Education is the foundation upon which our nation builds its prominence. For over a century, America has led the world in innovation. American prosperity grew through innovation and the ability of a skilled workforce to adapt and improve its skills. The key to continued world leadership by the United States will be our ability to continue to produce the best minds and most skilled, adaptable workforce.
Through globalization America has lost industrial skills. As industries left America the skilled workers and craftsmen had to find new livelihoods. The lost skills can not be passed to new workers. For each American company that relocated its manufacturing overseas, support companies were also lost. These are the companies that provided parts, supplies, maintenance and repair of the manufacturing facility as well as maintenance and repair of the products.
The job drain has now progressed to include knowledge workers and business services. Essentially, anything that can be done over a wire can be done overseas. From telephone call centers to engineering and accounting, we are seeing American jobs and skills disappear. There is no doubt that the direct economic benefits go to the country acquiring the jobs, not the country losing the jobs.
Fix the problem:
1. Create a model for American education.
Different educational systems throughout the country each have their own strengths and weaknesses. We need to study each of these systems, whether public or private, and find the very best attributes of each system. The model for the American educational system of the future will be built from the best attributes. There may be educational systems in other countries that have high quality attributes that we can build into our American education model. Building the best educational system in the world will enable America to stay on top of world progress and development for the next century and into the future.
2. Recover skilled workers.
Bring manufacturing and support industries back to the United States.
Recover lost skills, crafts and trades. Create incentives for designated industries to recover the workforce that requires essential skills, training a new generation of American workers to perform specialized jobs.
3. Provide employment based training for workforce improvement.
Create a program throughout the workforce, available to employees who want to improve their personal skills. These employment based programs should enable workers to continually improve themselves throughout their careers. The same program will support employers to continually improve their workforce. This type of workforce improvement allows for greater flexibility for adaptation and innovation.
4. Evaluate education and training programs by measuring results.
Testing is a tool for monitoring results. However, when performance on the tests becomes the goal and the test score becomes the result, the benefit of education for the individual and for society is lost. We need to eliminate national programs that are focused on testing and replace them with national programs that are focused on education. At all levels of education the result is the ability to perform. Performance is more than the ability to perform a task. Performance is measured by the ability of people to excel in what they do. Performance includes the ability to participate in improvement and innovation. Under these conditions, people will experience gratification through their performance.
To paraphrase Charles Darwin, It is not the largest or strongest workforce that will prevail, but the workforce that is best able to adapt to change. That workforce has been and will continue to be the American work force. We will develop and use the best education system in the world to assure the continued dominance of the American workforce. An educated, adaptable workforce beats a cheap workforce!
