were sedentary, physically inactive or phlegmatic, and exercise- aversive. ! suspect that such youths were in fact considered marginal and problematic. I submit that the so-called 'attention deficits' and hyperactivity of many students that are so troublesome to classroom teachers are less a medico-behavioural aberration than a normal trait of temperament, evi- denced in various degrees, and reflecting the fundamental constitution of youthful primates. Survey research has shown, not surprisingly, that partici- patory sports are the favorite activities of the modal early-adolescent. The energetic, stimulus-seeking, exploratory behavior of children and adoles- cents, interacting with individual differences in attention-span, brings many children into conflict with the traditional school, motivates millions of them to drop out of that uncongenial environment and, as a consequence, power- fully restricts their career opportunities and their social mobility.

Those who prefer to be outdoors, in fair and foul weather alike, to use their bodies and muscular strength to earn a living, rather than tapping a keyboard or pushing a pencil, could not have found a life of study in the cramped quarters of the typical North American classroom a good experience. Even 150 years ago, our less specialized production methods were highly suitable

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for legions of our youth who crave the vigorous, robust, gross-motor, yet intelligent activities of a pre-industrial economy that millions of years of evolution prepared them for. In this generation, we have gathered children cheek-by-jowl in crowded classrooms - quarters that any Western syndic- ated labour force would condemn as inhumane, and we have imposed a skeletomuscular stillness on them that many have found intolerable.

School is a preparation for the workplace (Cf. Lovell, 1980). But the workplace for the majority of adults in post-industrial society has become larded with paper and paperwork of the most sterile kind (Mumford, 1970, p. 191) - neither creative nor artistic. Is it surprising that the new school is characterized by that most uncharacteristic of juvenile activities, paperwork, or its simulacrum, print shuffled about on an electronic screen? For every degree of downshifting in manual and psychomotor activity in the work- place, there is a proportionate decrease in that kind of activity in the school - and there is a proportionate lack of fit between our school environment and the psychophysiology of our children.

Literally millions of children in North American public schools have been labeled hyperactive and attention-deficit disordered (Schrag & Divdky, passim, 1975). Given the highly constraining and sedentary nature of most of these schools, one may ask if those who fit well into them should not, rather, be labeled hypersedentary, and the preponderance of others, the so-called misfits, simply normal. There are some health and neurological conditions, certainly, that account for institutionally unacceptable behaviour in a smaU percentage of school children. But there are numerous school districts in the United States where thousands of children have been medically prescribed tranquilizers as well as such stimulants as methylphenidate hydrochloride (Ritalin), dextroamphetamine (Dexidrlne), and pemoline (Cylert) (Lemer, 1985, p. 210). The medication controls healthy behavior. Applicable here is the Japanese aphorism: the nail that stands up will be hammered down.

Normative data on the incidence and severity of attention-deficit disorder do not correspond with the counsellor- and teacher-reported levels of this disorder. There is obviously a poor fit between legions of healthy, normal children and the school system in which they study, particularly where teachers are responsible for oversize classes in which, moreover, there may be a large number of children with cumulative cognitive deficits that derive from years of poor instruction and faulty learning.

A plausible hypothesis suggests itself: altering the school environment is a more effective and humane remedy for this problem than the medication of innumerable healthy children. It is not unlikely that the millions of children w!~o have been labeled with attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder (or some other construal of it) and placed on medication are victims of a quirk of history. That many are easily distracted in the classroom but not cross-

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situationally (say on the football field or before a television screen) may say more about the institution than about such children. Their occupational future is in jeopardy for several reasons, not least being that they have been given to believe that the problem of poorness of fit between them and the school resides in them rather than in the institution. No doubt there are many individuals who are attention deficit disordered, this from neurological damage resulting, say, from perinatal complications or uterogestational problems, but it is not plausible that it exists on the vast scale on which it has been supposed by school personnel and diagnosed by many (but certainly not the majority of) physicians.

I suggest that methylphenidate is often a medication for the teacher that is taken by the pupil. The repression of otherwise adaptive individual differ- ences for the sake of a smooth running institution may be considered uniquely human; it is not humane. That counsellors in North America and, I suspect, elsewhere have been implicitly pressured to collude in the assess- ment of normally active children as ADHD-affiicted or maladaptive and to marginalize them psychologically and educationally is a situation that seems to require examination.

