Schools And Business Skills
A new concept emerging in many communities is the idea that the primary goal of education is to produce superior workers. Our schools should support our economy. As might be expected, the people advocating such an approach tend to be employers.
It is not clear that this strategy is the best. One question that immediately emerges is, What job are we training our students for? The “Did You Know” video that is popular on the World wide web points out that the average worker will hold about a dozen jobs before the age of 40. So if we’re training a workforce, for what job are we training them? And how could we ever train them for that many different jobs?
Even if we were to take the unreasonable approach that we are training “workers” who would spend an entire career in one kind of work, technology changes. The capabilities required today of the lowest-skilled jobs are far different today than they were 20 years ago. Even janitors need to be able to order supplies on-line, handle new equipment, and understand the proper use and disposal of hazardous chemicals; for jobs more complicated than custodial work, the needed skills expand exponentially. So if by some chance we could successfully train our students for one job that they would keep their entire careers, we will still need to spend large sums of money constantly re-training them. Unless, of course, our workers could train themselves. And that provides our first clue.
After we consider those problems, we will also have to decide whether each student will become a manager, or an employee? Management necessarily deals with many data from many disciplines, and requires the capability to synthesize the information. Moving down the corporation ladder, skill sets become narrower, less independent, and more focused on rules and details. Look around any corporation, and it becomes quite clear that there was no way to predict who would become a manger, and who would become an employee. So if we train leaders, followers will be poorly trained; and obviously, the reverse is equally true. This gives us a second insight.
Next, there is a problem of accountability here. Businesses want our schools to train workers. Why should we’ve 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.
And that brings us to a more fundamental question. Businesses frequently clamor for smaller government, and insist that private entities can do almost anything superior than public bodies. Why then should government pay for the needs of businesses? If for-profit initiatives are superior to public bureaucracies, then let each business pick up the cost of worker training, and give us the most efficient, economical solution. Otherwise, it appears that business’ interest in education is not truly educational, but purely mercenary: shift the costs to someone else. If businesses can do everything else better than government, why not train their own workers? This insight focuses on the origins of the workforce argument, rather than the conclusions, but it a crucial understanding nevertheless.
Another consideration is whether the concept of job training is consistent with the needs of the democracy. Police says want job training for the populace– and nothing else (and more than a few businesses operate like police states). Whether in the state, the workplace, or in the church, dictatorial leaders want no one of independent mind. Police states hardly want challenges to their competence, much less, probity. Autocrats want quiet, unthinking, but efficient workers, who do, and do not ask. Job training as opposed to citizen training is the final insight, and strongly points to the problem of turning our schools into centers of workforce development.
This is because the concept that education should exist to train workers is much too low of a target for a healthy democracy. It is stated that in America, any child can grow up to be President. This is not entirely accurate, because in America, EVERY child grows up to be President. When our citizens step into the ballot box, they each become our Head of State; we all run the country.
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 have the ability to see that it is precisely because everyone steers that the Free World also steers the world.
But that’s 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 swiftly declines into an autocracy. Democracy only flourishes where the citizens are independent-minded.
Seeing these things, we can understand that training our kids for jobs isn’t the answer, not at all. Vocational preparation is insufficient for the democracy. Democracy completely must have discerning citizens who have a grasp of multiple complex disciplines. As do our neighborhoods, our churches– and our businesses.
Workers are not what we need, not primarily. Citizens are what we need. The needs of the democracy require citizens with understandings of technology, geography, culture, history, political science, and economics. As the US is engaged in battles abroad, we have the ability to see that our misunderstanding of the cultures we’re dealing with, and their history, has led to some enormous errors. As we engage with countries around the globe, we do not want to make those mistakes again. And so the person in the street needs not only to have been educated in these fields, but needs equally to continue that education, as a life-long quest.
Democracy requires citizens; citizens who are scientists, philosophers, psychologists, economists, administrators, who can put it all together and derive some understanding of the world around us. Will the citizen who can do this also be a strong employee? Yes. And she’ll be a strong manager, a strong entrepreneur, as well as a strong civic activist, and a vocal and forceful recommend for progress, peace and prosperity. And when the marketplace shifts– as it is continuously doing, at an ever-accelerating rate– she’ll shift with it, because she’ll understand the fundamental concepts that’ll allow her to re-employ HERSELF.
And after we’ve graduated our citizen-employee, she will move into a workforce managed by other such citizens, who understand that each 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 superior 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 so much more than employees. We need members of the democracy, those who can think and learn at a level equal to the demands of the modern world. And we need them in the voting booth, the council meeting, the church, and the civic club– in addition to the workshop. So if we target employees primarily, or even first, then government, schools, and neighborhoods will all fall, and our businesses will fall with them.
But if we train citizens, all will prosper.
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