Sometimes I feel caught in the middle. My language and concepts seem too esoteric for hard-nosed business people, and my focus on increasing economic effectiveness seems to pedestrian for academics. I get to live with the blank stares of corporate executives every day, so that I have grown relatively used to. But for some reason I am always hopeful that people who spend their lives thinking about education will understand me better. The greatest disappointment is when I realize that the academic professionals who are engaged in education are just as invested in continuing a bad system as the corporations believe they are. I realize that modern western education systems are really good at producing three kinds of professions: academics, investment bankers and attorneys. Since all three work in the field of analyses, they are all deeply invested in making sure that the education system continues to pump out more of them, however damaging that may be.
Perhaps it is just my native cynicism, but I don’t think that there will be a spontaneous societal recognition of the need for changing education, nor will there ever be a conversation amongst powerful people about ideas that will result in fundamental changes to our education system. Systemic inertia and myopic self-interest being what they are, nobility, goodness and wisdom are not the best way to get a bureaucracy to change what it does.
But that doesn't mean all is lost. I do believe that if you can get alignment between what is right and what is good, between what corporations need to succeed in the creative age and the capabilities of education to increase the generative capacity of wise, connected and emotionally aware agents in an open civil society where production of value is assessed on the basis of true cost and sustainability… then you will start to change the education agenda.
Just as organizations have had to go through the “mission / purpose” exercise in order to align their productive capability with an ever-more dynamic market landscape, I believe that once schools understand that what they do doesn’t get their products (educated children) jobs (and therefore doesn’t get them money), they will start to change their behaviors and fundamentally examine why they exist and how they deliver value.
Inevitably the education academics will change the subject and move to America's weakness against other countries in standardized testing, especially math and science. I think they are using this as a blunt instrument to show that the education system is working but inefficient; that we are doing the right things in education, but just not hard enough or with enough focus and fervor. They are dangerously wrong.
I don’t believe that a solid grounding in deep math and science is a prerequisite for future economic success in western economies. Saying that we should be concerned because we are falling behind other countries in standardized testing is exactly that same as equating America to a football team whose front linemen are small compared to other teams. The logical conclusion from this data is that we need to get bigger lineman in order to compete. So we start building up our linemen and buying better, bigger front line talent at the same time another team comes out with the west coast offense and makes running up the middle less of a competitive advantage. In short, you can achieve the objective of optimizing a certain capability but lose the game anyway.
Learning math and science are not ends in-and-of themselves. They are means to increasing production in economic and scientific endeavors. We may all be competing on the same field, but limiting how we play the game to the standard model will surely result in a loss for the United States.
We can’t use the old linear progression type of thinking in assessing future competitive dynamics. You would think that China would have to put in a copper-based communications capability before they could progress to cell phones, but you would be dead wrong. As is reported on the Earth Policy Institute website in February 2005:
Nowhere is the explosive growth more visible than in the electronics sector. In 1996 China had 7 million cell phones and the United States had 44 million. By 2003 China had rocketed to 269 million versus 159 million in the United States. In effect, China is leapfrogging the traditional land-line telephone stage of communications development, going directly to mobile phones.
The U.S. will not be competitive in the long-term in analytical skills. The simple fact is that a middle-class kid from the U.S. will never be as competitive as a poor kid from China in math and science on the playing field of pure rote learning and fundamental mechanics. It’s not a xenophobic generalization. It is a recognition that China is going to invest more in math and science education than the U.S., that a middle class American won't wake up hungry and thinking that a good math and science education is the only way to get food and that the kid in China is going to have access to cheaper goods and services than the kid in U.S. In short, the problem is structural: it’s an economics, cultural and initiative problem more than anything else. This means we are playing the same game (global economics) but we need to put a fundamentally different type of team on the field in order to “win” (however loosely that may be defined).
Again, all is not lost. Far from it. Even innovations in math and science will be far more dependent on Einstein-types of skills (fundamentally reformulating the problem to arrive at a totally different perspective and solution) than Newton-types of skills (increasing precision in the description and prediction of a phenomenon). While Einstein clearly understood math, it was not his forte. He was first and foremost a creative who was given the space to think differently because he wasn’t deeply embedded in the physics community of that day which was proclaiming that all things that could be discovered about physics were in the past.
Leveraging the comparative cultural advantage of the U.S. in a creative economy (openness to failure, experimentation and connection across cultural and economic boundaries) should be our first goal. It aligns what is good (increasing the generative capacity of all children, independent of race, creed, color or disability to produce sustainable value that benefits them and the buyer) with what is right (providing more jobs for more people while decreasing the cultural, societal, environmental and economic waste created by those jobs). I believe that the structural deficiencies of the corporatist system that feeds a consumerist dependency on individual gratification as the heart of economic prosperity is at the core of a lot of what ails us. Of course, I could be totally wrong. But one thing I learned long ago is that it is better to be clear than certain. And on this, at least, I am clear.
It's not education academics who have pushed us towards standardized testing, it's the general public and by extension, politicians. Teachers don't like it wherever it's introduced, and academics raise the same "teaching to the test" complaints you do.
Testing is about one thing, and that's systemic accountability. There is a broad sense that school budgets have not been put to use efficiently, that job security takes precedence over performance, and that the system is not capable of evaluating itself objectively.
My feeling is that education has become an issue not unlike immigration, where the people who "own" the problem have lost the trust of their "customers." I don't think the average person really believes that standardized testing is nirvana either, but what else are we supposed to do? Your alternative hypothesis is interesting and might, if we were dealing with angels instead of men, work wonderfully, but my fear would be that it would only exacerbate the flaws of the past 20 years.
Posted by: Colin Kingsbury | June 06, 2007 at 01:26 PM