Students And Worker Training

One popular concept in education discussions is that our schools should focus on workforce support. This approach argues that the primary goal of our schools should be to support industry. As one might suspect, these approaches most often emerge from the business sector.

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?

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that training workers for only one job was a reasonable approach. How will they deal with constantly-changing skills that every job now requires? Consider the lowest-paid, minimally trained worker in any company. More and more, all employees have to be able to work with computer programs, train on new machinery, and handle equipment and chemicals that will often carry risks to the workers or the public. Then consider that as our students move into higher slots in the organization chart, that the quantity of skills, and the rate of change, will enlarge at ever-faster speeds. So by training students for just one job, that one job is a endless learning quest. So we see that with this approach, we have lashed ourselves to a lifetime of expensive continuing education for all employees. Unless employees are capable of learning on their own. And that gives us one clue here.

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 ability 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 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.

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.

Another consideration is whether the concept of job training is consistent with the needs of the democracy. Police states 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 said 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.

Historically, this is interesting. Socrates (via Plato) cautioned his pupils of the dangers inherent with democracy, and likened it to allowing everyone access to the ship's wheel (this is where we get the concept of the "ship of state"). Socrates was wrong, of course, and his fear is our triumph. It is through collective decision-making that the advanced countries excel.

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.

So clearly, the democracy can hardly tolerate mindless worker bees. The democracy needs-- demands in fact-- incisive, broadly-trained thinkers. But then, so do communities, churches, service organizations, and yes, even corporations.

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.

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 will be a strong manager, a strong entrepreneur, as well as a strong civic activist, and a vocal and forceful advocate for progress, peace and prosperity. And when the marketplace shifts-- as it is continuously doing, at an ever-accelerating rate-- she will shift with it, because she will understand the fundamental concepts that will allow her to re-employ HERSELF.

And once we have educated the enlightened citizen-worker, she will also work for equally well-educated citizens, those who are mindful and respectful of the critical skills of their employees and their customers. And these enlightened managers will be able to take the input from all of these diverse viewpoints, and synthesize them to create business models that look less and less like the outmoded aristocratic structures of the past, and more and more like the democratic structures of today, and of the future.

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 educate citizens for the democracy, all of these will grow.

Article Source: http://www.search4allinfo.com

Joseph N. Abraham, MD, is president of APSE, booksXYZ.com, The Non-profit Bookstore listing over 2,000,000 books. He wrote the book Happiness: A Physician Biologist Looks at Life.

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