The eminent developmentalists, Alexander Thomas and Ste!la Chess, have sensitized the scientific community of developmental psychologists to the disabling effects arising from poorness of fit between individual needs and environmental constraints (e.g., 1980, pp. 233-248). They refer to a 'pecu- liar strain of logic' in which social processes are analyzed in such wise that the causes of dysfunction 'are found to be in the qualities and characteristics of the victim rather than in any deficiencies or structural defects in the environment' (p. 248). Their renown 3-decade long research project known as the New York Longitudinal Study offers compelling evidence ~hat fundamentally normal but individually disparate responses to the environ- ment are present in the first weeks of life and continue relatively unmodified into adulthood.

Forcing children with widely varying temperaments, as with a shoehorn, into poorly fitting and uniform educational settings, and then medicating those who are unaccommodating or resistant does not seem like an optimal way to deal with this challenge. That this is done with varying levels of justification in prisons, or in the army, or even in many homes for the elderly, and some custodial institutions where counsellors are employed does not make the practice any the more excusable in the school. Dubos (1968, p. 17) quoted former American Secretary of State, Dean Acheson: '...the plunge into a motor age and city life swept away the freedom of children and dogs, put them both on leashes and made them the organized prisoners of an adult world.' Normality, Dubos (e.g., 1968, pp. 208-222) reminded us, should be defined first in terms of characteristics intrinsic to established principles of

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physical anthropology, not just in terms of the demand characteristics of any radically changing and ephemeral environment.

W o r k s t y l e s

In North America, the archetypal heroes of yesteryear were the trailblazers, the voyageurs, the pioneers who restlessly explored, prowled, and settled a sparsely populated continent to bring it, for better or worse, under cultivation - in that process, incidentally, in great measure destroying the weUbeing of the indigenous populations. They are the individuals who built the railroads, bridges, dams, seaports, cities, indeed the whole infrastructure of an indus- trial society. It was done with muscle and brawn as well as with intelligence. But in the twinkling of an eye so to speak, all that has changed. The qualities of soul that were needed to survive, the pleasure of physically and vigorously moving about, the satisfactions of shaping iron, brass, bronze, flint, copper, slate, marble, wood, stone - all by hand, the kinesthetic exhilaration of running a horse, or heading in a corralful of ponies or cattle, or simply digging in one's garden - in brief, of using a nice balance of body and intellect to provide for one's nourishment and shelter, as well as for one's recreation, all this has been largely superannuated.

That period must not be romanticized. There were terrible human costs associated with it. I wish only to suggest that the modern descendants of those productive workers of past centuries have been turned into the misfits of our contemporary socio-economic systems, and in consequence, our educational systems. As economies become increasingly information-based and electronically managed, there is a tendency to place value on people who fit the vocational template of an information gatherer and distributor. The more highly esteemed producers of the future will be, indeed already are, our white-collar and white-lab coat workers. They are workers who are media- ting an explosion of knowledge through 'computers, databases, decision- making software, modems, video equipment, CAD terminals, [automated office equipment such as] facsimile transmitters, laser printers, electronic mail, and desktop publishing gear' (Economist, December 20, 1986, pp. 93-94).

But what is happening to the legions of the young who feel themselves unsuited for such work - cognitively and temperamentally? They will be streamed into blue-collar careers, careers that are becoming relatively scarce as programmed machinery does what people used to do by hand or with simpler tools. The prevailing ethos has led those who wish to work with their hands and the muscular potential of their bodies to understand that they are moving into a lower stratum of the socio-economic order, and that their

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rewards, social as well as monetary, will be interior. It has not always been that way. Sophocles, in his Antigone, placed seafaring first among human endeavors. I know many youths today who would have been among the first into the boats of those legions of Greeks who colonized the Mediterranean Basin and the coasts of the Black Sea. They will never find their way into a space shuttle. They work resentfully, if at all, as parking lot attendants, streetsweepers, gas station attendants, and stock clerks.

