So the office is getting very political lately, but it
doesn't bother me, I actually enjoy the food for thought. George actually sent
out a company wide e-mail this morning and it really got me thinking how we as
human beings never stop learning. Day to day we observe and absorb everything
around us. Some have a bigger appetite for knowledge than others. And some have
an appetite for knowledge that only pertains to things that interest them. I am
one of these people. I already have a clear understanding as to what is
important in life and I still have a lot to learn. Am I satisfied by what I've
learned? I can say for certain, "HELL NO"!! Even now, I don't feel
like an adult or someone ready to pass down knowledge or wisdom to the future
generation. I would like to at least get my bachelors degree before having
children. But anyways, read this and tell me your thoughts
Thomas L Friedman
I JUST arrived in
Shanghai, but I’m thinking about Estonia
and wondering about something Presidents Clinton and Obama have been
saying.
Wired magazine
reported last week that public schools in Estonia are establishing a program for
teaching first graders — and kids in all other grades — how to do computer
programming. Wired said that the curriculum was created “because of the
difficulty Estonian companies face in hiring programmers. Estonia has a burgeoning tech industry thanks in
part to the success of Skype, which was developed in Estonia in
2003.”
The news from
Estonia prompted The Guardian
newspaper of London to publish an online poll
asking its readers: “Children aged 7 to 16 are being given the opportunity to
learn how to code in schools in Estonia, should U.K. school
children be taught programming as part of their school day?” It’s fascinating to
read about all this while visiting Shanghai,
whose public school system in 2010 beat the rest of the world in math, science
and reading in the global PISA exam of 15-year-olds. Will the Chinese
respond by teaching programming to preschoolers?
All of this made me
think Obama should stop using the phrase — first minted by Bill Clinton in 1992
— that if you just “work hard and play by the rules” you should expect that the
American system will deliver you a decent life and a chance for your children to
have a better one. That mantra really resonates with me and, I am sure, with
many voters. There is just one problem: It’s out of
date.
The truth is, if you
want a decent job that will lead to a decent life today you have to work harder, regularly reinvent
yourself, obtain at least some form of postsecondary education, make sure that
you’re engaged in lifelong learning and play by the rules. That’s not a bumper
sticker, but we terribly mislead people by saying
otherwise.
Why? Because when
Clinton first
employed his phrase in 1992, the Internet was just emerging, virtually no one
had e-mail and the cold war was just ending. In other words, we were still
living in a closed system, a world of walls, which were just starting to come
down. It was a world before Nafta and the full merger of globalization and the
information technology revolution, a world in which unions and blue-collar
manufacturing were still relatively strong, and where America could still write
a lot of the rules that people played by.
That world is gone.
It is now a more open system. Technology and globalization are wiping out
lower-skilled jobs faster, while steadily raising the skill level required for
new jobs. More than ever now, lifelong learning is the key to getting into, and
staying in, the middle class.
There is a quote
attributed to the futurist Alvin Toffler that captures this new reality: In the
future “illiteracy will not be defined by those who cannot read and write, but
by those who cannot learn and relearn.” Any form of standing still is
deadly.
I covered the
Republican convention, and I was impressed in watching my Times colleagues at
how much their jobs have changed. Here’s what a reporter does in a typical day:
report, file for the Web edition, file for The International Herald Tribune,
tweet, update for the Web edition, report more, track other people’s tweets, do
a Web-video spot and then write the story for the print paper. You want to be a
Times reporter today? That’s your day. You have to work harder and smarter and develop new
skills faster.
Van Ton-Quinlivan,
the vice chancellor for work force and economic development at the California
Community Colleges System, explained to me the four basic skill sets out there
today. The first are people who are “ready now.” That’s people with exactly the
right skills an employer is looking for at the right time. Employers will give
the local labor market and schools the first chance at providing those people,
but if they are not available they’ll go the “shortest distance to find them,”
she said, and today that could be anywhere in the world. Companies who can’t
find “ready now” will look for “ready soon,” people who, with limited training
and on-the-job experience, can fit right in. If they can’t find those, some will
hire “work ready.” These are people with two or four years of postsecondary
education who can be trained, but companies have shrinking budgets for that now
and want public schools to do it. Last are the growing legions of the “far from
ready,” people who dropped out or have only a high school diploma. Their
prospects for a decent job are small, even if they are ready to “work hard and
play by the rules.”
Which is why if we
ever get another stimulus it has to focus, in part, on getting more people more
education. The unemployment rate today is 4.1 percent for people with four years
of college, 6.6 percent for those with two years, 8.8 percent for high school
graduates, and 12.0 percent for dropouts.
That’s why I prefer
the new mantra floated by Clinton at the Democratic convention, “We have
to prepare more Americans for the new jobs that are being created in a world
fueled by new technology. That’s why investments in our people” — in more
community colleges, Pell grants and vocational-training classes — “are more
important than ever.”
