Should business be invited to shape education to provide the workers they desire?
Much of the opening of the State of the Union expressed, from a couple of different directions, that business should be a partner in education so we train and teach to meet the current needs of business.
I can argue either side of this because there is no yes or no answer, but rather questions of degree. (no pun itended)
The starting point is that it would be absurd for education to be indifferent to the skills desirable in the contemporary economy. Of course making students better potential workers is one priority.
As a practical real-world matter, the people survive and thrive only insofar as they serve business and it does benefit the people themselves to be able to be what business wants, in the way of work skills.
Yes, public education, public-supported training, public colleges do a very real service to their students in teaching them how to be a more desirable worker in the system, because that system is where they are going to be living.
And nations with better workers really do prosper in ways that benefit everyone. A waitress or gas station attendant in a town that attracted a big tech company to locate there is benefiting from the community's concentration of skills. (In the same way a waitress near a union auto plant benefited from the circulation of union wages in the local community.)
However...
It is creepy as Hell to ask some fricking corporation what out curriculum should be to best suit its commercial needs. And it makes tax-funded education partially a donation to business. And since business has little interest in the long-term benefit to the individual being educated, the interests of business are not entirely aligned with the interests of the student, which should be paramount.
And...
We are living out experience with education creating the workers business wants.
It sometimes seems that Americans know more about particle physics than we do about macroeconomics. For instance, all Deficit hand-wringing the last five years has been denying-evolution level clueless idiocy based on ignorance.
And it really does feel like business has created workers who think about wages the way business wants them to. (For instance, there are lots of real workers who support "Right to Work" status... though without an ability to quite explain why.)
And who vote the right way. (Not just R vs. D, but constraining politics itself to pro-business-D versus pro-business-R)
= new reply since forum marked as read
