In his latest column for the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman argues that fixing our failing public schools will help end the Great Recession. The key, according to Friedman, is to strengthen the American worker’s global competiveness by teaching our students to think more creatively.
From Friedman:
A year ago, it all exploded. Now that we are picking up the pieces, we need to understand that it is not only our financial system that needs a reboot and an upgrade, but also our public school system. Otherwise, the jobless recovery won’t be just a passing phase, but our future.
“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”
Friedman goes on to explain why our schools need to improve creative thinking skills:
Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
I enjoyed the posts. They all demonstrate that we have a long way to go to prepare for the competitive future. I read Friedman’s book last year and it demonstrated that other countries are taking global competition much more seriously than is the U.S. I don’t see much effort to improve things. More money is not the answer. We have done that without results. A major change in perspective is needed; we have become complacent.