Alysia likes to raise as much of our food as possible so each spring she buys 30-50 Cornish Cross chicks to raise for meat. Cornish Crosses are the result of breeding chickens with just one goal in mind: grow as much good-tasting meat as possible with the least input of time and feed/money. Maximum conversion of money into meat. Cornish Crosses are very stupid because they don’t have to forage; it’s assumed they will be fed. I always feel sorry for them as butchering time approaches because they become so front heavy with breast meat that they grow unstable. If humans disappeared, the Cornish Cross variety would quickly follow. But, oh, their meat tastes really good.
My dad read an article telling how valuable old growth hardwoods were becoming. The Japanese had developed a machine that could “peel” a trunk of black walnut into an incredibly thin, incredibly long, continuous sheet of wood for use as veneers in fine furniture. With this technology, a black walnut tree with a good, straight trunk was worth $10-20,000. So my dad decided to grow a tree that would be ideal for that machine. He went to a black walnut grove and selected a nut from a big, strong tree and planted it in our yard. As it started to grow, he would rub off any side buds so they never even started. In four years or so, he had the strangest tree you had ever seen. It was fifteen feet tall with a very straight, two-inch diameter trunk with a small cluster of leaves on the top. One day, the trunk crumpled about four feet from the ground and the top just fell over and that was the end of that tree.
One of the schools in our county is in “program improvement.” “Program improvement” is the nasty end game of No Child Left Behind. If any subcategory of students does not score high enough on the standardized test three years in a row, the school goes into “program improvement” and the state delegates a team with the authority to tell a school what they have to do to get out of program improvement. The teachers of this school have been told to not put kids’ art on the walls because the kids should not be doing art. Art isn’t on the tests. The time that kids spend doing art should be spent on doing more math and language drills.
In Cairns #26, I summarized a book that concluded that agencies tend to mismanage their resources if and when management becomes guided by just a few measurements. The resource grows brittle under such management but the agency is blinded by their focus on just one criterion until the system collapses like my dad’s tree.
Leave a Reply