Learning contexts and personality paradigms

Psychologically minded people can become obsessively focused on inter- preting and probing other people's minds. Attribution theorists and research- ers (e.g., Nisbett & Ross, 1980) have demonstrated that such people have a penchant for explaining behaviour principally in terms of what is going on in students' or clients' minds rather than in terms of the environment that continually provokes and modifies their behaviour. In view of that, an often-asked question needs to be asked again, but somewhat differently: 'Have counsellors, educators, and school psychologists been enlisted in the service of changing people's perceptions, psyches, and personalities so that they fit the institutions in which they study and work, rather than modifying the institutions so that they fit their clients?' The bias for explaining behavior in terms of intrapsychic causes rather than situational ones has probably led us to spend more energy altering individuals than altering their institutional environment.

Relative to education and career development, individual differences manifest themselves most significantly in the area of personality profiles. Let me speak briefly about two models, as examples only; both are relevant and problematic. In the last 30 years an increasing amount of attention has been given to researching what some call the Type-T personality, which is characterized by risk-taking, high need for stimulation, thrill seeking. People like this seek novelty, intensity of experience, excitement of risk, exploratory possibilities, absence of institutional constraints; they love complexity; they enjoy ambiguity and unpredictability; they have an intolerance for the repetitive and the conventional. Schools, as they are generally structured in North America (and no doubt elsewhere) are not an apt environment to satisfy the deepest needs of such people.

Type T is a construct which, like all constructs (e.g., Ausubel, Sullivan, and Ives, 1980, p. 108) is preferably operationalized in such a way that its measure is distributed along a continuum. Personologists would place each one of us who is here on this T-continuum, although we could plausibly be estimated to form a positively skewed distribution in the low range of a

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normal (back home) population. After all, we are educators and counsellors, not hot-air balloonists, Formula-one racers, test pilots, members of SWAT teams, or professionals of that kind. However, Frank Farley (1986) of the University of Wisconsin, has, with others, further distinguished this charac- terological disposition: it expresses itself in mental activities as well as physical ones. For example, some individuals have a predilection for the cognitively creative, perhaps bizarre; others for the banal or highly conven- tional; for financial risk taking, perhaps gambling, or for secure investment; for new disciplines, or for long-established, tried-and-true disciplines; for activities that are amorphous, contingency-rife, or for jobs that are routinized and rule-governed. The assessment of this personality dimension, added to others in the career counsellor's tool kit, can offer richer possibilities for profiling the behavioral needs of our children and analyzing the educational and institutional alternatives that can maximize likelihood of personal and career success in every culture. It would enhance our ability to make modifications to our institutions whether they be school, workplaces, or recreational settings, in view of adapting them to the personality profiles of the users, rather than vice versa.

Let us take another personological paradigm, one that bears on cognitive styles. Gordon and Morse (1969) distinguished learners on the basis of their ability to identify and define problems on the one hand, and to solve problems on the other. These are continuous variables: we all have some of both of them. Relative to the first, some of us are more or less open to diversity of stimuli, can tolerate ambiguity and nebulous criteria, are sensitive to dissonances and anomalies in our environment, do not accept paradigms on faith. Such attitudes are characteristic of problem-definers. Such students are hindered, indeed disadvantaged, by most educational institutions for, among other things, this cognitive style does not allow one easily to pass conventional examinations, nor is it one that the rank-and-file teacher of a large class finds congenial.

People can, on the other hand, also be measured as more or less disposed to solving problems, to working within highly defined paradigms, fashioning solutions to specific problems, developing ingenious configurations of elements that are already recognized within a discipline (Cf. Kuhn, 1970, passim). In such cases, the criteria are crystal clear and paradigms are as unchallenged as was Newtonian physics in the 18th and 19th century. Those most comfortable with this approach to learning can accept the externally imposed values and tasks of the educational institution. They will work hard at uninteresting tasks. They do well in state board examinations for which they have crammed. They are task-focused. They tend to be compliant with authority. They please school personnel (see Bar-Haim, 1988, for a contem- porary analysis of these constructs and their relevance for examining

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goodness or poorness of fit between a constraining institution and the divergent individual it harbours).

The social environment in which learning takes place interacts profoundly with the temperament of the learner, and the cognitive style of the leamer. The traditional learning environment of industrial societies has had a distinctly didactic and disciplinary 1 character. John Goodlad (1984, e.g., pp. 95-102, 124) reported, in an American perspective, that over 70% of teacher time is spent in lecturing or presenting information. Much of the rest is spent in managing the off-task behavior of about 30 students, many of them restless. He noted that 'much of what goes on is conditioned by the need to maintain orderly relationships .... Demands for such order are conveyed to students early, and their socialization into it is rather thoroughly achieved before the end of the early elementary grades.' (p. 123).

