HOW AVERAGIANISM CAME TO BE
The Evolution Of the disapproving scale of Average
For a long time man has been living in accordance to an artificial scale created by American psychologists that defines the realm of living –averagianism scale. The society adopted and now everything you do is judged according to that scale, disregarding individual’s prospects and nature. If you are surpassing people’s expectations you are considered above average if not you may land on average or below average on the scale which uses timelines on what others are or have been able to do at your age.
They say nothing is new under the sun, unfortunately this societal menace dated back in 1840 when a Brussels sociologist Adolphe Quetelet wanted to study human behavior in an attempt to manage revolutionaries. He came up with the theory that if you measure dimensions of human bodies then aggregate them you will get the “average man” and thus the ideal dimensions man should be. Human behavior was from then henceforth judged on an average view, again disregarding individuality. And that was the beginning of the age of average.
In 1851 a British phycologist Sir Francis Galton came up with a theory that supported Quetelet’s idea though with a different ideology. He regarded that being average was mediocre while being above average was eminent and below was termed as the imbercile. In 1909 Galton wrote that “as statistics have shown, the best qualities are largely correlated.” In his view if you are intelligent then you could make a good athlete or be anything that is considered good.
Further In 1890, Frederick Winslow Taylor an American mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency ignited averagianism to another level. During that time the world had started to undergo economic regression which brood his idea of standardization. This was scripting the duties of workers by assigning the amount of work to be done and under which time and voila human robots were created. According to him there was nothing worse than a worker trying to do things his way, hey presto they had to killed creativeness in work places. A work system was created and to be followed to the latter, and that’s how managers were created to govern operations standards. Fortunately or unfortunately it worked and become the norm.
In 1912, the education system had to be reinvented to suit what was in the market place or the tenets of scientific management, its core value to teach children to become workers who could perform industrial work in a perfect way. According to how students ranked in relation to the average, hands on worker or managerial role was the destination.
You may be labelled lazy, redundant or even reasonable but that’s not what you really are that’s what our preceding philosophies have made us to see. If we could focus on individuality of people maybe someone doesn’t have a questionable personality, it’s just the scale of average gauging him that way. I mean we measure things according to what we think is average.
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