This is dangerous at a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever. Which is why the goal of education today, argues Wagner, should not be to make every child “college ready” but “innovation ready” — ready to add value to whatever they do.
That is a tall task. I tracked Wagner down and asked him to elaborate. “Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/friedman-need-a-job-invent-it.html?_r=0
I like the idea of making every child "innovation ready." Now, how as leaders do we also make our own employees "innovation ready"?
ReplyDeleteOK, as an educator (and specifically a business educator) I’ve been told that my courses and curricula must address the “4 C’s”…Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, and Critical Thinking. Great! But then I’m beat up about making sure we have common measurable assessments (ostensibly so we can make data-driven decisions and adjustments), including the “embedded question” in every exam,making sure all my adjunct faculty use the same assessment tools, limiting adjunct faculty’s ability to change or insert course materials (“they really should be participating in the discussion board and the announcements. That’s their real value”.) Oh, and let’s load up that curriculum with 21st century skills and technical courses, that’s what employers want!
ReplyDeleteSo let’s fill up the students heads with technical skills and teach them better critical thinking by limiting their instructors’ abilities to think critically…sounds like a real recipe for success, no? NO!
The observation Friedman is leading us to is that we must understand that future development, success, individual as well as national economic independence and the like is to be achieved by regaining an understanding of the difference between “training” and “education.” Different words with different meanings. In my opinion, Friedman is begging us to return to education.
To use an example I start a lot of arguments with, consider the state of MBA programs in business education. If you examine an MBA program today you’ll find it packed with courses on leadership, innovation, ethical considerations and managing cultures and so forth, all of the soft skills we recognize as critical to organizational/personal success that are so hard to master. These courses teach the 4 C’s. Going back to my day of the “dark ages” MBA (1977 to be precise when it was considered a terminal degree…but I digress…) the curriculum contained managerial economics, marketing, econometrics, accounting, financial analysis and so forth. Sounds like giant training course doesn’t it? The difference is that by today’s time, we’ve moved those hard skills down the educational ladder into the bachelor’s and sometimes pre-bachelor’s levels. Students graduate knowing how to keep the books but they don’t know the ethical implications of financial reporting. They can build human resource information systems but they don’t know about leadership models. They’ve never been exposed to the history of civilizations so they can't explain and manage cultural differences. The list goes on and on. In 1977 if a holder of a bachelor’s degree in business applied for admission to an MBA program he/she might be turned away (not rejected, turned away) with the question “Why?...you already know all this stuff.” The intent of the MBA program was to take liberally educated folks and give them business knowledge and skills on the premise that their undergraduate work had taught them the 4 C’s. Now, we find that we need to take the students with business bachelor’s degrees into MBA programs precisely because they did not get the 4 C’s as undergrads…they were trained and not educated.
A commonly used expression containing advice we often don’t follow is “hire for attitude, train for skill.” If we need to expand the definition of attitude to include enough intellectual curiosity to have pursued the 4 C’s either formally or informally, then let’s do that…and follow the advice of the saying.