Educational complexity in the global village

Did you know…
If you are “one in a million” in China, there are 1,300 people just like you. In India the number would be over 1,100. The 25% of the Chinese population with the highest IQs exceeds the entire population of North America. In India that number would be 28%. The translation for teachers and parents – they have more honor students than we have students. And if we exported every job in America to China, they would still have a labor surplus.
Did you know…
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, today’s high school student will have 10 to 14 jobs - by the time they are 38. One in four U.S. workers currently works for a company they have been employed by for less than one year. One in two has been with their current employer for less than five years. On top of that, the top ten in-demand jobs for 2010 didn’t even exist in 2004.
Did you know…
There are over 2.7 billion Google searches done every day, and the number of text messages sent and received in a day exceeds the population of the planet. There are over 3,000 books published daily, and the amount of technical information available doubles in less than two years. Predictions are that by 2013 a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computational capability of the human brain, and that by 2023 a $1,000 computer will do so.
So today’s schools are preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, which will use technologies that haven’t been invented yet, to solve problems we haven’t even identified as problems yet.
But America’s schools are not just about technology and jobs. We understand that many kinds of thinking and imagination will be needed in the future; and we hope that our children will be excited and fulfilled as well as employable. So we teach music, and dance, and art. We offer carpentry and culinary arts in our schools; not in industrial apprenticeship programs as much of the world does. We provide both casual and competitive athletics in our schools, something that is uncommon in the rest of the world. Add to that home economics; driver’s ed; drug, tobacco, and alcohol awareness; character education; obesity prevention; and a litany of other subjects that compete for time and attention in our schools.
Finally, unlike almost every other country, we ask our school system to reach and teach every child, regardless of physical, mental, emotional, socio-economic, or cultural barriers.
Does that sound like we’ve created an impossible situation for our schools? Well, I remember when John F Kennedy said that we would commit to putting a man on the moon in less than a decade. It sounded outrageous, impossible… and I remember when it happened. So I don’t believe that reaching all of these goals is impossible. It’s just very, very, very hard. Setting high goals, especially when they involve our children, requires of us a commitment to creativity, dedication, honesty, and the plain hard work that will be needed to get it right. Of course, the Apollo Program had one goal, getting to the moon. Education has as many goals as there are students.
The complexity and urgency of the education issue is why I an so glad and grateful that the Observer-Reporter and Dawn Keller have begun this public conversation. As they say, all of us are smarter than any of us.