7gen Bloc
Why Education Belongs Back on the Agenda
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The bleak economy has increasingly dominated the headlines. It's easy to see why, given the yo-yoing stock market and through-the-roof energy prices. But the economy's difficulties have overshadowed an equally troubling trend: since the late 1960s, U.S. high-school graduation rates have steadily declined.
Riane Eisler, in her wonderful book, "The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics
This troubling development threatens the country's long-term prospects. It also widens the gap between rich and poor, as Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz describe in their book, "The Race Between Education and Technology
"In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens," write Goldin and Katz. "The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power."
We've all read about India and China's huge investment in training professionals of all kinds. Brooks argues that in the U.S., our "skills slowdown is the biggest issue facing the country." He rightly reminds us, as we send our kids back to school, that "this slow-moving problem, more than any other, will shape the destiny of the nation."
One serial entrepreneur said a great phrase: “Employees commiserate, entrepreneurs brainstorm.”
I have three University degrees, used to be a University professor and my wife is still teaching there. We both are very pro-education, but we find that the unrelenting shrill of demands for more conventional education in this country is quite misplaced.
To listen to some, you’d think that stewing kids in schools for more and more years, like the books discussed by Brooks propose, is the only way to attain national prosperity. But as Canadian, European and especially Eastern-European experiences show, more degrees do not create more and better jobs (I presume that better jobs and better living are the final goals of educational investment.) We cannot school the country into prosperity in the absence of productive risk-taking, otherwise known as entrepreneurship.
China, India, and Brazil, the unlikely nations to encroach on our prosperity, do so despite the huge disparity between our vast funding for our okay schools and stellar universities and their shortage of funds for their ramshackle schools and so-so universities. They grab our high-skill jobs not because they beat us on some ”school years per student” ratio, but because they have the entrepreneurial zeal for those jobs and a favorable dollar exchange.
We can do little about the dollar, but we can do a lot about our entrepreneurial zeal.
Although few of us can tough it out as lone entrepreneurs, given a supportive group environment, all of us can be far more entrepreneurial collectively, within our established companies or communities in a way somewhat similar to support communities of Grameen Bank. Once entrepreneurially engaged, instead of vegetating in front of TVs, we'll want to learn everything we need to know about our business. We'll do it within or without school walls, ensuring our life-long learning.
So, I'd say that it is not the money or the greatness of educational bureaucracies that is sorely missing in our country: it is the supportive environment for such company- or community-based entrepreneurs.
Mind you, the typical school desk-based courses on entrepreneurship won't fix the problem. Having been to some of those, and seeing the meager results, I offered some "big people" a better method for increasing the level of community- or in-company entrepreneurship. Sadly, the educational establishment and even "the titans of industry" are not serious about the loss of entrepreneurial spirit in America. They are even not serious or about increasing their profits via employee empowerment. What they are serious, however, is about commiserating on the lack of educational attainment...
...like it's going to help.
Andrei Vorobiev