Students need to concentrate on the basics: Math, science, communication
Danielle Portteus, an Evening News reporter, posted an interested presentation on the Eyes and Ears forums. A list of non-so-random facts about education, technology and the global economy, it certainly provides food for thought. You can also find it at the Michigan Department of Education Web site.
In my opinion, the central message is that we’re well into the new global, knowledge-based economy. With the help of their teachers and parents, our students need to be concentrating on learning the fundamentals of math, science and communication (literacy in languages and in computers) in order to be prepared for the jobs of the future.
If we’re not prepared, all those Chinese and Indian students will be. Jobs are like water. The best jobs will flow to where the best-prepared workers live. If China and India lead the world in producing mathematicians and engineers, that’s where the best jobs will go.
Google chose Ann Arbor for its advertising department because Ann Arbor has a good pool of highly educated workers. But how many other Michigan cities can say that?
Low-skill jobs that don’t require higher education will flow to wherever the lowest paid workers live. That’s why manufacturing jobs are moving to countries with cheaper standards of living. In the future, we won’t want the manufacturing jobs - if we have them, it will mean we’re the lowest paid workers.
The problem, of course, for Michigan and the rest of the United States, is that our economy depends on those manufacturing jobs for a few more years. How can we maintain our standard of living while we transition from a manufacturing economy to the knowledge economy of the future? That’s the $64,000 question.
Maybe Charles Ballard has the answer. A professor of economics at Michigan State University, he’s speaking tomorrow at the Business and Industry Luncheon at Monroe County Community College. The topic is his latest book, “Michigan’s Economic Future.”
His book covers some of these same issues, although for the most part it focuses on the mess Michigan has created for itself in funding of government services. Mr. Ballard’s talk should be interesting, given the stalemate in Lansing over the state’s budgt crisis.
April 13th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
I couldn’t agree more. I just started teaching a class at the community college and am a little in culture shock. I was in high school quite a while back, but I was not allowed to hand in ripped-off spiral notebook paper for homework assignments. And in reading the homework I’m hard pressed to believe I’m not looking at high school papers - from the poor English and grammar alone.
Japan graduates more engineers per year than the US.
That’s not per capita. That’s TOTAL. And China’s numbers exceed that.
The sense of entitlement that today’s students exhibit will certainly be a recipe for that giant sucking sound of tech jobs flowing overseas. Student aren’t willing to take on the sciences and engineering, or the fields that enable innovation and cutting edge technology, yet feel that somehow they will be millionare CEOs of their own high tech corporation in their 20’s. Yet there is no sense that they are WORKING toward this goal; rather that it will arrive on their doorstep somehow.
This is not a sweeping generalization, to be sure, but I sure have observed the “entitlement” syndrome. Growing up upper middle class with a lot of things handed to them on the proverbial silver platter (parents buying them a new SUV for their 16th birthday?!?) leads kids to believe they can leave home and instantly have the same standard of living (ipods, tivos, SUVs, eating out, big screen TVs) that their parents had to work so hard for.
I sound more bitter on this subject than I actually am; I have a lot of hope for America. But I think there will be a wake-up call in the next generation that will have to make people hungry for success again, hungry for their own American dream, but be willing to work for it.
Like the people who were hungry enough to come to this country and brave the odds to carve out their little piece of pie in the first place, be it now or generations past.
Because if they don’t, there are billions of Chinese who are hungry enough to do whatever it takes to be the best.
Helen - who advises her students to learn Chinese. They’ll need it.
April 16th, 2007 at 6:26 am
Well said, Helen.
One of Michigan’s challenges - along with the rest of the nation - is to get that message out to young people - and their parents who are enabling them.