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Article By: JosephN.Abraham,M.D.
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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.
Such an approach appears to be insufficient. First of all, if we are engaged in workforce development, then what workers are we developing? For which job shall we train workers? There is a popular slide show claiming that today's graduate will hold 10 to 14 jobs by age 38. What will those jobs be? And even if we knew what they would be, we couldn't possibly train for that many jobs. For which of them should we train our workers?
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.
Another problem that emerges is that in traditional educational approaches, we have to decide whether we wish to train leaders or employees. The education of the doctor, the engineer and the attorney focus on broad, theoretical education and in-depth analysis. By contrast, the training of the nurse, the mechanic and the paralegal, focus more on practical skills, narrow guidelines, and clerical tasks. And even minimal experience has shown us that it is impossible to predict where any student will end up in the business. So if we train the employee, we fail the leader; and vice versa. This supplies us with another clue.
Next, we need to ask how it is that citizens, with moderate private income, should pay taxes to produce workers for corporations, which have very large budgets? If commerce needs to train workers for the corporation, private individuals should not pay taxes to support this.
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.
These ideas are inadequate, because in a free democracy, education should not serve worker training. Here in the USA, one of our favorite saws is that it is possible for any young student to be elected President one day. The problem with this argument, is that EVERY student in the USA becomes President. When we cast our ballots, we are all the Chief Executive of the country; so everyone is President.
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.
However, that is accurate only when the population consists of robust, self-reliant, and intelligent thinkers. In the weariest parts of the world, where there is is insufficient education and no tradition of free independence, democracies collapse. Free, democratic governments only survive where the voters think for themselves, and act accordingly.
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 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.
Our world demands citizens who are versed in many disciplines, who can analyze and synthesize, who understand that the sciences, the humanities, business, politics, and the social sciences are all inter-related, and that they all interact to give us the world we live in-- the one through which we must navigate our "ship of state". Of course, a citizen who understands these things will also be a good employee; but not good at one job, and at one trade, but at almost anything we can throw at her, because she will have the understanding and intellectual skills to re-educate herself to adapt to the rapidly changing world around her.
And after we have graduated our citizen-employee, she will move into a workforce managed by other such citizens, who understand that every worker, and every customer, are also broadly educated, and who each supply important opinions and vantage points. These new-age managers will then weave the divergent viewpoints into a more accurate picture of the world around them, and make better decisions. So the business of the future will look less and less like the autocracies that America was designed to replace, and will look more and more like the democracy our Founders designed to replace them.
We need thinkers, we need learners, and we need leaders: in the democracy, in the community, and in the corporation. If we train Workers, but not citizens, as the democracy and the community collapse, the workforce will collapse with them.
But if we graduate broadly-educated citizens, all will flourish.
Article Source: ArticleZones.com
About the Author
Joseph N. Abraham, MD, is president and founder 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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