While the precipitating event in our financial crisis was the extensive investment of banks in loans that were unlikely to be repaid and were poorly secured, the problems go much deeper. Several major factors need to be considered. First, ubiquitous communications have made it possible for virtually any place in the world to produce any product and most services. This means that at every level of education, Americans now compete with the entire world. Second, automated devices have become able to replace people in virtually any job that requires only limited levels of intelligence and creativity. The exceptions are jobs not done by many people, for which building of intelligent robots isn’t worth the cost. Third, the initial head start of the U.S. in the computer age allowed us to create a number of new business opportunities, and the initial lead in overall wealth allowed us to capitalize some industries and thus give them a head start. This, in turn, prompted people elsewhere with newly acquired wealth to invest it in the U.S. Fourth, as we were ignoring the need for more of our children to receive top levels of education, newly wealthy or developing countries improved their education systems, creating more competition for our undereducated children.
This all worked until a crisis arose, from the banking problems. That prompted every investor overseas to wonder whether to put all the money here. So, in addition to temporary credit problems, which are bad enough, we can assume that investors overseas will be much more careful in deciding where to invest, whether buying stock in American companies or building plants here. In the very short term, we need to shore up our banks and assure that more companies don’t collapse because of credit shortages. In the longer term, though, we cannot assume that those with money to build businesses will decide either to keep jobs here (if we are not competitive with our workforce) or simply give away their earnings to those not equipped to be productive. We can and must build bigger safety nets, but the only way to assure widespread living standards is to assure widespread 21st century education. A recent article by Elena Silva sketches the situation pretty well (see MeasuringSkills.pdf for the article).
Today, we are prodding our schools to produce higher scores on State tests, some of which are limited in scope to traditional basic skills content, exactly the stuff now done by machines. While the basic skills may provide a good foundation for developing problem solving and creativity skills, if we are to succeed in educating our children to be competitive enough to reverse the decline of our country, we must go beyond the current goals to teach our children to attack and solve novel problems, work in teams (since the tough problems computers can’t solve require more than one person’s ideas), and be both creative and disciplined. Those basic requirements are, unfortunately, not directly measured on current tests, and what is not measured is not adequately taught.
So, while a longer-term matter and not the only thing required, I suggest that our economic woes will continue to recur unless we both better manage our financial world and dramatically improve all our schools to teach the skills most highly valued in the modern economy: teamwork, problem solving, self-management, and disciplined creativity. To do this, we must develop better assessment tools and better prepare teachers. Both areas will require changes throughout our education system, including the School of Education at Pitt.
We currently are one of the best places to become a teacher, in terms of successfully teaching the core subject matters. We need to stay good at all of that. In addition, though, we need to embed in all our areas of teacher preparation an increased focus on the new skills that cut across subject matter: teamwork, problem solving, self-management, and disciplined creativity. That is a challenge that will be at the core of our continuing efforts to improve our programs. And, it is a core component of our new efforts with the Pittsburgh Schools to develop University Prep School.
On the research side, in addition to the other fine work we do, we need to begin exploring better ways to measure the new skills. Valerie Shute, former Pitt post-doc, has begun to work on some of this. You might want to check out her paper on embedding “stealth assessment” into educational games; see Melding the Power of Serious Games and Embedded Assessment to Monitor and Foster Learning: Flow and Grow. We may pursue other ideas, but the important task before us is to begin working, at many levels, to reshape American education to aim beyond the basics, not by excluding them, but by understanding that we will never succeed with a system that aims to make people who are only the equivalent of slow computers.