Some non-Western cultures still use an apprenticeship model for training youths and young adults in specialist work. Hart, Eisemon, and Ong'esa (1990), for example, have studied the informal apprenticeship system used by expert Inuit soapstone carvers for training their children in their craft. This industry of New Qu6bec is thriving. The learning environment is not set apart from the daily, routine socio-familial activities of the community. Children learn the various aspects of the craft as the occasion presents itselt in organically unfolding work schedules. Learning in this mode is contextual- ized, whether it be dressmaking, automobile maintenance, or soapstone carving. Just a bit different is the installation of telephones, spotwelding, erecting hydro-power lines, or landscaping. In these cases, what is learned is clearly linked in the learner's mind with the end product. Lessons are intrinsically meaningful. The relevance of a skill to an end product and to the means of earning a living is not in doubt. That is a powerful motivator.

As end products become more complex, for example, sophisticated computer programs or manned spaceships, it is more difficult to contextual- ize the learning of those disciplines that are needed for their design and manufacture. Nevertheless, for the preponderance of specialist tasks that exist in contemporary industrial societies, an educational model that inte- grates some apprenticeship features into a didactic program is feasible. (Indeed, such a model is extensively used, for example, in Germany.) Illuminating examples from the anthropological and cross-cultural psycho- logical literature can be cited: e.g., the work of Lave (1977) with apprentice tailors in Liberia, and Jordan's (1989) work with apprentice midwives in the Yucatan province of Mexico.

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School and the marketplace

The marketplace itself presents some paradoxical pressures on the diversity which many wish to preserve among individuals and among cultures. Let us look at that environment. One of the dilemmas that face us is that there is an inexorable logic driving the development of the world economy. The most explosive of the workplace revolutions that our young must adapt to, and a reality to which counsellors must be especially sensitive is office systems technology. The skills to fit into such an environment are requiting an ever larger segment of the educational careers of an increasing proportion of children in the postindustrial economies. It is estimated that close to 40% of all workers in the United States now use electronic terminal equipment at some 38,000,000 workstations - performing tasks as sophisticatedF as computer-assisted-designing or as rudimentary as simple data entry into data banks. And before the end of this century computer terminals will be as commonplace as telephones on office desks (Cf. Giuliano, 1982; [U.S.] Office of Technology Assessment, 1985, cited in Tumage, 1990). The job training process that we counsellors participate in is being revolutionized by word-processing, computerized bookkeeping, and other record keeping that contribute to the lifeblood of the modem organization, communication (increasingly mediated by electronic mail, teleconferencing, computer con- ferencing, and networking of all varieties), this, additional to the computer- aided design, manufacture, servicing, and management of post industrial economies.

To enter into this environment requires a culture of work that takes years to adjust to and to master. That is one point that has profound implications for our children. They need to be inducted from their earliest years into modes of thought that fit with the cognitive demands of electronic informa- tion processing. There is a bewildering array of skills and careers encom- passed by this revolution, and in the main it is a fundamental departure from the career paths and the training programs in which children engaged in the past. This obliges the young to shift blocks of time away from the courses that might normally appeal to them, such as history, philosophy, the arts, crafts, literature, geography, sociology, and anthropology, to name some, to the foundational programs of electronic information processing. There seems no escape from this. But since the electronic revolution has proved its superiority for managing the means for producing goods and services, it will not be long before it blankets the earth, drawing hundreds of millions of workers into its peculiar environment.

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School and workplace

Industrial and organizational psychology has abandoned the paradigm of trying to find the 'fight' people and fit them to the job (Landy, 1985). The worker is part of a system that includes the workspace, the equipment, the organization, the co-workers, the benefits. Emphasis is being placed on redesigning the workplace to fit the individual characteristics and to respect the individual differences in capability and temperament of workers. A similar logic applies to the school. Educational psychologists, if not North American school boards in general, have abandoned the principles and the policy of fitting everyone into the traditional classroom. First of all, the classroom is increasingly seen as existing everywhere: in the workplace, the gymnasium, the school, the camp, the assembly hails, the street, even the pool hall. But the school classes themselves are increasingly being regarded as subcultures to be shaped to meet the needs of specialized segments of the student population. 'Magnet' and alternative schools are an expression of this.

