Education is a complex subject that requires complex solutions. Perhaps the following information will introduce you to another unknown facet of the problem of contemporary education. If you are a parent and concerned about your children's higher education, or if you are a young person trying to figure out where to go in life, this article may contain the information you are looking for.
Is our children's education preparing them for the new challenges of the 21st century economy?
This question is very complex and the answers are beyond the scope of this publication. However, I want to invite every parent to reflect on an article that I recently read in the Wall Street Journal and whose content reflects the problems of education today.
The title of the article read: "A Lament for the Class of 2010".
Here I give a short summary of the most important parts of the article:
In the following weeks, hundreds of thousands of students will graduate from higher education institutions. They are going to celebrate for several days, possibly for weeks. Then they will enter a labor market that does not want or need them. They will enter an economy in which approximately 17% of people between 20 and 24 years old do not have a job and two million university students are unemployed…
The article further mentions that no generation in the United States has been faced with greater obstacles than prevail today, with the obvious exception of the youth who lived during the Great Depression of 1929. Economists speculate that something unusual will happen: it will be a generation that will have less financial success than the generation that fathered it.
The article underscores the fact that current college graduates, even those graduating from prestigious universities such as Harvard and Yale, have likely spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and their entire academic lives preparing for a new economy in which their efforts will be irrelevant.
Despite the fact that this reality is pertinent to the particular conditions of the United States, it is an alert voice that we should all listen to.
Why? Because both their education system and ours continue to produce students "in series" just as they did 100 years ago. And today's industry no longer needs what was required 100 years ago.
A few years ago, Harvard Business School listed 10 skills that its students should master to be well prepared for the challenges of this new globalized economy:
1.- The ability to define a problem without having the help of another person.
2.- The ability to ask questions that pose a challenge to preconceived ideas.
3.- The ability to work in a team without having a guide.
4.- The ability to work absolutely alone.
5.- The ability to persuade others that the direction you are proposing is the correct one.
6.- The ability to discuss techniques and issues in public with the aim of reaching a decision about the established norms and policies.
7.- The ability to reorganize known information and form innovative concepts and patterns from it.
8.- The ability to quickly extract useful information from a large amount of irrelevant data.
9.- The ability to think inductively, deductively and dialectically.
10.- The ability to find an optimal solution to solve problems using intuition and common sense. (Heuristic method).
The document warned Harvard students that professional credentials were going to be worth less and less. Training and experiences in the real world, on the other hand, were going to be key to being professionally successful.
According to a recent survey conducted by IBM, in which around 1,500 CEOs from 60 nations and 33 industry sectors around the world were interviewed, creativity was considered the key factor for competent leadership of a successful company of the future. (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/31670.wss)
The implications of these claims are enormous. If skills that are considered essential for successful living in the future are studied, none of them are taught in educational establishments today.
Traditional education educates its pupils to follow instructions instead of leaving them free to explore their own path.
It requires the student to memorize thousands of data that are not related to his life, instead of allowing them the deep analysis of the acquired knowledge and its application to their real life.
It motivates students to perform with a scoring system that is far from what should motivate them in their educational process and later in their working life: a deep passion for their daily activity.
Perhaps the worst harm the school does is to develop a complacent attitude in its students that teaches them to depend on the "system" for security and employment, rather than inspiring them to start their own business that allows them to exploit their unique strengths.
The school teaches how to avoid risky situations and trains people to think that we cannot go wrong. However, the most successful entrepreneurs take risks and make many mistakes when trying to innovate and explore unknown territories.
On the one hand, the picture is dark, since, as parents, we have to prepare our children for a world that is radically different from the one we knew as children and we must teach them skills that we do not possess ourselves.
On the other hand, we cannot forget that the human being is an innate creative being. In situations of crisis and great change, we can trust that this inquisitive nature will awaken and look for new ways to successfully navigate a complex globalized economy.
