Finding a Common Goal
| Sarah Isgur | Nov 20 | 18 | 30 |
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| 0:00 | -46:50 |
Charles Koch and Brian Hooks joined Sarah and David to discuss their new book, Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World, which is about social entrepreneurship, the principles of human progress, and empowering people to discover their gifts. On today’s show, Koch and Hooks explain how finding common ground with people across the ideological spectrum has helped reorient their approach to public policy reform as it relates to the criminal justice system, education, and more.
Show Notes:
-Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World by Charles G. Koch and Brian Hooks.
-Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies by Charles Koch.
-After Life: My Journey from Incarceration to Freedom by Alice Marie Johnson with Nancy French.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
| 18 | 30 |
This still sounds quite partisan. The "vision" articulated here is just a softened version of the old agenda of dismantling the public education. If they actually wanted to bridge the partisan divide, wouldn't they have addressed the elephant in the room, public education, instead of pretending the promotion of private/charter education is an automatically bi-partisan issue.
What the participants in the conversation don't want to confront is that a lot of jobs are going to be uninspiring - and that's okay, a job isn't everything. The whole mantra about "success" masks a profound contempt for "unsuccessful" people - who a categorized as such according to how success is defined. Want proof of the contempt: the examples they use are Einstein and the Wright Bros. The example they should use is of the anonymous father or mother who works hard, builds a home, raises a family, contributes to their community, who never comes to the attention of a wider public, etc.
This whole conversation struck me as intellectually lazy and insincere. The vision of a public education was not to offer handholds for those who, according to their private means, were in a position to "rise up." That would happen in the natural course of things, as parent's nurtured their children's gifts, as teacher's encouraged their development. The vision was that we collectively would "lift" everyone up to aid what is already occurring in the natural course of things.
Two thumbs down.
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Interesting...I am torn on Mr Koch..some things sound good, others I just don't understand or get how they help everyone that needs it...and I run into that if you aren't doing well, it is because you are a bad person in some way too...I guess it is just a bit too Libertarian to me in some ways?
But, I find it fascinating to listen to
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