Rather than refashion people, institutions need to be redesigned to attract, motivate, and retain those millions of students and workers who would otherwise abandon them. The success with which this has been done in the workplace, say in Sweden where this policy was largely pioneered, has encouraged others to do likewise in the schools. Such structural innovations as grouping employees into units by production processes, creating liaison devices such as periodicals, committees, networking devices, assigning people to varied and attractive responsibilities, (called 'matfixing'), decen- tralizing (Turnage, 1990), empowering individuals where possible to in- fluence the structure of their days (e.g., as in flex-time), can be applied in an analogous fashion in any institution.

Cultural entropy

Let me turn for 5 minutes to a worldwide view of the pressures that are assaulting the diversity which we find about us and within us. The differ- ences that exist between individual human beings and the institutions in which they study and work have an analogue in nations, regions, and cultures - and a new world economic order in which they are being obliged to fit. What is happening in our schools is happening on a macro-level in our global village. This issue evokes in me a concern about cultural entropy. Entropy, as you can probably recall, is a physical science principle that flows from the second law of thermodynamics. We remember from secondary school that if one pours boiling water and frigid water into the same container, the difference in their temperatures begins to diminish instantaneously. The hot,

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fast molecules and the cold, slow molecules interpenetrate each other's space. The result soon is a lukewarm tub of water. The only way to prevent that is to keep these two different bodies of water in energetically isolated enclosures.

The principles of thermodynamics can be extended analogically to the area of cultural systems and their manifestations - economic, esthetic, musical, culinary, technological. (There are, of course, dangers in extrapolating the principles of a natural sciences domain into social science domains. The history of social Darwinism among other disciplines attests to this.) Let us take but one example in a domain in which, I should admit, I am less expert than you.

Eighteenth century Japan is an analogue of the physicist's energetically isolated enclosure. There had been little modem penetration of Japan by foreign cultures. Now, by virtue of the information revolution that we are in the midst of, profound changes have begun to take place in Japan. Japanese businessmen and diplomats have, to a certain extent, adopted Western garb. Millions of Japanese have developed a taste for Western music, both classical and popular. Their dietary conventions have begun to change, as their primarily fish- and rice-based diet yields to foreign and perhaps less healthful alternatives. They have embraced Western scientism and technol- ogy and, indeed, improved upon them in many respects.

As nation-cultures become increasingly permeable; as travel becomes easier and the movement of large numbers of people about the globe increases, two things happen. Entropy asserts itself. Cultures become less distinctive, increasingly resembling each other. For example, the means of transportation of formerly distinct cultures become almost indistinguishable from each other. The laws of aerodynamics constrain engineers to minimize drag by shaping their creations in near-identical fashions. One hears Ameri- can popular music in large regions of Europe, replacing to a great extent indigenous cadences and instruments, and even languages. The quality of bread and foodstuffs takes on a sameness as the need to ensure longer shelf life and to improve the efficiency of food manufacture and distribution asserts itself. The metaphor of Kentucky Fried chicken or McDonald hamburgers is poignantly illustrative of this evolution.

Old and distinctive cultures are dying throughout the world. Languages are disappearing. 'Typical' apparel, regional modes of thought, dance and music, socio-religious ceremonies, crafts, architecture, and other expressions of cultural evolution are only preserved, if at all, as quaint, folkloric traditions that can attract tourists? Type-T personalities for the most part, who are thirsting for the unconventional. All of this corresponds to a reduction in order, in complexity, in information, in human richness. It is fundamentally disorder and entropy in full flight.

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There is a mitigating variable at work here. If, in fact, our sociocultural world as a whole degrades, any individual part of it may temporarily become more highly ordered, complex, variegated. More order, more complexity, means, in short, negative entropy. And as Nobel laureate, Jacques Monod, suggested in his little book entitled, Chance and Necessity (1971), the 'degree of order in a system is definable...in another language: that of information' (pp. 60,198). If there is a certain equivalence between negative entropy and information, then even if all parts of the world look increasingly similar, information growth may ensure that each part of the world will not in itself descend into a trough of uniformity.

