Tutoring students has been an amazing experience. I get to experience what kids go through at school these days and their family lives. What I found is disturbing. They are not taught to be ready for life, instead they are taught trades with little emphasis on self-discovery.
It clicked yesterday as I was reading a February print of BusinessWeek with an article called: “Education: The Next Generation Of U.S. Workers Is Falling Behind”. Catchy title, it caught my attention. What I found confirmed what I have seen. Our education system in no way prepares kids for life. We all knew that and have experienced it first hand. What I found was that it stresses a push into sciences without developing first the founding blocks of education, the why we do it, the who I am and what do I want to do in life. That alone would make a generation of kids who would excel at their workplace because they would actually know what they wanted to do instead of being enticed into a particular industry segment.
It’s all obvious, school doesn’t teach you much about yourself and how to go into life. What it does is it teaches you arts and trades which you can then use to become a productive part of society. However, I wonder about the definition “productive part of society”. Is it just to have one go out into to the market to find a job and contribute by paying taxes and buying product? Surely, there must be more.
The article was chilling at best, downright frightening at worse. 66% of companies interviewed found 4 year college graduates to be adequate and 25% excellent, while 9% deficient. Two year colleges graduates scored higher in the adequate part with 77%, lower with excellent 11% and 12% deficient.
The next graph was the scary one pitting science students in better performing students in higher-income countries with poorer performing students in higher countries. Guess where we stand? In the latter while Korea ranks the highest, followed by France, Germany, Japan, Australia and other countries. In fact, we are trailing most other countries in other areas. In science, we are in the middle of the pack, i.e. our graduates are not top picks for companies. Guess that explains why companies higher foreigners.
Maybe instead of closing borders, protecting our own companies and spending billions on crisises by concentrating on non-issues, we need to redefine our priorities. We need to invest money into our ailing education system instead of draining into warfare which will be unsustainable if we do not have strong science graduates anyway. There will come a time when we cannot even have a strong country if engineers are better trained outside ours. It just seems self-defeating not banking on education to create a stronger tomorrow. It’s a dangerous loop. If we don’t invest in educating our children right by allowing them to understand who they are, which will make them know what they want to do, which follows they will excel at whatever they chose in life with the result being a strong system with knowledgeable and skilled people in the right places. Maybe it’s time to stop those who put on the brakes and steer our resources in other directions that are running us into a dead end street.
