Tough Choices or Tough Times

Last week I read several articles about this paper from  the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce.  A PowerPoint is here.  This reports says that the American standard of living is going to take a nasty dive if we cannot increase the number of people working in “creative” fields.  The chart below shows the three types of work defined by the report.

The areas are routine work done by people.  Routine work done by machines.  And finally, creative work.  Notice the triangle is split near the bottom of the creative diamond.  Only the top portion of the graph will be work done in the United States.  Almost all routine work will be completed in less developed countries.

Education (part of the creative diamond) will need to change drastically.  The commission recommends we begin to recruit teachers from the top third of all graduates.  Create an incentive for these students to go into education by offering a six-digit pay scale for the best teachers.  

We need to train students to solve problems.  One of the key points in the PowerPoint explains that our students must be creative, innovative and able to learn new things quickly.  That last point is a tough one.  It is one I stress in my classes all the time.  Being involved in technology requires me to continually learn new things because I have to teach them.  All educators need to do the same.

There was a time when the first computer course every educator took was programming in BASIC.  The computers we had in our classrooms didn’t do much more than BASIC.  I remember when Hypercard was the topic everyone needed to learn in education.  Now very few of my students have heard of the program.  In the mid-90’s we learned HTML.  At the start of the 21st century video editing was hot.  Now we have to manage web 2.0 applications.  Somewhere in there all our presentations switched to PowerPoint and we started taking all our pictures with digital cameras.

Students graduating from high school last spring had Microsoft Office available to them from kindergarten through twelfth grade.  Most of them will take a course in college that introduces them to this same set of tools.  Change takes time in education.  We need to speed things up if we want to stay ahead.