This talk was prepared for presentation  to the European Architecture Students Assembly, in Manchester, England in August 2010. I was (and am still) concerned that the way we teach professional skills is directly related to the social, political, cultural, economic and environmental crises that seem to be increasing daily. The Wall Street sub-prime traders of today are the graduate students of yesterday. They learned their skills in an environment of social and cultural isolation - separated from those who ultimately paid the cost of their collective misdemeanours. Furthermore, the skills that they learned were forged in a pressure-cooker environment of rampant competitive individualism and selfish egocentrism - devoid of compassion, empathy or kindness. Their work ethic was grounded in the ideology of the free-market as Prime Mover - superceding all human agency - existential or otherwise. We now know the price of that education and the millions who had to pay, and while the Business Schools like Harvard and Stanford now scramble to reinsert courses on Ethics into their curricula, little has changed, simply because the foundational premises upon which their system of beliefs is built remains unchallenged and untouched. The rhetorical context of this piece is somewhat abhbreviated - the talk was never crafted into a formal scriipt. But the images and occasional comments will perhaps convey the sequential argument that I was presenting.

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