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Currently in some circles there is this "new" idea, that education should serve workforce development. In this approach, the primary role of education is to produce workers for the economy-- in essence, employees. Not surprisingly, these arguments generally come from the business community. Such an approach appears to be insufficient. First of all, if we are engaged in workforce development, then what workers are we developing? For which job shall we train workers? There is a popular slide show claiming that today's graduate will hold 10 to 14 jobs by age 38. What will those jobs be? And even if we knew what they would be, we couldn't possibly train for that many jobs. For which of them should we train our workers? Even if we made the poor assumption that we are training our students for just one job, the skill sets necessary for any position will change constantly. This is true for even the least-skilled jobs. Even menial workers will need, more and more, to work with computers, new equipment, and understand the potential liabilities inherent in any work. As the job description enlarges with moving up the organizational lader, the necessary skills accelerate at an ever-increasing rate.\. So even if there were only one career track for each student, we are committing ourselves to enormous, continuous ongoing training costs. That is, if our students are incapable of training themselves. That is our first insight here. Another problem that emerges is that in traditional educational approaches, we have to decide whether we wish to train leaders or employees. The education of the doctor, the engineer and the attorney focus on broad, theoretical education and in-depth analysis. By contrast, the training of the nurse, the mechanic and the paralegal, focus more on practical skills, narrow guidelines, and clerical tasks. And even minimal experience has shown us that it is impossible to predict where any student will end up in the business. So if we train the employee, we fail the leader; and vice versa. This supplies us with another clue. Next, there is a problem of accountability here. Businesses want our schools to train workers. Why should we have to pay for that out of our personal taxes? Corporations have much more money at their disposal than you or I do. Let them pay for their own expenses. Which bring up a deeper ideological question. The corporation almost always argues for less government, for lower taxes, and for privatization of everything possible. Given that, why should corporations now insist that government pay to train workers? if privatization is the superior strategy, here is a perfect opportunity for corporations to prove it. Is business arguing for workforce development simply to avoid the costs? If so, it appears that business has subjugated concerns for education to the desire for someone else to pay the costs. If corporations bear the costs, then by their own arguments, the pressures of the free market will produce the best solutions. This approach does not move us toward our conclusion, but it does expose a major flaw in this sort of thinking. Workforce development is also at odds with the tenets of the democracy. Consider for a moment that workforce development is what totalitarian regimes target (and we must remember, poorly-run businesses can be eerily similar to totalitarian regimes). The last thing an oppressive organization-- government, corporation, or church-- wants, is thinkers. Highly centralized organizations do not want hard questions asked by their minions, they do not want workers who will question the status quo. All manner of dictators want mindless workers, who will tacitly and faithfully serve the desires of the leadership. The needs of the dictator vs. the needs of the democracy is the last clue, and points up more than anything the problem of equating education to workforce development. These ideas are inadequate, because in a free democracy, education should not serve worker training. Here in the USA, one of our favorite saws is that it is possible for any young student to be elected President one day. The problem with this argument, is that EVERY student in the USA becomes President. When we cast our ballots, we are all the Chief Executive of the country; so everyone is President. Our democracy is at odds with classical thought. In "The Republic", democracy is dismissed as a model akin to allowing all citizens to steer the boat; hence the concept that continues after 2500 years, of "the ship of state". The argument against democracy has been rejected in the modern world, of course, and we can see that it is precisely because everyone steers that the Free World also steers the world. But that is true only if the citizens are a hardy group of equals, of free, self-reliant, thinking citizens. Democracy fails in illiterate, impoverished countries of the world, where it quickly declines into an autocracy. Democracy only flourishes where the citizens are independent-minded. Seeing these things, we can understand that training our children for jobs is not the answer, not at all. Vocational preparation is insufficient for the democracy. Democracy absolutely must have discerning citizens who have a grasp of multiple complex disciplines. As do our neighborhoods, our churches-- and our businesses. We should not be educating a workforce; we should be educating a citizenry. We should be educating a population who have a grasp of history, economics, the sciences, and particularly, a grasp of the many complex cultures of the world. America is at war in two countries, and though the country is divided on the necessity and management of those wars, it is clear to everyone that grave errors were committed because we did not understand the history and the cultures we were dealing with. Since we cannot possibly prepare our citizens for every eventuality that might arise in our nation's future, we should also educate a population who will continue to educate themselves throughout life. We need citizens who are flexible and broadly educated, who have a grasp of how science and history and literature and traditions commingle to produce cultures, communities-- and citizens and nations. And yes, the citizen will also be able to hold a job; but she will also be able to hold down many different jobs, because she will be able to quickly learn and re-train herself to the accelerating changes in the modern market. And after we have graduated our citizen-employee, she will move into a workforce managed by other such citizens, who understand that every worker, and every customer, are also broadly educated, and who each supply important opinions and vantage points. These new-age managers will then weave the divergent viewpoints into a more accurate picture of the world around them, and make better decisions. So the business of the future will look less and less like the autocracies that America was designed to replace, and will look more and more like the democracy our Founders designed to replace them. We need thinkers, we need learners, and we need leaders: in the democracy, in the community, and in the corporation. If we train Workers, but not citizens, as the democracy and the community collapse, the workforce will collapse with them. But if we educate citizens for the democracy, all of these will grow.
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About the Article Author
Joseph N. Abraham, MD, is president of APSE, The American Public School Endowments, and booksXYZ.com, The Non-profit Bookstore listing over 2,000,000 books. He is also the author of the book Happiness.
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