Learning to keep learning
The National Center on Education and the Economy report that I wrote about yesterday is focused on one thing: how to shape education policy to produce more people who can think creatively.
Thomas Friedman wrote about the issue earlier this week:
In a globally integrated economy, our workers will get paid a premium only if they or their firms offer a uniquely innovative product or service, which demands a skilled and creative labor force to conceive, design, market and manufacture — and a labor force that is constantly able to keep learning. We can’t go on lagging other major economies in every math/science/reading test and every ranking of Internet penetration and think that we’re going to field a work force able to command premium wages. Freedom, without rigor and competence, will take us only so far.
We should have the same goal from a communications policy point of view: What's the set of policies that will facilitate creative thinking, generate new ideas, and help us keep our rate of economic growth increasing?
The answer is to focus on diversity. But before you groan and think of forced educational programming or affirmative action programs of various kinds, let me explain: my suggestion isn't that we go back to FCC's old role of using scarcity to require particular kinds of programming. (Red Lion: “because of the scarcity of [electromagnetic] frequencies, the Government is permitted to put restraints on licensees in favor of others whose views should be expressed on this unique medium.”) That kind of diversity means “the fostering of programming that reflects minority viewpoints or appeals to minority tastes.”
Rather, the new growth theory form of diversity is much simpler. The internet, which will someday soon be cable/telephone/television all in one, is characterized by abundance, not scarcity. Although we don't have competition in this country for highspeed internet access, we have a fiercely competitive internet above the access layer. All the FCC has to do is support this fiercely competitive, idea-generating, diverse internet, and we'll all be better off.
The leap forward in technological change represented by the internet provides us with a tremendous opportunity to foster the kind of radical change in communications policy that the education community is already working on. We should make sure that highspeed internet access is universal and unfettered — uncontrolled and unmonetized by the regional duopolies that control access in this country at the moment.
If we can consider changing the format of high school education, as Friedman and the NCEE are urging us to do, we can certainly consider changing the way we approach communications. If we don't, as they suggest, we'll continue our steady descent as a country.
Many increasing returns cont.
Here's an opportunity for leadership, change, and increasing returns:
A report [warning, large pdf executive summary] has been released by a panel called the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy (funded by foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Hewlett Foundation). As reported by both Time Magazine and the New York Times, the New Commission states bluntly that leadership in the new world order of digitized global industries requires a “deep vein of creativity” that, in turn, requires substantial education (”comfort with ideas and abstractions”) that we're not providing in this country.
So our standard of living is going to fall. Inevitably.
To address this problem, the report (based on two years of work, many major economic and labor studies, lots of international comparisons) makes several recommendations about how education should work in the US. Students should take board examinations in subject areas at the end of the 10th grade, which will serve to direct some students to community college and some to additional high school work towards eventual college admission. And we should persuade the best students eventually to become teachers, by paying them more in the early years of their teaching careers and providing them with better benefits. We should test students for the skills that will help workers in this new world, like creativity, self-discipline, the ability to work well with a team. We should change the way schools are managed, by privatizing them and making them accountable for their funding to the state rather than the local area — and allowing parents to send their children to any school whose reported results they liked. We should provide high-quality early childhood education, provide continuing education to adults, and generally make learning a lifelong (and competitively provided) experience.
Paul Romer is quoted in the Times coverage saying that this change-the-world effort “was driven by improvements in technology, much as advances in the early 20th century led to universal high school.”
Investing in the educational changes suggested by the report could substantially increase our productivity as a nation — many increasing returns. And technology — particularly an open internet — could help a great deal.