This article originally appeared in the May, 2000, Number 8 issue of *spark.
The government in my province has been placing its emphasis in the field of university education on job training. As it has decreased funding for wussy Liberal Arts programs, it has increased funding for university/business partnership programs. Recently, it announced part of its funding to universities would be tied to how well students who graduated from the institutions subsequently found jobs. Not enough graduates with jobs, less funding next year.
The Premiere of the province said this was necessary because we didn't want too many "deep thinkers"; we wanted people with the skills to staff industry. (I don't see a contradiction here but, then again, I'm a victim of a wussy Liberal Arts education.) I don't blame the provincial government for this stand. Governments of all stripes these days are bought and paid for by big business, whose campaign contributions are necessary for a political party even to begin to contemplate winning an election. Naturally, any government, once elected, will do its best to reward its patrons.
No, it's business I cannot understand. When it cries out there is a dearth of qualified computer programmers (to use but one example), government naturally moves to change the education system so more people graduate with those skills. The results are well known: Five to 10 years from now, there will be a glut of computer programmers as universities will churn out more skilled grads than the market can handle. (Which is not bad for business, actually, as a labour pool too big for the market tends to drive the cost of skilled labour down.)
While the short-term benefits of turning universities into vocational schools may appeal to business, it is not in their long-term interests. As many pundits (economic and otherwise) are telling us, we are moving away from an industrial economy to an information economy. Whereas making physical objects used to be the engine of the economy, they tell us now a major factor of economic growth will be the creation and distribution of information.
This has important implications for education. Since information has a short shelf life (think of how quickly software is updated), learning specific skill sets is of limited value. The skills you graduate with today may well be obsolete tomorrow. Many people now argue that future workers will have to be skilled in "learning a living"; that is, they will have to be able to pick up new skill sets as required by the day-to-day demands of their jobs.
"Life-long learning" is another term used for the same idea. In practice, what does this mean? It means the ideal worker will have a set of intellectual tools which allows her or him to think critically about what skills are necessary to perform a given task, and the intellectual flexibility to acquire those skills. Critical thinking? Intellectual flexibility? Oh, no! The ideal worker sounds like somebody with a wussy Liberal Arts degree!
In fact, many corporations tacitly recognize this shift to an information economy, offering their employees educational seminars and other programs to upgrade their skills. It has been argued that the existence of this phenomenon is an indictment of the impracticality of the current education system. Nonsense. As we move deeper into an information economy, most businesses will have to help their employees upgrade their skills throughout their careers in order to stay competitive. It's an economic imperative, stupid.
Starving Liberal Arts programs at universities will benefit nobody, not even corporations. Instead, we should envision an education system with three arms: vocational schools for specific skills training (since, after all, doctors, engineers and others will need specific basic skills); Liberal Arts institutions for critical thinking, and; lifelong learning institutions -- whether at colleges, universities and technical institutes or corporations -- that allow employees to continue to upgrade their skills throughout their careers. A healthy economy will require all three arms be as strong as possible. Corporate executives who demand the education system to be tailored to their short-term needs are not acting in anybody's long-term interest, including their own. You would think they would realize this but, then again, most of them don't have the benefit of a wussy Liberal Arts education.
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