On a macro-level, however, we must consider and speak of the homogeni- zation of the marketplace, of the reduction in distinctiveness of cultures (leave alone the reduction, in the biological domain, of numbers of species of both flora and fauna). We are faced with a certain impoverishment of workstyles, of lifestyles, of recreational styles - in short, of quality of life. And the danger is that society may have successfully enlisted the counsellor (and other mental health practitioners) in the task of fitting the client to this changing but increasingly standardized environment. That is part, of course, of what we are supposed to do, to wit, help clients to alter their perceptions and attitudes so that they can fit more easily into the socioeconomic settings that are coming into existence. But that task must be balanced by its converse, that is, to be in the service of a constructive and negative entropy to ensure the diversity that will contribute to the satisfactions of future generations.

In summary: programs for the normal

Children, still in school, can be anchored in our social system by an educational and school guidance program that takes into consideration that they are not all temperamentally suited during their childhood and adoles- cence to be seated at desks, tables, and laboratory counters for long periods of the day. However, many (bat far from the majority) of the secondary school students in the English-language countries are at risk of abandoning their education such that they will not only be nonproducers in the higher technology industries, but they will be psychologically unsuitable for work in the traditional service and trades domains. But it is possible to develop multidimensional programs of a modified academic, vocational guidance, career education, physical fitness, and employment-based character to ad- dress the fact that millions of manufacturing jobs are being squeezed out of existence by electro-automated information technologies.

The foundational principle of many innovative projects in North America

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is that well coordinated programs must be developed by highly competent counsellors, educators, school psychologists, technicians, and administrators for treating in a wholistic and individual way those younger adolescents who have been designated by competent diagnosticians (usually teachers and counsellors) as at risk for failure (cf. Dryfoos, 1990, pp. 199-223 for a review of such projects). Career guidance and counselling in such programs operate on the assumption that the physical, familial, cognitive, attitudinal, and temperamental strengths and deficits of each student who gives evidence of being on a failure track will be competently assessed. For many this will mean that while every effort is made to anchor them within the school system, the program will provide those so inclined to spend blocks of time on a weekly and at times daily basis in highly differentiated settings (Post Kammer & Perrone, 1983). And importantly, it will allot, where it is indicated, greater opportunity for gross-motor physical activity for those who demonstrate an above-average need for it.

Conclusions

The evolution of life on planet earth has resulted in a dazzling and beautiful array of species of life, in addition to forms and structures of nonorganic nature. Even within the human species the psychological development of the individual (like so many fractal variations in nature) has fostered a great variety of patterns of interests, competencies, tastes, and temperaments - again like so many displays in a recursive Mandelbrodtian program.

It is the view of a large proportion of counsellors and educators that they have a responsibility to facilitate the dynamic interplay of as many cultural variables as possible in their work with the varied and complex personalities of their clients. If one accepts what has been stated above, the counsellor needs to buffer the young from the excessive institutional constraints of the marketplace and its nursery, the school. Not only do we need more sophisticated computer programmers and more or less sophisticated data processors, we need poets, playwrights, historians, artisans, classicists, archeologists, musicians and composers, philosophers, dancers, artists, nov- elists. These often are men and women who do not easily fit in institutions. And though some will blossom in even the most sterile and Procrustean environment, like flowers on a slag heap, there are many more that will languish, and take their place on a dole line.

The city-state of Athens in Hellenistic Greece was able to provide world culture with its most enduring and precious treasures. We are the heirs of its logicians, its playwright-tragedians, its architects, its sculptors and master potters, orators, mathematicians and geometers, historians and poets, philo-

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sophers and statesmen. But it was not the slaves of that Society who created that legacy for themselves and for us; it was the diverse and freest spirits among her free citizens.

Notes

1. This feature of Western schools is not a 20th century novelty. Upon retirement an 18th century schoolmaster stated with great pride that he had inflicted upon his noncompliant pupils '911,527 blows with a cane; 124,010 with a rod; 20,989 with a ruler; 136,715 with the hand; 10,295 over the mouth; 7,905 boxes on the ear; [and] 1,115,800 slaps on the head' (Coleman, 1953).

2. A trivial but telling consideration is that the artifacts that tourists used to buy as souvenirs in their travels in exotic places now can be found in large cities around the world. There they can often be found in greater abundance, of better quality, and at lower cost. (Indeed they may also have been made there). This provides tourists with the convenience of being able to buy their souvenirs even before they leave home.

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