Schools, and automated CEOs

Everyone says our schools are broken.

And everyone seems to have a fix to flog—more money or less, crush teachers unions, merit pay, charter schools, and on, and on, and on. A hundred different solutions battle it out. Some, like the libertarian proposals to abolish the Department of Ed, will probably always remain in the realm of fantasy. Others actually have money behind them. Thus, the Republicans had their "No Child Left Behind." The Democrats have their "Race to the Top."

In theory, all these are very different. However, at least as I read the various proposals, they actually have a lot in common. They hold as an unstated but dominant belief that schools should prepare children to be white-collar employees of some large business entity.

But is that wise?

Let's think about how hiring has changed over time. In the 1950s, the norm was the massive industrial corporation with large numbers of workers on an assembly line and a smaller but still respectable number of white-collar employees in "the office."

Except that's not the way it stayed. All businesses seek to reduce their operating costs. One way to do that is to cut staff. So, in the second half of the twentieth century and the first years of this, American corporations did just that. They automated. Or, they went offshore. And we had a wave of blue-collar layoffs.

But, we reassured ourselves, there'd always be white-collar jobs. Surely, corporations would always hire managers, clerical workers, and accountants.

Except they didn't. Starting in the 1970s, corporate America famously flattened and mid-level staffers became an endangered species. Today we've got far fewer white-collar employees, and those who remain are working much harder.

And now… it's Upper Management's turn.

I predict we'll see the same process there. Some of the functions of top management are going to go offshore, or, believe it or not, be automated. If you don't think that's possible, then consider the following: the majority of trades on Wall Street today are carried out not by brokers, but by computers. It's called "Algorithmic Trading."

I'm not saying that we'll have a business version of the Terminator taking over the world. Corporations will always be run by human beings. But, it is also true that the natural evolution of corporations is away from employees. It is always in their interest to hire as few people as possible.

If so, then teaching our children to be cubicle denizens is idiotic. It is more likely that they will find jobs in small businesses and/or be self-employed. Which means we need to be training young people to be small-scale entrepreneurs. They don't need MBAs. They need basic business skills, like bookkeeping and salesmanship.

And we ought to re-value the trades. Let's face it, right now, it is lot easier for young people to make money repairing cars or fixing plumbing than it is for them to get entry-level positions in big companies.

Finally, maybe most of all, we ought to promote creativity in students—a proven business advantage, and something that will be difficult or impossible to automate or outsource any time soon.

And to make this happen, our schools are going to have to change—root and branch.

But we're going to have to change with them. We've got some major values to shift. We've got to do some re-defining of the word "success." We're going to have to get used to the idea that being a solvent plumber is better than being a bankrupt white-collar worker.

Until we do that, education in America will continue to be a problem. All the reforms proposed by Right, Left, and Center will fall short.

And our Race to the Top? All too likely a mad dash, confused and stumbling, without a goal, without a map…

Into the abyss.


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Special Note: I'm off to New Mexico in a couple of days. So, I won't be posting an Xcargo next week or the week after. But, in the meanwhile, have a great holiday, and I'll see you in January 2011.

Twenty-eleven? Oy. How did that happen? Wasn't it just yesterday that 1975 was impossibly far away in the future?

Ah well…

Onward and upward.