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!

#EPIC Failure

We fail far more than we succeed.  It is our failures that allow us to move closer to our best. Failure knows no limits. It touches the old and the young, the wise and the numb. Everyone suffers a skinned knee and a wounded heart.

As a teacher, I feel that our curriculum says little about failure. Certainly, there are stories of failure that are told and gaffs in history that are reviewed. We examine the world in hindsight. But, we do not teach our students to examine themselves. 

We should. 

I would like to teach a course called, Failure.  As a part of this course, students would become intimately familiar with failure and how to move beyond it. They would examine their feelings and the reactions of others, including their peers, their parents, and their teachers. 

They would learn to identify the reasons for their failures and ways to rectify them moving forward.  They would learn to be experimental and take thoughtful risks. They would develop a metacognitive relationship with failure. The ability to embrace their wounds and analyze their actions. Failure would become a laughing matter. A part of life that is accepted and expected.

Students would become comfortable sharing successes and failures. Laughing, teasing, and bolstering one another. Facing their failures, with eyes open, and the tools needed to persist when success looms beyond their reach.