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Students And Worker Training
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.
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.
This idea does not hold up well to scrutiny. First, What job? A slide show currently making the Internet rounds talks about global competition, and makes the point that by mid-career, the average employee will hold over ten jobs. So which of these should we target? And is there any way we could train a worker for 20 or more jobs in a career?
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 abilities 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 dangerous 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.
Next, we will need to decide whether each student will become management, or labor. Highly skilled jobs require critical thinking skills, and a wide knowledge of many different fields. Less-skilled jobs-- even middle management-- require a more focused training that concentrates more on attention to details, and frequently moves away from autonomous thinking. At the same time, it is impossible to predict who will be management, or labor. So, train the employee, fail the manager. Train the manager, fail the employee. This is a second consideration.
Next, why should the average taxpayer dedicate public funds garnered from her private, moderate income to fund the training of workers for industries, most of which earn much more money than the worker? If industry wishes better workers, you and I should not have to bear that cost out of our pockets.
And that brings us to a more fundamental question. Businesses frequently clamor for smaller government, and insist that private entities can do almost anything better 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.
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.
The idea that our schools are places for workforce training is entirely inadequate for a strong democracy. In our country, we say that any boy or girl can become the President some day. But this is untrue, because they ALL do. When they vote, every one of us is the Commander-in-Chief; all citizens govern the nation.
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.
Given these consideration, workforce development is entirely insufficient; employee training hardly prepares one for the rigorous demands of the citizen. For free nations to thrive, they need-- no, they require-- trenchant, well-rounded citizens. But this equally is true for the town, the temple, and even the trades.
We don’t need to train workers. We need to train citizens. We need citizens who understand history, and science, and economics, and diversity of cultures-- particularly as it relates to geopolitics. Currently we are engaged in two wars in the Middle East. Regardless of how each of us may feel about those wars, all parties agree that costly mistakes were made because we did not fully understand the geopolitics of the region. And as the world grows smaller, we are becoming aware of the impossibility of understanding all of it diverse cultures; obviously, we will need to inform ourselves as we go. So we also need citizens, and workers, who continue to learn, and inquire, for their entire lives.
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 in the ideal economy, she will only hold jobs run by yet other well-rounded citizens, by supervisors who equally understand that all of their workers have eyes, and ears-- and brains-- and who are therefore key assets, and critical decision-makers in the everyday running of the company. As business becomes more complex, and as the workforce in the advanced economies becomes better-educated, new models of management increasingly move decision-making from the centralized, dictatorial autocrat, to the decentralized, autonomous employee. Exactly like the democracy.
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.