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Home | Business | Training
Schools and Business Skills 
By: 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.
It is not clear that this strategy is the best. One question that immediately emerges is, What job are we training our students for? The "Did You Know" video that is popular on the Internet points out that the average worker will hold about a dozen jobs before the age of 40. So if we are training a workforce, for what job are we training them? And how could we ever train them for that many different jobs?
Even if we made the poor assumption that we are training our students for just one job, the skill sets necessary for any position will change constantly. This is true for even the least-skilled jobs. Even menial workers will need, more and more, to work with computers, new equipment, and understand the potential liabilities inherent in any work. As the job description enlarges with moving up the organizational lader, the necessary skills accelerate at an ever-increasing rate.\. So even if there were only one career track for each student, we are committing ourselves to enormous, continuous ongoing training costs. That is, if our students are incapable of training themselves. That is our first insight here.
Next, we will need to decide whether each student will become management, or labor. Highly skilled jobs require critical thinking skills, and a wide knowledge of many different fields. Less-skilled jobs-- even middle management-- require a more focused training that concentrates more on attention to details, and frequently moves away from autonomous thinking. At the same time, it is impossible to predict who will be management, or labor. So, train the employee, fail the manager. Train the manager, fail the employee. This is a second consideration.
Next, why should the average taxpayer dedicate public funds garnered from her private, moderate income to fund the training of workers for industries, most of which earn much more money than the worker? If industry wishes better workers, you and I should not have to bear that cost out of our pockets.
And that brings us to a more fundamental question. Businesses frequently clamor for smaller government, and insist that private entities can do almost anything better than public bodies. Why then should government pay for the needs of businesses? If for-profit initiatives are superior to public bureaucracies, then let each business pick up the cost of worker training, and give us the most efficient, economical solution. Otherwise, it appears that business' interest in education is not truly educational, but purely mercenary: shift the costs to someone else. If businesses can do everything else better than government, why not train their own workers? This insight focuses on the origins of the workforce argument, rather than the conclusions, but it a crucial understanding nevertheless.
Another consideration is whether the concept of job training is consistent with the needs of the democracy. Police states want job training for the populace-- and nothing else (and more than a few businesses operate like police states). Whether in the state, the workplace, or in the church, dictatorial leaders want no one of independent mind. Police states hardly want challenges to their competence, much less, probity. Autocrats want quiet, unthinking, but efficient workers, who do, and do not ask. Job training as opposed to citizen training is the final insight, and strongly points to the problem of turning our schools into centers of workforce development.
These ideas are inadequate, because in a free democracy, education should not serve worker training. Here in the USA, one of our favorite saws is that it is possible for any young student to be elected President one day. The problem with this argument, is that EVERY student in the USA becomes President. When we cast our ballots, we are all the Chief Executive of the country; so everyone is President.
Historically, this is interesting. Socrates (via Plato) cautioned his pupils of the dangers inherent with democracy, and likened it to allowing everyone access to the ship's wheel (this is where we get the concept of the "ship of state"). Socrates was wrong, of course, and his fear is our triumph. It is through collective decision-making that the advanced countries excel.
However, that is accurate only when the population consists of robust, self-reliant, and intelligent thinkers. In the weariest parts of the world, where there is is insufficient education and no tradition of free independence, democracies collapse. Free, democratic governments only survive where the voters think for themselves, and act accordingly.
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.
We don't need to train workers. We need to train citizens. We need citizens who understand history, and science, and economics, and diversity of cultures-- particularly as it relates to geopolitics. Currently we are engaged in two wars in the Middle East. Regardless of how each of us may feel about those wars, all parties agree that costly mistakes were made because we did not fully understand the geopolitics of the region. And as the world grows smaller, we are becoming aware of the impossibility of understanding all of it diverse cultures; obviously, we will need to inform ourselves as we go. So we also need citizens, and workers, who continue to learn, and inquire, for their entire lives.
Democracy requires citizens; citizens who are scientists, philosophers, psychologists, economists, administrators, who can put it all together and derive some understanding of the world around us. Will the citizen who can do this also be a strong employee? Yes. And she will be a strong manager, a strong entrepreneur, as well as a strong civic activist, and a vocal and forceful advocate for progress, peace and prosperity. And when the marketplace shifts-- as it is continuously doing, at an ever-accelerating rate-- she will shift with it, because she will understand the fundamental concepts that will allow her to re-employ HERSELF.
And once we have educated the enlightened citizen-worker, she will also work for equally well-educated citizens, those who are mindful and respectful of the critical skills of their employees and their customers. And these enlightened managers will be able to take the input from all of these diverse viewpoints, and synthesize them to create business models that look less and less like the outmoded aristocratic structures of the past, and more and more like the democratic structures of today, and of the future.
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 train citizens, all will prosper.
Article Source: http://www.uberarticles.com/articles
Joseph N. Abraham, MD, is president of booksXYZ.com, The Non-profit Bookstore listing over 2,000,000 books. He wrote the book Happiness: A Physician Biologist Looks at Life.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, which means you may freely reprint it, in its entiretly, provided you include the author's resource box along with LIVE links (without "nofollow" tags).
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