Poisoning the Professional Waterhole

Originally posted on January 21, 2021 @ 6:40 PM

Poisoning the Professional Waterhole

In the latest IOSH magazine you can find a host of safety gobbledygook , enough to turn you off an industry consumed with itself.

We know about zero vision but did you know that a career in safety makes you an education expert? Apparently so.

Wonderful how Safety, with no expertise in Education and Teaching seeks to lecture the Education profession about how to do their job (IOSH – THE BENEFITS OF TEACHING SAFETY AT A YOUNG AGE)

This is no different from the AIHS lecturing epidemiologists about how to manage a pandemic (https://safetyrisk.net/is-this-your-aihs/). Amazing how Safety thinks it is justified in lecturing real professions from the base of dumb. BTW, when I contacted the CEO of the Commonwealth’s Infection Control Expert Group, they had never heard of the AIHS. A sure sign that talking to yourself is a mental health disorder.

So here we have on this IOSH article Safety lecturing the Education profession about including safety in the school curriculum. Talk about poisoning the waterhole. It seems Safety is not content with wallowing in its own toxicity and zero cult, it must share the love of zero around (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/for-the-love-of-zero-free-download/ ).

The crazy thing about this article on indoctrinating the Education sector with the zero cult is it is framed with the language of ‘risk intelligence’.

There is one thing the safety sector knows very little about and that is risk intelligence. To be risk intelligent one would need to know something about fallible humans not a love of objects, numbers and metrics. There is nothing in the AIHS BoK that even comes close to critical thinking or risk intelligence. To be risk intelligent one needs to know how to tackle risk. The fear of risk, the love of stasis/zero creates risk ignorance.

Of course, in this article nothing is defined, it is assumed that risk intelligence is a given. This discussion comes in the same magazine that touts the love of zero vision. If your vision is zero then nothing that follows can be intelligent. The denial of fallibility is the beginning of stupidity (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/fallibility-risk-living-uncertainty/ ). So we can be sure about one thing, this article contains nothing that is either professional or intelligent.

So lets look at the profession of Education and think about compatibility with the zero cult:

First of all, no one in the Education profession believes in zero or perfection. You can’t have a class of 20 children in front of you and think that the language of zero is either motivation or sensible. If you want to turn children off anything just tell them that perfection is the only acceptable goal.

Second can you imagine the school assembly where the Principal gets up each month and rebukes the school for its injury rate. Just imagine the rhetoric:

‘Now children this has been a most unacceptable month. We’ve had 11 injuries, 15 medical treatments and 25 Lost Time injuries. Now, many of these injuries we from kids running and playing on the quadrangle, that must stop. We will have no skinned knees or elbows. Other injuries were from children running on the oval, kicking balls and throwing objects, that must be stopped too. All movement in this school must stop because we have worked out that movement brings harm and injury and there is no other acceptable goal than zero’

This is what the cult of zero sounds like, just imagine bringing such toxicity into a school of the education profession. Here Education, have a listen to this dumb bunch of amateurs lecture you about injury rates and zero harm, then you’ll become really professional.

The last thing Education needs is to be infected by the toxicity of the zero cult. The last thing a real profession needs is the denial of fallibility and the brainless amateurish of worshiping objects and injury rates. Nothing could be worse for Education that compromising its professionalism with the amateurish nonsense of the zero cult.

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Dr Rob Long

Expert in Social Psychology, Principal & Trainer at Human Dymensions

Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)

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PhD., MEd., MOH., BEd., BTh., Dip T., Dip Min., Cert IV TAA, MRMIA Rob is the founder of Human Dymensions and has extensive experience, qualifications and expertise across a range of sectors including government, education, corporate, industry and community sectors over 30 years. Rob has worked at all levels of the education and training sector including serving on various post graduate executive, post graduate supervision, post graduate course design and implementation programs.