In the outline of his ideas for the future, Jim made this point:
The next stage of economic development is to systematically develop a region’s human capital through education and training of the population, as well as recruitment and retention of individuals who possess cutting-edge knowledge and skills — the so-called “creative class.”
I can see the point — an educated population tends to be more dynamic and adaptable to changing conditions. That is generally a good thing. But what troubles me is that too often, education is reduced to the mere acquisition of skills, rather than the development of the ability to think.
Independent, critical thinking is supposed to be one of the benefits of a liberal arts education. It also, increasingly, seems to be passe. Businesses say they want a highly educated workforce. That is in their interest, naturally, as it saves them time and money having to train workers how to make better, faster, cheaper widgets. But what is their vision of an educated workforce? Is it one that can apply critical thinking to problems, and question assumptions, or one that can simply make correct change and do what it’s told? I fear the trend is toward the latter.
If we are to compete effectively with the prussianized hoards, the thinking goes, we must sacrifice or at least minimize any forays into art, philosophy, music and literature. You can’t build a new economy on the back of a screenplay, so get thee to a technical school and quit wasting time.
And what a bleak, colorless, humorless world that would be. I suggest that if we really want to build more human capital (a phrase that deserves to be banned form all polite speech), we first ought to demand that our educational system allow people to spend more time developing their abilities to think critically, to observe, to analyse, to question…to be independent.
In other words, it demands we become more liberal in our learning. But I’m not sure that concept would sell.