I will continue to post some items that may be little or of no value to those who read them, but they helped me during my years in industry and education.

Interpersonal Relations

Todays society has a strong tendency to evaluate human beings on scales which make some persons better than others.
Assumptions:
Adults are better than children
Bosses are better than employees
Men are better than women
Whites are better than blacks
Doctors are better than plumbers
Teachers are better than students
Winners are better than losers
and so on.
We are undergoing significant changes in every aspect of our society, our religion, our families, our work, our life styles, our educational systems, and our government. Education, like society and all its other institutions, is experiencing painful and profound crisis and confusion.
I am aware that many persons continue to believe in a thrust towards betterment- call it evolutionary, intellectual, scientific or humanistic- it is vital that human beings, especially those with responsibility to and for others, attempt to make sense for what is happening- for their own fullfillment and for that of others.
We never- no never outgrow our needs for ongoing courses in human relations. I endorse without qualifications the concept of the quality of human beings. Caring, sincerity and honesty are essential parts of human relations. I am sure we all want to do right.
What we are going through now is the deepest and most dramatic of changes- How the human being views the human being- How man envisions Himself as a person- What it means to be human- What consciousness means- to express emotion- How to relate to others. We are often put down or made to look down on ourselves.
In traditional western culture, man has been conditioned to see and experience himself in negative ways- with much fear, shame and guilt. Whatever the relationship, ( parent and child, teacher and student, minister and worshipper, politiician and constituent) man has been impressed to look outward and upward, to the authority figure, for instruction on how he ought to be.
Let's look at it in a different light. Let's think about looking inward and seeing ourselves in a positive way. Learning to be assertive is education for living, for being human, for becoming ourselves in much more human ways and for making society more human also.
Romans 12:3, 9-16 What does it mean to be assertive, as opposed to being overly aggressive or over passive. Do not think more highly of yourself than you ought, but think of yourelf with sober judgement. Aggressive and passive are the two extremes we want to recognize and correct in our lives that cause us to have a negative feeling about ourselves and others.
When we are agressive with our anger, we rid ourselves of our own feelings and vent our own anger at someone else's expense. We attack his character, we attack him personally. We lose control of ourselves.
When we are passive or use non-assertive behaviour, we do not express how we feel, but we take out our in some kind of unconscious passive behaviour by putting things off, pouting, doing a poor job, letting other people run our lives and at the same time resenting it. We will say yes when we really want to say no. Neither extreme is healthy.
When we are assertive, we do express the way we feel, but we use love and tact in the way we say it and what we say. We say yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no. We stand up for what we think we should stand up for and we ask for what we feel is important. We must take a real interest in someone if we expect to know him or her well enough to understand where they are coming from.

More later on Human Relations.