Economics
March 23rd, 2009For an economics course I’m teaching this semester, the primary text the kids read through will be Thomas Friedman’s The Earth is Flat. It’s a fascinating read, especially given the economic situation in which the nation is finding itself.
The main point—something picked up by the New York Times—is that the American economy is, perhaps, finally hitting that point so long predicted of deep change. The causes are numerous, but key among them is globalization, the power of new technology to allow communication, and the role of individuals in creating content that allows them to compete with large businesses and governments. The average individual is moving from being a consumer of material to creator of content, be it on blogs, podcasts, photographs, or by “hacking” software.
The same processes that allow an American in New Hampshire to compete with IBM are also available in India, or Indonesia, or the Philippines. The same processes that moved American shipyards out of New England and into the South will also move jobs from America to Bangladesh.
By now, if someone is not aware¹ of the hours that young men and women are spending in school—and studying—in India and China, then he or she is trying to not pay attention. The top 10% of their students outnumber—by far—all our students. Thanks to fiber-optics, the irresistible law of economics that work will always go where labor is cheapest, and the ability to find skilled labor for far less elsewhere than here—well, it’s going to be a much tougher work world for the students sitting in the chairs right now.
To be honest, I wonder what the solution to that is. There’s no doubt more must be done for and by our students. I think we’re on our way to doing so, and I think it’s something that will continue to speed up and accelerate. I think schools—the MRSD in general—are talking more about skills, talking more about the social aptitudes students will need, in addition to their knowledge of math, science, social studies, technology, literature, writing, and a host of other subjects.
But I’m wondering if the needs that must be filled can be filled without a sea-change. To get there, it isn’t as easy as merely putting the right thing in place—there also needs to be a recognition that the right things are the right things.
To put it another way—there’s never going to be much attention paid to the other things until they’re recognized not as “other” things but as important as any other element of schooling. If mom and dad at home don’t really care whether or not Timmy misbehaves, as long as he’s “passing” then it doesn’t really matter what’s happening at school.
As long as mom and dad aren’t content that the student is getting through “without much trouble” than it’s really hard to raise the bar. The millions of young men and women in China and India sitting in lecture halls are there because their culture knows education is going to be vital, that it’s the stepping stone to something better. I imagine discipline is real easy in China and India. “Timmy won’t be allowed to come to school today.”
That’s it. A good chunk of our kids think of it as a break—and mom and dad are perhaps more irritated at the inconvenience to them than they are what it means about their child’s behavior in school. Not always, mind—there are some tough eggs to crack in a school system—but some of them. The question is—how do we get to them, as well as to mom and dad?
It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg question. How do we get the schools we should have when the kids we have aren’t ready for them? If we put a great school system into place—the way we wish a school to be—and the kids in question are more interested in anything else than what good do we do?
If the schools aren’t ready for the kids who need them, then we’re doing them a disservice… but without the students being ready, we can’t build the right school for them.
I’m, once again, not sure how to get there from here.
1 The link is to a newly updated version of “shift happens”, which is perhaps the most engaging and “think about it for a moment” thing I’ve seen on the internet in a long while. ↺
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America’s Role, China, Competency Based Education, Competition, Education, Monadnock Community Connections School, Monadnock Regional School District, School Change
