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Re: U.S. Education Woes Threaten National Security, Report Says

By Learning-Activist on March 21, 2012 in Capital Value Case, Comments on other sites, Learning

Re: “U.S. Education Woes Threaten National Security, Report Says” Education Week 3-20-2012

Of course everything about the future ultimately depends on our children’s learning. Certainly the economy and how well it resources traditional national security activities is one dimension. But the bigger issue is how well our nation learns.

We as a nation must learn to become significantly better at learning if we are to compete in a world changing so vastly and rapidly. Because the future is ever less predictable our national security depends more on how well our children are able to learn in their futures than on what we think we should be teaching them today. In that KEY sense, our education system is, as a whole, backwards.

What should today’s children learn in order to be ready for a world in which virtually everything known about everything known is instantly available via natural language dialog with inexpensive mobile devices? What facts should they remember? What mental skills must they have?

What kind of jobs will exist for humans? What should today’s children learn in order to be ready to compete for jobs with tomorrow’s computers and robots? In what kinds of ‘knowledge work’ jobs will humans still be able to out-perform the ROI advantages of machines? In what kinds of manual labor jobs will humans out-perform machines?

Clearly there will be ever fewer opportunities for human beings who can only perform repetitive manual labor, remember factoids, or perform routine intellectual functions. So what is the mission of education today that leads to improved national security tomorrow? What can we do today to best prepare today’s children for tomorrow?

Steward their abilities to learn – steward the health of their learning.

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It starts with recognizing the fundamental, profound, and capital value of ‘stewarding the health of our children’s learning.’

“I agree. I think everything points in that direction. I think you want to get to a basic set of principles and this is clearly it.” – Dr. James J. Heckman Recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

Is there an educational mission that trumps, that is more important than “stewarding the health of our children’s learning”?

“No when put that way”. Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst 2002-2008 Director of the Institute of Education Sciences and Assistant Secretary of Education with the U.S. Department of Education.

Ultimately what’s going to shift the behavior of the country over the long-term is understanding how fundamental this [healthy learning] is to everybody through the economic channel. …We must come up with a way of describing, measuring, and supporting the health of children’s learning. It is the unhealthy learning environments that are the problem.

Yes, that’s the message. That’s the message you’ve got to get across. Arthur Rolnick Senior V.P. and Director of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and Associate Economist with the Federal Open Market Committee.

It’s not that somebody ‘knows’ the current science, because the current science might be wrong. But it’s that somebody knows how to learn about new science, and adapt. It’s also how they learn to adapt to workplaces… how to learn to do something that they had never even thought about doing when they were in school. That’s the key element. Dr. Eric Hanushek Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

So then the fundamental intention of our education system must be to use knowledge, skills and experience not just as the end, but as the means through which we’re exercising how well someone is able to participate and become self-extending in learning what they need to learn when they need to learn it.

Precisely.

The Institute for the Study and Prevention of ACQUIRED Learning Disabilities.

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