Need World-Ready Workers? First, We Need to Raise World-Ready Kids.
STEM curriculum is certainly important. But not at the expense of intercultural communication skills.
Front page article from today’s New York Times reports on the student take-over of the anthropology library at UCLA, Berkeley, California, in protest of the administration’s decision to cut costs by eliminating the library. Enrollment in graduate level anthropology degree programs, the article reports, have declined due to budget cuts in all the social sciences, while the percentage of minority students enrolling in these programs has doubled to become the majority of students in these programs. This is occurring in the context of the the opening of a brand-new billion-dollar-plus research center on the Berkeley campus dedicated to AI and AI-related technology, for which the university somehow found the funding.
This latest follow-the-fastest-money decision by a leading US-American university is just the latest example of the embrace of STEM curricula in education over the last decade or so, mainly always at the expense of the social sciences and humanities. In its latest form, it blatantly ignores the needs and preferences of many minority groups who look to higher education as a path toward solving the social issues facing their communities, reflecting a tone-deaf position when it comes to some of the most burning issues of the moment, like racism and social inequity. Apparently, UCLA Berkeley, and perhaps most US-educational institutions, have already made the decision that nothing is as important as STEM-related curricula, and that the traditional values of the liberal arts education, the humanities and the social sciences in particular, are all dispensable to the needs of technology. It’s short-sighted, it’s racist, and it’s revisionist, at least as it challenges the definition of the mission of higher education. It’s also reactionary, as it turns its back on the greatest challenge we face going into the future, and a fundamental reason for the humanities and especially social science research: to learn how to get along with each other without blowing each other up.
I’m glad the old activist tradition at Berkeley is being revived by the students currently occupying the anthropology library; the university should fund the library and also give each of the students an honorarium for their efforts to keep an important part of Berkeley’s culture alive. Reading the story also reminded me of an article that I wrote several years ago (“Want World-Ready Workers? First We Need to Develop World-Ready Kids”) about the need to revise education to address the issues of living in the 21st century, and that while science and math are critically important, they won’t develop kids with knowledge of the world enough to work successfully in it, and with skills enough to live happily and well in and with societies of differences. Those skills, that knowledge, and the kind of world that we could have, will mainly be the result of greater global understanding. While technology might assist in that development, the wisdom to make it happen comes from education that develops the human, and not just our machines.
Have a look at my article, below, and let me know your thoughts.
“You cannot educate for the future with schools from the past.”
“A global company is a local company…everywhere”.
— 21st century guru
A few years ago, I had the privilege of working on a book with Keith Bellows, who was then the Editor-in-Chief of National Geographic Traveler Magazine. At the time, I was writing the CultureWise column for the magazine, and Keith and I became friends. We would often meet in his office in Washington, DC, or in my hometown of NYC, and whenever possible at our favorite watering hole, the King Cole bar. Naturally, the most interesting conversations were always at the King Cole bar. One such meeting revolved around the idea that society wasn’t doing enough to develop “world-ready workers”, that the task was either being overlooked, or left to businesses, because the schools certainly weren’t up to the task. Both Keith and I had young kids at the time who were, if not for the efforts we were putting in as parents, not getting the kind of education that would make them “world-ready kids”, exactly the pre-requisite for being a “world-ready worker”. We noodled this idea around for some time, and decided we needed to write a book about it. Keith, unfortunately, is no longer with us, and he is missed by many, me included. But his ideas are alive in the introduction to our book, reprinted below. And while the world seems to be even less inclined to support “world-ready kids” and “world-ready workers”, I believe more than ever, it’s the only way we can survive into the 21st century. So I thought I would write an article that included some of what Keith and I were thinking that day in the King Cole bar…
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