Thomas Friedman has an interesting Op-Ed piece in today's New York Times in which he argues that our current recession, while torched by the financial crisis continues to burn because of our educational crisis:
"Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”
Friedman goes on to point out that in a global economy, "average" workers won't be able to make it:
Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.
As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”
Argues Friedman, workers who have the skills and education to make their occupations less routine and more valuable are the ones who will succeed in a shifting economy.
Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
Given these changes, how is your WIB and One Stop supporting this shift? What are you doing as a staff person to obtain the professional development and skills that will keep you marketable in a transformed economy?
If Friedman were arguing for a conscientious employee, I would say that's both realistic and feasible. Employees need to add value to their job by distinguishing themselves from those who put in the minimum effort.
If, however, Friedman is suggesting that schools can imbue a rare combination of talent, creativity, motivation, intelligence and street-smarts — in effect engineer "nature vs. nurture" outcomes — then he is not making a realistic argument. What Friedman is, in fact, describing is a set of personality profiles (visionary, investigative, pragmatic, etc.). Even parents have a difficult time with that one because those traits are thought to be hard wired!
It's hardly a recipe for American competitiveness to suggest that schools control all manner of outcomes. It would be more productive for Friedman to propose that we identify schoolchildren who offer this rare combination of proportionately balanced left-brain/right-brain talent early on so that they can be properly groomed to carry the totality of American competitiveness. In this scenario it would not be sufficient to test high on an IQ test. Students would also have to display "visionary" capacity as well. If anything, this is task for clinical psychologists, not educators!
Friedman's emphasis is on innovation/creativity, entrepreneurship and analytical/intelligent capacity. If, however, Americans' future relies on superhuman competitiveness whereas the rest of society will not earn or apparently "deserve" a living wage, that doesn't bode well for a market economy in which those innovators, entrepreneurs and creative-analytical types at the top of the pyramid rely on "lowly consumers" who can afford their products and services at the bottom of the pyramid!
Unless the bottom 3/4 of the population can participate in this Brave New Economy, the top quarter of the "producers" that Friedman describes will not have an easy go of it, either. Therefore, what Friedman is describing, ironically, is not a race to the top but a race to the bottom. Perhaps Friedman is the one who ought to consider going back to school where his ideal of the properly reformed "all-knowing teacher" can help him unravel his disturbingly circular logic.
Posted by: SocialCritic | October 31, 2009 at 11:18 AM