http://www.leadered.com/pdf/Preparing%20Students%20for%20Their%20Future%206-05.pdf
I found this article online the other day. Some parts I found quite interesting, others bordered on funny and scary to me. The section on student demographics is interesting because if the facts are accurate, our grandchildren and great grandchildren will be in the work force for roughly 30 years of their lives and in retirement for at least 50 years of their lives! What I also found educational about this article was the Globalization section in that in the next few decades, the majority of science and engineering degrees in the world are from China and that the United States is nowhere near dominant in that category. I was wondering if this is due to lack of American student interest, lack of good teachers in those subjects, or a combination of both? Also, I am not very technologically advanced. My nieces know more computer knowledge than I do at the ripe ages of 6 and 8. I find the technology facts amusing that, if this study is correct, some time in the upcoming generations, actually computers (or SPOT devices) will be the size of wrist watches. This may already be out there, as the article was written in 2005. Any of you guys have one?
To me, the article shows what is in store for us in our classrooms and in society in the near future. Hopefully you all will find it as informative as I did.
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2 comments:
This is a fantastic article! I wonder what it will take to get our country to band together and make a push to recapture our place in the global market. We seem to have become so obsessed with our individual achievement and search for status that we abandoned the idea of country and community. We have so much strife within our borders that the rest of the world is surpassing us without fear of competition. We are handing them our economy by sending our jobs that would support a middle class overseas.
It is almost laughable that they put the responsibility of our future in the hands of the schools, yet year after year the educational budgets get cut, and more call centers for our banks are set up in foreign countries. There is little incentive to become educators other than internal drive. Salaries are low and teachers are frustrated with the ever increasing pressures placed on them by testing and laws such as No Child Left Behind that look great on paper, but lose something in the implementation.
Children do not seem to have the work ethic that was engrained into the earlier generations either. There is a certain sense of privilege that seems to go along with the idea of being American. The frontier spirit has been replaced with a feeling of birthright. Our increased technology is giving us the ability to become cave dwellers once again, as we no longer have to go out into the world and do much of anything. Shopping, working, education, communicating, playing, etc. can all be done via any number of devices other than human contact. People live in houses that they can reach out of the window and touch the next house, but they do not even know their neighbors' names. Children no longer want to grow up to be president, they want to be pop stars. I wonder about the path that our country is following, and I do question what it will take to bring it together. Even the feelings of brotherhood that resulted from the 9-11 attacks were short-lived. What to do? What to do?
Dewey said many of the same things in 1917, at least in terms of a significant social shift necessitating a revision of our educational system.
Not sure about his use of the Committee of Ten, however. To claim the CoT was somehow responsible for the emergence of the U.S. as a global power in the 20th century seems a bit far-fetched.
Excellent link.
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