How many workers will we need?

Globalization and trade agreements get the blame, but technology is changing our work lives in ways we have yet to fully understand.  Agrarian societies gave us a new merchant class as technology allowed farmers to grow more food, industrialization then grew cities and the service sector... where will people work now?
See this story about Apples new "workforce"... here

Flipping the script -

Couple of good links ...

Teachers as Mentors, Working For Students: Salman Khan “calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help”. 

US Undergrad Education Hits Rock Bottom: The NYT explains why undergraduate teaching in the US is now essentially worthless — it has become an expensive day-care program for unemployable youths.

And a quote- 

It Takes That Long to Break a Child’s Will: From Derrick Jensen “Even when I was young it seemed to me that most classroom material could be presented and assimilated in four, maybe five, years… I’ve since come to understand the reason school lasts thirteen years.  It takes that long to sufficiently break a child’s will.  It is not easy to disconnect children’s wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure.  Less time wouldn’t do it, and in fact, those who are especially slow go to college.  For the exceedingly obstinate child there is graduate school.”

All from Dave Pollard @ How to Save the World - I would also recommend Dave's book below -

Creative organizations

Good piece from Sir Ken Robinson in Fast Company magazine -
The Principles of Creative Leadership

This is one of those areas where if you read what the CEO's say they need and compare it to how most of them run their enterprises and compare it with the structure and emphasis of the education and training institutions in theory preparing students to fill those needs... you see massive gaps.

How well do grades on standardized test prepare students to answer the challenge from these 3,000 CEO's?
"There was a report published in the fall by IBM called Capitalizing on Complexity. It was based on a survey of 3,000 CEOs of for-profit companies, non-profits, social entrepreneurship and public sectors from around the world asking what's on their minds. What was interesting about it was that this year the CEOs said they had three overall priorities. The first priority was running organizations that can respond to complexity because the world is getting more complex every day. Second was how to run organizations that are adaptable and resilient to these changes. But the top priority was how to promote creativity in organizations."

Creating Jobs

Really good piece by Ed Morrison on creating jobs - I didn't take offense at the NPR piece he chastises in this, but I could see how one could, it is cynical and perhaps we do have enough cynicism around -

"What do we know about "how to create a job?" - Ed Morrison

The Civic Process -

The model for engaging communities in the work of the community has, like everything else, changed dramatically.  Most communities are struggling with this process, we as a country are struggling with this process, this piece from Ed Morrison, offers some interesting insights on the model they are working on...

- Agile strategies for sustainable development -

"In an industrial economy, metrics (and the impulse to measure everyone by the same yardstick, e.g., jobs) emphasize control and undercut experimentation. In a sustainable economy -- an economy reliant on flexible, adaptive networks -- metrics provide a critical tool for learning and evaluation to figure out "what works". "

"In building sustainable communities, the civic process for developing and launching collaborative investments is what matters."

Workforce - Human Capital -

Don't call people "human capital"... seriously they are people.  When workforce development professional's get together they talk about being "demand driven" and "engaging employers"... the idea is simple, find out what the employer's in your region need, train people for those jobs, and everyone's happy.  This was a great model in 1989... not so much today.

Why?

- knowledge becomes obsolete at the speed of light, the current model assumes we can train someone one time and they'll keep that job for the forseeable future. Not in this dynamic, global economy.  The shelf life of companies is very short, much less the shelf life of employee's.
- 50+% of all new jobs are temp or part-time jobs.  The consultant is the new model.
- Nobody asks the worker what they want... do they want to be a widget? what do they like to do?  what are they passionate about? where are their skill sets?  How can we possibly assume none of that matters?

Setting the terms of debate... continued

I thought this was a fascinating factoid -

"Just to put in perspective the degree to which these government funds make private foundation resources look like chump change, if every penny of the Gates Foundation 2010 grant budget had gone to K-12 education, it could have paid for less than one full day of nationwide schooling. In other words, the US government spends more each day on education than the Gates Foundation spends across all their programs each year."
Read the rest by clicking HERE

Ultimately, we assume Gates is spending so much money he must deserve to be leading the conversation on education reform. yet, what he spends is a drop in the bucket compared to what taxpayers invest, who appear to have very little say in our schools "reform" agenda.