Education and Business: Enemies or Bedfellows?

Education has focused a lot of energy on pedagogy, as well as, assessment of student and educator outcomes. Technology has also provided educators an opportunity to increase student engagement and to enhance instruction. There is no doubt that this focus has improved performance for some, and created a more student-focused classroom for many.

However, the path forward needs to take a broader view.  This view requires that business, education and government work together to create ground-breaking changes.  These changes will require huge shifts for all involved.  It's time.

Historically, business has asked that education produce certain types of workers.  Since, the globalization of the marketplace, business need has driven education to produce more white collar workers. The reality is that not all people are wired to be white collar workers.  Not all people want to be white collar workers.  

Big business drives our economy, and in turn, the job market for our workforce. The fact that skilled labor has shifted overseas from American soil is not a new revelation.  However, it is having a deleterious affect on the American worker.  Education in America is forced to respond to the desires of the corporate sector, instead of responding to the diversity among American students and the broader populace.

It is time for big business to listen to education.  We need to continue to be the innovators of the world, as well as, becoming(once again) the leading producers in the world.  Yes, big business will have to pay American workers more money than workers overseas.  Honestly,  is a 3 trillion dollar annual profit rather than an 6 trillion dollar annual profit really a hardship for corporate America? Yes, I am just throwing out numbers, but you get my point.  Half of a whole lot is still a whole lot.

Capitalism is a great start up economic system.  However, it encourages greed, overly-competitive, and selfish behavior.  These are the models that our children see.  Yes, education needs to continue to change and improve.  Assessment isn't a bad thing, but assessment should fit student goals and capacities...not business goals focused on building an America that provides for an elite few.

We are the greatest country in the world.  Let's lead the way in humanism.  Let's define a business model that makes America great again.  Education will be happy to help!

The Heart of a Child

The most powerful and meaningful learning begins in the human heart.  It is our relationships with others that serve as the catalyst for these lessons. Yet, we leave the development of this critical domain almost entirely out of our schools.  We create rules to enforce suppression of behaviors, but do not teach students how to manage difficult emotions. We leave these lessons to the family and the church. In many instances, the family and the church are not adept at guiding young people in this area of human development.

Lessons of the heart are not as complicated as they may seem.  It is the lack of understanding and practice that make this domain so challenging.  Mostly, young people need to develop strategies for honoring and expressing their feelings in the right place, with the right people, and at the right time.  If schools begin these lessons early on, students will develop methods for managing their feelings and a tolerance for the most difficult of human emotions: fear, anger and pain.

It follows that if our students develop these skills at a young age and then continue to hone them, they will be less likely to turn to food, alcohol, violence, and self-harm to cope with the impact of these emotions.  They will be more likely to employ strategies that enable them to live harmoniously with their emotional selves and harness the power of their hearts.

Next Blog: Skill 1:  Awareness

The 21st Century School: Think Tank and Research and Development Organizations

Yesterday, I asked my 9 year old son (Turner) how he felt about his performance on the state-mandated assessment he had taken that day.   I felt relieved, of course, when he told me..."it was easy...just the same stuff we've already learned".

Turner is a case study of a kid who likes going to school.  Primary education can work for students who are comfortable with a social learning model.  I am concerned, however,  about his motivation as he reaches the middle school years.

These years comprise huge developmental changes for children across physical, cognitive, social, and emotional domains. They are "experienced".  They know what school is like.  A continuation of "more of the same" wears thin for these students. Instead, infusing the curriculum with a variety of pedagogical approaches centered upon problem-based learning, has the potential to re-engage the middle years student in the process of learning. Perhaps, to even ignite their love of learning.

In many ways, secondary students are ready to become a part of defining solutions to our world problems.  They are old enough to know that the world is not the illusion that we presented to them during their primary years. The illusion that we can protect them and shelter them from the problems that generations of world citizens have created.

Today, more than ever, students are savvy in ways that preceding generations were not.  They are both innocent and wise. Child-like and worn. They have glimpsed the real world and they know that there is much to do.

Flipping or Flipping Out?

What if we REALLY flipped it? What if our current workforce was infused with the ideas, gifts, and interests of today's students, instead of the other way around?

Currently,  unless a youngster is a gifted entrepreneur, it takes 40 to 50 years for the average person to have any sort of impact on the bureaucracy of business and government. For young people, this is a grueling and exhausting path that squashes motivation and desire.

The age of technology has shown that we are still a country of innovators and pioneers. Yet, we grind our children through a seemingly endless process of practice runs and assessments before we let them try out their own ideas. Honestly, our mistakes are really pretty glaring.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that we have a host of economic, political, and environmental problems.

We need to quit tinkering with education and find ways to engage students in solving the problems that face their generation, right now. We need to bring them to the table much earlier and reward them. 

Flipping, in this sense, requires a change in the way we overlap and infuse education and work. There needs to be multiple avenues into the real world that students can access at much younger ages.  We can't really afford to wait.  What we are doing now is simply wasting one of most valuable resources: the gifts, interests, and ideas of our young.