Students And Worker Training
Joseph N. Abraham, M.D.
A new concept emerging in many communities is the idea that the primary goal of education is to produce better workers. Our schools should support our economy. As might be expected, the people advocating such an approach tend to be employers.
Such an approach appears to be insufficient. First of all, if we are engaged in workforce development, then what workers are we developing? For which job shall we train workers? There is a popular slide show claiming that today's graduate will hold 10 to 14 jobs by age 38. What will those jobs be? And even if we knew what they would be, we couldn't possibly train for that many jobs. For which of them should we train our workers?
Even if we were to take the unreasonable approach that we are training "workers" who would spend an entire career in one kind of work, technology changes. The abilities required today of the lowest-skilled jobs are far different today than they were 20 years ago. Even janitors need to be able to order supplies on-line, handle new equipment, and understand the proper use and disposal of dangerous chemicals; for jobs more complicated than custodial work, the needed skills expand exponentially. So if by some chance we could successfully train our students for one job that they would keep their entire careers, we will still need to spend large sums of money constantly re-training them. Unless, of course, our workers could train themselves. And that provides our first clue.
Another problem that emerges is that in traditional educational approaches, we have to decide whether we wish to train leaders or employees. The education of the doctor, the engineer and the attorney focus on broad, theoretical education and in-depth analysis. By contrast, the training of the nurse, the mechanic and the paralegal, focus more on practical skills, narrow guidelines, and clerical tasks. And even minimal experience has shown us that it is impossible to predict where any student will end up in the business. So if we train the employee, we fail the leader; and vice versa. This supplies us with another clue.
Next, we need to ask how it is that citizens, with moderate private income, should pay taxes to produce workers for corporations, which have very large budgets? If commerce needs to train workers for the corporation, private individuals should not pay taxes to support this.
There is a related philosophical problem here. Industry generally insists on a minimalist government, and the freest markets possible. So if industry desires division of business and government, how can we then decide that it is the responsibility of government to underwrite the needs of industry? If business argues that it is more flexible and efficient than government at everything else, then it is disingenuous to now argue that government should train industry's workers. It would seem to be an attempt to shift the cost to the general population, even though it will be less efficient, simply because business interests will bear a much smaller cost. So worker training seems to be at odds with the key concepts of the free market, particularly efficiency and accountability. That clue points more to the problems with motives rather than goals, but it is an important insight nonetheless.
Workforce development is also at odds with the tenets of the democracy. Consider for a moment that workforce development is what totalitarian regimes target (and we must remember, poorly-run businesses can be eerily similar to totalitarian regimes). The last thing an oppressive organization-- government, corporation, or church-- wants, is thinkers. Highly centralized organizations do not want hard questions asked by their minions, they do not want workers who will question the status quo. All manner of dictators want mindless workers, who will tacitly and faithfully serve the desires of the leadership. The needs of the dictator vs. the needs of the democracy is the last clue, and points up more than anything the problem of equating education to workforce development.
The idea that our schools are places for workforce training is entirely inadequate for a strong democracy. In our country, we say that any boy or girl can become the President some day. But this is untrue, because they ALL do. When they vote, every one of us is the Commander-in-Chief; all citizens govern the nation.
Our democracy is at odds with classical thought. In "The Republic", democracy is dismissed as a model akin to allowing all citizens to steer the boat; hence the concept that continues after 2500 years, of "the ship of state". The argument against democracy has been rejected in the modern world, of course, and we can see that it is precisely because everyone steers that the Free World also steers the world.
But that is true only if the citizens are a hardy group of equals, of free, self-reliant, thinking citizens. Democracy fails in illiterate, impoverished countries of the world, where it quickly declines into an autocracy. Democracy only flourishes where the citizens are independent-minded.
Given these consideration, workforce development is entirely insufficient; employee training hardly prepares one for the rigorous demands of the citizen. For free nations to thrive, they need-- no, they require-- trenchant, well-rounded citizens. But this equally is true for the town, the temple, and even the trades.
Workers are not what we need, not primarily. Citizens are what we need. The needs of the democracy require citizens with understandings of technology, geography, culture, history, political science, and economics. As the US is engaged in battles abroad, we can see that our misunderstanding of the cultures we are dealing with, and their history, has led to some enormous errors. As we engage with countries around the globe, we do not want to make those mistakes again. And so the person in the street needs not only to have been educated in these fields, but needs equally to continue that education, as a life-long quest.
We need citizens who are flexible and broadly educated, who have a grasp of how science and history and literature and traditions commingle to produce cultures, communities-- and citizens and nations. And yes, the citizen will also be able to hold a job; but she will also be able to hold down many different jobs, because she will be able to quickly learn and re-train herself to the accelerating changes in the modern market.
And in the ideal economy, she will only hold jobs run by yet other well-rounded citizens, by supervisors who equally understand that all of their workers have eyes, and ears-- and brains-- and who are therefore key assets, and critical decision-makers in the everyday running of the company. As business becomes more complex, and as the workforce in the advanced economies becomes better-educated, new models of management increasingly move decision-making from the centralized, dictatorial autocrat, to the decentralized, autonomous employee. Exactly like the democracy.
We need so much more than employees. We need members of the democracy, those who can think and learn at a level equal to the demands of the modern world. And we need them in the voting booth, the council meeting, the church, and the civic club-- in addition to the workshop. So if we target employees primarily, or even first, then government, schools, and neighborhoods will all fall, and our businesses will fall with them.
But if we graduate broadly-educated citizens, all will flourish.
Joseph N. Abraham, MD, is president of APSE, booksXYZ.com, The Non-profit Bookstore listing over 2,000,000 http://booksXYZ.com/ books. He wrote the book Happiness: A Physician Biologist Looks at Life. Don't reprint this exact article. Instead, reprint a free unique content version of this same article.
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