[Vision2020] New Rules

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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September 8, 2012
New Rules By THOMAS L.
FRIEDMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html>

Shanghai

I JUST arrived in Shanghai, but I’m thinking about Estonia and wondering
about something Presidents Clinton and Obama have been saying.

Wired magazine reported last week that public schools in Estonia are
establishing a program for teaching first graders — and kids in all other
grades — how to do computer programming. Wired said that the curriculum was
created “because of the difficulty Estonian companies face in hiring
programmers. Estonia has a burgeoning tech industry thanks in part to the
success of Skype, which was developed in Estonia in 2003.”

The news from Estonia prompted The Guardian newspaper of London to publish
an online poll asking its readers: “Children aged 7 to 16 are being given
the opportunity to learn how to code in schools in Estonia, should U.K.
school children be taught programming as part of their school day?” It’s
fascinating to read about all this while visiting Shanghai, whose public
school system in 2010 beat the rest of the world in math, science and
reading in the global PISA exam of 15-year-olds. Will the Chinese respond
by teaching programming to preschoolers?

All of this made me think Obama should stop using the phrase — first minted
by Bill Clinton in 1992 — that if you just “work hard and play by the
rules” you should expect that the American system will deliver you a decent
life and a chance for your children to have a better one. That mantra
really resonates with me and, I am sure, with many voters. There is just
one problem: It’s out of date.

The truth is, if you want a decent job that will lead to a decent life
today *you* have to work harder, regularly reinvent yourself, obtain at
least some form of postsecondary education, make sure that you’re engaged
in lifelong learning and play by the rules. That’s not a bumper sticker,
but we terribly mislead people by saying otherwise.

Why? Because when Clinton first employed his phrase in 1992, the Internet
was just emerging, virtually no one had e-mail and the cold war was just
ending. In other words, we were still living in a closed system, a world of
walls, which were just starting to come down. It was a world before Nafta
and the full merger of globalization and the information technology
revolution, a world in which unions and blue-collar manufacturing were
still relatively strong, and where America could still write a lot of the
rules that people played by.

That world is gone. It is now a more open system. Technology and
globalization are wiping out lower-skilled jobs faster, while steadily
raising the skill level required for new jobs. More than ever now, lifelong
learning is the key to getting into, and staying in, the middle class.

There is a quote attributed to the futurist Alvin Toffler that captures
this new reality: In the future “illiteracy will not be defined by those
who cannot read and write, but by those who cannot learn and relearn.” Any
form of standing still is deadly.

I covered the Republican convention, and I was impressed in watching my
Times colleagues at how much their jobs have changed. Here’s what a
reporter does in a typical day: report, file for the Web edition, file for
The International Herald Tribune, tweet, update for the Web edition, report
more, track other people’s tweets, do a Web-video spot and then write the
story for the print paper. You want to be a Times reporter today? That’s
your day. *You have to work harder and smarter and develop new skills faster
*.

Van Ton-Quinlivan, the vice chancellor for work force and economic
development at the California Community Colleges System, explained to me
the four basic skill sets out there today. The first are people who are
“ready now.” That’s people with exactly the right skills an employer is
looking for at the right time. Employers will give the local labor market
and schools the first chance at providing those people, but if they are not
available they’ll go the “shortest distance to find them,” she said, and
today that could be anywhere in the world. Companies who can’t find “ready
now” will look for “ready soon,” people who, with limited training and
on-the-job experience, can fit right in. If they can’t find those, some
will hire “work ready.” These are people with two or four years of
postsecondary education who can be trained, but companies have shrinking
budgets for that now and want public schools to do it. Last are the growing
legions of the “far from ready,” people who dropped out or have only a high
school diploma. Their prospects for a decent job are small, even if they
are ready to “work hard and play by the rules.”

Which is why if we ever get another stimulus it has to focus, in part, on
getting more people more education. The unemployment rate today is 4.1
percent for people with four years of college, 6.6 percent for those with
two years, 8.8 percent for high school graduates, and 12.0 percent for
dropouts.

That’s why I prefer the new mantra floated by Clinton at the Democratic
convention, (which Obama has tried to fund): “We have to prepare more
Americans for the new jobs that are being created in a world fueled by new
technology. That’s why investments in our people” — in more community
colleges, Pell grants and vocational-training classes — “are more important
than ever.”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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