I don't know where Tom Friedman and the people he pals with grew up or what kind of schools they attended but they obviously live on a different planet than I do.
He begins today's column with a talk he attended by Michele Rhee, the new "Chancellor" of the Washington, DC, school system (sorry, I just hate the title). The DC school system consists mainly of inner city schools and it has been struggling for decades.
Friedman somehow makes the jump between our nation's failed education system (debatable) and the recession.
While the subprime mortgage mess involved a huge ethical breakdown on
Wall Street, it coincided with an education breakdown on Main Street —
precisely when technology and open borders were enabling so many more
people to compete with Americans for middle-class jobs.
Also attending Rhee's talk was Todd Martin, a former global
executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international
investor. Before the talk Martin had this to say to Friedman:
“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the
decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly
at the middle and bottom ranges.”
Oh, really? Tell me more. Friedman:
A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his
firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting:
lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them
were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble,
that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to
imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work
were being retained. They are the new untouchables.
That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today.
Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again
hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to
make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs,
energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old
customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive ...
As
the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you
think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market,
those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can
compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with
new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the
top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and
not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing
technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done
poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make
them easily substitutable.” [emphasis mine] Yada, yada, yada...
This just pisses me off. These people don't have a clue about the real job market, or real people. They really don't.
Assuming you went to a public school in a working class/middle calls town or neighborhood like I did you will recall that for every A student there was a student who struggled. By 5th grade you could see some of them maxing out. No matter how hard they tried they couldn't grasp concepts that the smarter kids picked up in an instant. Nothing has changed since then. We will always have kids who will be lucky to graduate from high school. College is out of the question. Even the "average" student can be expected to have a lot of trouble getting a four year degree. Everyone maxes out at some point.
If you listen to the experts these days you get the impression that the answer to outsourcing and our jobless recovery is for the American worker to be more flexible, continue their education throughout most of their career so as they lose one job they can bounce to another. Work all day, go to school in the evenings, constantly learn new skills, move where the jobs are when they get laid off. If you snooze, you lose. And don't expect the government to mollycoddle you while you try to learn a new skill. Uh, uh, this is YOUR responsibility.
WTF?!! What kind of life is that? Look, kids entering kindergarten today are facing 13 years of public schooling, then an additional four years in college, and possibly 2-3 years more for an advanced degree to get a good job by the time they enter the job market. 17-20 fuckin' years of school just to get a good job. And then there's no guarantee of a decent job after all that! Faced with all that boring, mind-numbing schooling ahead of them, is it any wonder kids today seem unmotivated?
I grew up in a factory town. Our town had a population of about 35,000 and probably had 80 or so factories, plus more in a neighboring city. Many of the factory jobs were low-skill, perfect for those kids who struggled in school. These low skilled jobs have disappeared overseas (along with a lot of skilled jobs!) and a lot of these workers are now unemployed or underemployed. Most of these workers are not going to learn the skills described in Friedman's columns, they can't. And they make up a good portion of the job market.
Read Friedman's column and then ask yourself, is this the future you want for America, a future of long hours, lots of pressure to be constantly 'developing new ideas and recombining existing technologies" and be expected to occasionally reinvent yourself, spending a lot of your evenings in night class?
We need to rethink our education model. Most jobs don't require a four-year degree. We need to cut the years of schooling for many, and we need to tailor education to teach kids basic life skills and the basics needed in the job market. Those who need or want more education, make it available, but don't bog kids down for 17 years of school before they can begin a career.
We also need to reconsider our employment model. We need to find a way to make the job market more stable, increase benefits and wages, and give our workforce more leisure time, not less - and yes, we can afford it (it will come at the expense of the very wealthy). Sorry, but that's what best for the country!
We need to acknowledge that most people work to pay the bills, not because they want to work. Most people want to put in their 40 hour week and enjoy their friends and family in their free time. It may not always be possible, but we need to make it our goal. We need to recognize this and build our national policies around it. Our government must put the needs of the people above the desires of the corporations, and if it means free-market globalization, so be it. Remember, "We the People..."?
--Trakker
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