Replying to LO25756
Dear At:
Thanks for your superb post on this issue. A small proposal for
generalization:
At 10:54 07-12-2000 +0200, AM de Lange wrote:
>I myself was born before apartheid became the official ideology and policy
>of South Africa, but too young to become aware of the vast changes it
>brought about and all its implications. One of apartheid's implications
>was that it loaded the majority of South Africans with an omnibus of
>horrible Mental Models (MMs). Our greatest struggle now in the new South
>Africa is to get rid of these MMs.
>
>One curious MM was that showing appreciation spontaneously is not good
>citizinship. We had to ask permssion to do so and permission was often not
>granted. Only much later I learned that much of this had to do with the
>country being run by a secret society.
I find that the same MM (not showing appreciation) is at work in a lot of
other cultures, especially in occidental cultures. This can be found at
schools as you expressed so clearly, but also in the work place and at
general social life.
So if it is right that it can be found in many other occidental cultures
we have to find a more general cause than the apartheid regimen (even if I
agree with you that probably it was more evident in South Africa and in
other similar regimens).
My hypothesis is that it is one between many other manifestations of what
Argyris and Schon call "Model 1 theory in use".
As any one worked with this model and tried to facilitate changes from
model 1 to model 2? Would you agree that not showing appreciation is a
common MM within Model 1?
Regards
Artur
--"Artur F. Silva" <artsilva@mail.eunet.pt>
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