Category: Misdirected Front Page Stories
The Back Burner Crisis
Categories:
Today’s PD paper missed the biggest headline opportunity. Go to Business D-3, left hand corner: Study: More than half of U.S. workers lack basic education.
If you care at all about the region, this article should have been on the front page.
Look at the stats and you will realize that we are deep trouble on many fronts: manufacturing, K-12 education, post graduate education, employment, etc. Perhaps the most alarming sentence was this: “Young Americans now are the first generation in history to be less educated than the previous generation”.
Why? If we look beyond a silo sector perspective (only the education perspective), we can imply assumptions that greatly influence these crisis condition: poverty, national debt, credit card debt, mental health, family instability, declining achievement gap indicators, health care insurance and costs, underemployment, etc….
The truth is, we simply can blame NOR SOLVE this educational crisis on Title I and Title II funding. The truth is, the issues go much deeper to causes which influence the growing lack of value for education and the growing lack of ability to create a vision for success.
People, it seems, just don’t have the drive or ability to find value in education.
Community Transition Partners is open to participating and leading discussions related to this most important crisis. In my opinion, nothing else in the paper today matters – if this trend continues.
Brain Gain by Virtue of Entrepreneurship ›
Comments
# Submitted by Arnold L. Johnson (not verified) on Thu, 10/16/2008 – 14:17.
We spend so much time competing, we don’t push the knowledge and technology we have down into the fabric of our society. Throw more money at it, throw more minds at it, the problem will not go away.
While it may take a top engineer to design a wind turbine, it might not take one to build, hook up, service and or repair it.
We are all in a transition gap because there is a need not to pass on a great portion of what we created on to the next generation. The intricate infrastructure of the oil based world against an emerging green one. Which values do we instill in the kids?
A PHD might design an energy system, but won’t make the parts, won’t sale the parts, install the parts, or service them. One educational standard or aspiration does not fit all. We have to stop acting like it does. The real thing is to give them the tools to best explore their potentials. Maybe it’s not our nations need to be technically number one, maybe we need to work on our humanity.
