An article by Marc Tucker. What “Building Back Better” Might Mean for Education and Job Training in the United States - NCEE has given us food for thought and initiated some interesting discussion amongst our “i4j brains trust!” Initiated by Miriam Freedman and Curt Carlson
Summary
- The education system has to change to accomodate Nexttech Revolution
- The winners and losers of the post covid era
- Other countries overtaken USA in quality of education
- Where to from here - what we need to do to change this paradigm
Some Questions
Is the USA fiddling while the world is moving forward?
Is the existing education system adequate?
Do we need a New education system designed to providing competence and meet the needs for the Nexttech Revolution - and not the industrial economy for which it was designed a century ago?
Does the USA have a problem - and does it start at building competence at schools? Is the USA “losing the war” or merely destroying itself?
What is competence in the Nexttech Revolution?
What do we have to teach our kids and our existing workforce?
Is the education system of our schools that have been optimised for the industrial Revolution still relevant?
Does our existing system achieve this competence during the precious few hours that we have in school for about 180 days a year (pre-COVID. Now, so many fewer....)?
The Solution - cater for the lifelong learners (all of us) - make them competent
We have a choice. Advance globalization and automation and increase the skills of our workforce or have a lower standard of living.
Upskilling and reskilling our Students, Citizens and Nation - and “making them competent” should br front and centre” when forming our educational policy.
We know there will be and continue to be massive changes in the way we do things - and what we know now will be redundant soon .... and that the average millennial will probably have 17 different jobs in a variety of “different professions” - so what do we need to do to educate ourselves - how do we equip ourselves and make us competent for the future .
The answer , my friends, is to make you competent to become a lifelong learner .
Teaching and learning real knowledge and skills so students become competent to cope in the Nexttech Revolution - should be a primary focus for all students--we need to get back to our roots of teaching, learning and competence.
Doing a 4 year course at university learning a trade or profession - when that competence will be different and superseded in a few years - needs to change
Do we need to learn how to learn?
Marc Tucker talks about the winners and the losers in the Nexttech Revolution - which will be beyond borders .
2 types of workers post pandemic the winners and the losers
The winners
Those that work from home - seamlessly - with computers snd tech - highly educated and technically adept
Productivity up - time saved commuting
Pollution down
Traffic better
Moving to holiday homes in country and working remotely ;from anywhere on the world)
Automation will increase the demand for the educated
Those with a high degree of technical skill to their jobs Will be using automation and intelligent technologies to make them more productive.
Health care workers, caregivers, hair stylist—are not going to be replaced anytime soon by someone at the other end of an internet connection.
The losers
Those with minimal education and little technical education - decimated by covid 19
- Workers in restaurants as cooks, servers and dishwashers;
- clerks and cashiers; inventory takers, pitchers and packers, stickers and fitters; n malls and department stores as stockers
- Assembly line workers in factories
- cruise ships - bar keepers, cleaners, crew and entertainers.
- Drivers - trucks, limos, Uber’s and taxis,
- Carers of our kids in child care centers
- Miners
- Farmers
- Pickers and packers on farms
- Butchers
Many of these humans have been decimated by COVID-19, many lost their jobs and can’t find other ones.
Many of the jobs they lost will not be coming back, now or ever.
The truth of it is that this was always going to happen and covid-19 just accelerated the process - Automation , AI VR and machine learning , outsourcing to other countries - for more efficient production
Restaurants will come back, but a growing number will have iPad terminals for customers to place their orders and automated machines preparing the food.
Machines don’t require social distancing and special air conditioning and will not sue if the company is not strictly following CDC recommendations.
Many that served the commuters will simply disappear. We will get self-driving trucks and self-driving cars,
Millions of workers will be put out of work by automated machines.
Will companies invest in hiring people back to do the work or buy machines that will do it?
Education and learning in the USA and the global stat of play
According to an analysis of data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) done by the Educational Testing Service, the basic skills of millennials in the American workforce are the lowest or tied for lowest among all the countries they surveyed.
Workers in the United States are now competing with countries in Asia whose workforces were largely illiterate 40 years ago, but whose high school graduates leave high school now with the equivalent of as much as two-and-one-half years more education than our high school graduates.
The USA high school vocational education system has almost vanished.
The USA community colleges have adjusted to the poor performance of their high school graduates by offering a curriculum that would be regarded as a high school curriculum by the standards of any country leading the OECD league tables.
The quality of the technical training available in most of USA community colleges is far behind the quality of vocational education in Switzerland, Singapore and many other countries.
USA firms are investing much less in staff training than they used to.
The US Army, which was once a major source of middle-level technical skills for the whole country when young people were being drafted, now keeps the people it trains, so they are no longer available to the civilian economy.
Competition from off shore
Young people in countries on the other side of the world are better educated and more than willing to work for much less, because their wages will go much farther there than they will here.
The internet has made it possible for well-educated people in those countries to work for American firms without leaving either their country or their home.
Those people in those other countries who are better educated will be coming for USA jobs - And they won’t have to move.
Competition from automation
There have been stunning advances in natural language processing, machine learning, sensing, the ability of the machines to handle things that are fragile and more.
Machines can now write music, stories, and news reports and invest money and destroy military targets and drive trucks and mine ore and cook food in ways that rival the best that humans can do
But the American education and job training system. And the performance metrics has stayed the same while one country after another plows right past us.
What the USA needs to do to change this paradigm
Marc Tucker’s conclusion
“My message to the Biden administration -
Make it possible for millions of unemployed people to get the training from the nations’ community colleges and other providers that will make them more attractive to employers offering jobs and, while you are doing it, give them the income support they and their families will need to stay afloat while they are in training.”
Almost all the growth in employment from now on will be in high- skill, high-wage jobs. That is impossible to do with the education and job training system we have.
We need to create the kind of education and training system the country needs in the long-term to build widely shared prosperity for everyone.
Put in place the key elements of the continuous lifelong learning system that we will need to move forward.
Tags: education policy, globalization, politics, system design, workforce
