Whenever you think about the future, no matter where you start, if you think about it long enough, you’ll always wind up thinking about education. Because the world is changing so quickly, and innovations are coming fast and furious, brain power is the answer no matter what the question. And for brains to function well, they have to be well-stocked with information and ideas, and trained in coming up with fresh, new approaches as needed.
Accordingly, as a society that wishes to remain prosperous, that wants to offer employment to our citizens and health care to those who need it, that wants to afford life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then what we, as a society, need is education that is effective in the 21st century.
To start what this means is that we need to be careful not to push childhood education to the background as our population ages. The propensity for older voters to vote against money for education is legendary, but as long as a relatively small percentage of the voters didn’t have children in school, it created only localized difficulties, not major, national problems.
Now, though, we are moving towards a society where there will be more retirees than children in schools. The demands on governments for more money for health care and pensions are already causing major headaches for elected officials, and forcing them to seek places where they can cut budgets. And, once you start looking, you realize that education is typically the second-largest area of program spending – after health care – and therefore number one on the potential hit list.
But if we vote to cut funds per learner for education, then we are voting for bread and circuses, and the end of our society is in sight. We will almost literally be eating our seed corn, and by and by we will starve, not from lack of grain, but from lack of brains with which to compete.
This is why education is the answer. However, for the same reasons, education is also the problem.
We need to completely re-think what education is, how it is delivered, to whom, where, and when. The answers of the 20th century, let alone the 19th, are no longer sufficient, and we need new ones. ‘Back to Basics,’ for instance, is a recipe for disaster, for it calls for a return to Olde Tyme Values, in the hope that it will produce good mass production workers for a world where the only employed mass production workers live in distant lands and make less than 20¢ an hour. And thinking of state-sponsored education as being just for children is wrong because the only hope that many people whose jobs are disappearing is to retrain (i.e., re-educate), and find a new profession, or else live on welfare the rest of their lives – or until the government’s money runs out.
The problem is that education and the means by which we deliver it is the single social structure most resistant to change at a time when change is happening faster than at any time in human history. Our education system, with classrooms, separate grade levels for similar-aged children, letter grades for evaluation, and teachers teaching groups is a millstone from the past.
What we need is an education system that serves all citizens, that is the hub of each community, and that helps invent progress for each individual, and for society as a whole. We need education to the be at the center of our society, not a convenient baby-sitting service that sits off to one side. And we need an education system that works and thinks strategically with corporations and government policy-makers, competes with industry and government to hire the best and brightest, pays them like royalty, and then demands great things from those it hires, holding them accountable for superb results. If this sounds wild-eyed and unlikely, that’s the problem.
We read occasional articles in newspapers and magazines about the outsourcing of call centers to India, and the migration of manufacturing to China, and think this is irksome, and that somebody in government should come up with a program to help those poor people who have lost their jobs. Or we think that the government should put a stop to all those foreigners stealing our jobs, depending on your view of the world. Both views are wrong, and, ironically, in the same way.
Only a disaster can stop globalization, and globalization is leveling the employment field world-wide. A worker in North America today has to be prepared to compete with workers in India, China, and elsewhere not only on wages, but on results. There are 1.3 billion people in China, and 1.1 billion in India compared with around 320 million in all of North America. The educated cream of the worker crop in China and India alone outnumbers the entire workforce of North America, and they are becoming competitive in brains, education, and talent. And they’re much cheaper, and much, much hungrier.
Add to this the telecommunications revolution of the last 10 years, when optical fiber networks have spanned the globe, and made it possible for workers anywhere in the world to do the work that needs doing in your local community, and the result is a global workforce.
The anti-globalistas seize on this kind of observation to say that globalization is the problem, and must be stopped. Theirs is a fundamentally racist argument, although usually dressed up to look altruistic. What they say is ‘We need to stop exploiting people in developing countries!’ What this means (whether they realize it or not) is ‘We need to make those people more expensive, or else they’re going to put us out of work!’ Or they’re scared, want this threat to go away, and for the clock to go backwards to a safer, simpler time (as if such a time ever existed). ‘Make it didn’t happen!’ is what this argument amounts to.
But the clock going backwards is precisely what happened to the blossoming global trade of the 1910s and 1920s. The trade war that ended globalization then was one of the major reasons why the world fell into a global Depression.
Unless we want to hew to a racist view that the jobs we have now are God-given, and no Asian wogs are gonna steal ‘em from us, then we’re going to have to compete on the basis of our brains and hard work – as we should. We are only people, with no more right to jobs than people in China, India, or anywhere else – and we deserve them only when we can do them more effectively than anyone else. That’s where education comes in.
We need an education system that works with anyone in our society that has need of it – perhaps on a paid basis for those who have moved beyond basic schooling, but still extending to all ages. And we need an education system that tailors its offerings to each individual learner. It must identify their strengths and weaknesses, design a curriculum to encourage the growth of their specific talents and abilities in light of the environment in which they will work, and help develop their talents to fruition – which includes the commercial know-how to make a living from them. Academic learning is not enough. We need real world results.
And don’t tell me this is an unrealistic proposal, because private tutoring organizations are doing something very like this on a one-to-one basis today. But to do so requires us to change the way we pay for, prepare, and think about education, and to restructure the goals and benchmarks for educators and students. In short, we need to refashion the entire system.
We don’t have to do this. We could, instead, slide into genteel poverty, blaming the result on “bad luck”, or the unfair or malicious actions of others instead of our own laziness and stupidity. That would be much easier. Failure is simple – it’s just not much fun. Success is hard, but usually more enjoyable.
© Copyright, IF Research, March 2006.
by futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A.
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