Here's a little anecdote regarding Seeing like a state. I read the book some years ago, then afterwards as chair of a kindergarten had a state-like experience w

Here's a little anecdote regarding Seeing like a state. I read the book some years ago, then afterwards as chair of a kindergarten had a state-like experience with the local municipality. They wanted to use a language test on all recently turned 3 year olds in the municipality because someone had told them that a bunch of the children starting in school ended up in trouble because they did not have good language skills. Now, the school curriculum had recently changed to be much more intellectual in the first year. So you might think that perhaps something had gone awry in the school end - but no, see, the problem is here, our kindergartens clearly suck, let's just measure 3 year olds (!) so we can identify the bad kindergartens/children and fix them. That's seeing like a state mentality in a nutshell. Having read the book, it was just so obvious. I talked to several kindergarten leaders who hated that test because it had clear false negatives (kindergarten pedagogues are there because they love the children, anything that goes against that makes them want to die) and made parents nervous for no good reason, but try explaining that to the responsible manager at the municipality. He obviously thought I was just being dumb. Luckily, the municipality made a mistake, because after a lot of digging it turned out they didn't actually have the authority to demand the tests. For the record, I think the right thing to do here would be to strengthen the caring culture for misfits in the kindergartens - often, but not always, the children with language trouble have other troubles. And then look holistically at the curriculum in the schools. If it's not working out for them with the children they get, they need to do something else. It's like when you make a program and your intended users are too dumb to figure it out, well, chances are you messed up.