Many years ago I attended an education Conference in upstate New York and saw, as I remember, a Keynote speaker who was a superintendent of an upstate district. He told the audience of an experience he had with a business owner in his region. The businessman told the superintendent that the students being graduated were not coming to him with the skills needed for his industry. He invited the superintendent to visit his plant and see the problem he faced matching the needed skills with the skills being taught. He then told the superintendent that he couldn’t even hire Lathe operators from the high school graduates.
The Superintendent visited the industrial arts teacher the next day, and asked if the proper use of the lathe was taught in his class. The superintendent even looked over the lathe that students used to do their work. It was an impressive piece of equipment and it all seemed in order. The students seemed to be doing a fine job with the lathe. This superintendent was ready to face the businessman in his plant assured that the school district’s students were certainly prepared with the skills to operate a lathe.
The next day after the social amenities were exchanged between the superintendent and the plant executives, they all took a walking tour of the plant ending up in the area of the plant where the lathes and the lathe operators did their work. To the superintendent’s surprise it looked nothing like the lathe area of the school’s shop. The touring group entered a closed-in, air-conditioned area. In that area the superintendent was introduced to a young woman in a white lab coat as she operated a computer that made all of the needed adjustments to operate the plant’s lathes. The superintendent was educated at that moment about relevance in education.
Now we are hearing from many of our leaders that in order for our country to recapture and secure its prominent position in our new global economy, we need to be innovative. Innovation will drive us to where we need to be. It was, after all, innovation that put our country in its position of prominence in the world initially.
When our public education system started out, we were way ahead of so many other countries with unlimited resources to work with; it is no wonder that we were successful. We may have conceived of the public education system to provide workers for the country’s workforce, but that, as a goal, was surpassed by many, as opportunity and innovation offered a path to security and wealth.
How do we now, in our present system, promote innovative thinking in order to produce innovation? When we look at the lathes that we are using in education, do they look like the lathes of today’s industry? Can we continue to use yesterday’s methodology to create today’s thinkers? Are we creating workers for industry, or are we creating leaders of industry?
If we continue to assess students who find no relevance in a mandatory education that they are not interested in, we should not be surprised at the failing results. Should we not consider other factors of poverty, race and language gaps as possible reasons for failure? Is the blame to be placed on the teachers who teach it, or should we look at the methodology and the goals of education? Could it be that the system is failing the teachers and not the other way around?
We need to assess what skills our children will need in their world, for it will be very different from ours. We need to provide them the opportunities to develop those skills. We need to promote innovative thinking in order to promote innovation. We need to be more innovative with education in order to move it from where it is, to where it should be going. We need not look back at what we had, but rather support teachers who are innovators and moving us forward. We need to support teachers with best practices, professional development, and encourage and support those teachers who do more than just ask students to be lifelong learners. The best teachers are learners themselves. They practice and model lifelong learning. They are education innovators, finding new ways to learn and teach in relevant terms, providing opportunities for their students to do the same. The successes of these educators can be more than models for others; they can be inspirational as the successes of the students are shared with teachers who have yet to become innovative.
Skills of acquiring information, communicating, critically thinking, and creating are the skills of innovation. To pull out an old chestnut, you don’t get that through osmosis, it must be taught. Our students need more than a lecture about the use of a lathe in a shop class. We need them to understand the world in which they will live.
Tom, very nice post. You’re exactly right – too often, we spend too much time teaching the tools when we should be spending more time teaching WHY these tools are effective. Technology and social media are constantly evolving, and if our learners understand the priniciples governing learning and collaboration, they’ll be able to adapt to the next wave of new tools.
Johnny Kissko
Tom,
Nice post. I agree–the best teachers are learners themselves. I think it’s important to model learning in order to transfer that desire authentically, naturally to our students.
I wonder, if teachers were truly supported in their educational endeavors, how much better would the state of education be in our nation? We certainly wouldn’t be talking about ed reform, or at least, not as much.
What I know for sure, is that educators must continue to grow, develop and learn throughout our careers or we don’t stand a chance of reaching the apex of innovation we are capable of.
Our students deserve teachers who never stop learning.
No doubt we need to teach all the thinking skills associated with innovation and creativity. I personally have become just a bit cautious about industry’s suggestion about what skills students need. Ten years ago, the fiber optic industry partnered with the school system for which I worked at the time, and there was all this talk about our students needing to be able to work in teams, problem solve, among other things. Our school system enthusiastically adopted their suggestions. Fast-forward ten years later. The fiber optic industry began moving operations to other countries with lower labor costs. All these students we had been teaching and instilling with this industry’s suggested skills now found themselves unemployed as adults. Moral of the story for me was, this industry did not really care what skills we were teaching, cheaper labor costs were more important. As we look for what we should be teaching our students, we need to be careful about limiting our students possibilities by blinding following the directions of industry. After all, they are into profit-maximization, not potential maximization of our students.
Exactly! Adaptability and the ability to learn new skills is crucial, as well as training provisions by industry.
“We need to assess what skills our children will need in their world, for it will be very different from ours.”
Love that line, Tom. In terms of technology our students (my children) need to be able to communicate, and communicate effectively, using technology…among many other skills. In years past they were taught how to hand write a letter, address an envelope, and place a stamp on it because that was a primary means of communicating with the world. While still useful, that mode of communication is rapidly disappearing. At what point do students learn how to send an email, a text, an IM, join a chat session, join and participate in a webinar, etc. Communication in their world is dramatically different than years past. Right now, most schools are not preparing them for it; using tech to communicate locally & globally is not valued by many teachers & admins and therefore is not explained and taught.
Is the purpose of education (particularly general high school education) to prepare students for the world of work? In the lanthe example, was the fault solely that of the school? What elements of using a lanthe should the school have been teaching and what elements should the employer have been teaching as part of orientation?
Hi Tom,
Interesting post.
According to Lauren Resnick [Resnick, L. B. (1987). The 1987 Presidential Address: Learning in school and out. Educational Researcher, 16 (9), pp. 13-20], there are three main views about the role of education in American society:
1. schools should prepare people for economic participation (i.e., work)
2. schools should prepare people to learn effectively over the long course of their work lives, and
3. schools should prepare people for civic and cultural participation
and that we as nation struggle with these competing visions and purposes of education. (see also David Labaree’s (1997) Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34. )
Resnick notes that “the job training vocational education agenda fails today because of the sheer impossibility of preparing people for the quickly changing requirements of specific jobs. The direct training approach can only work when there is relatively slow change in the technological and social structure of work and when the equipment of the workplace can be duplicated within the economic and safety tolerances of the education system. Neither of these conditions holds today.”
The other issue with the view that schools should mainly be about preparing people for economic participation (work) is that such education curtails opportunity by tracking some students out of high-opportunity and intellectually demanding curricula.