Form: Quote Commentary

THE DISASTER OF OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM

by Steve Pender

Outsourcing is a symptom of the diverging of industry and education. Govt schools for decades have wasted 12 years of everyone’s youth not adequately leveraging our productive advantage in machinery and computing, to provide citizens with an education of any marketable value at the end of high school. So everyone goes to college to get marketable skills. But then college, except for some of STEM, stopped providing marketable skills and instead put kids in huge debt. Outsourcing implies that the per capita productive ability per dollar is lower here than in China or Mexico. In most occupations, you get paid more based on producing more. If Americans are not able to produce more to justify higher wages because our educational system failed to leverage our technology advantage, and we aren’t willing to lower wages, but other countries can do both, outsourcing will continue. I lay a large part of this blame on k-12 public schools. What could have been several years, from the age of 12-18, learning trade skills that transfer to an occupation, were instead wasted on social studies, political issues, 3-page essays on trivial details of novels few students even care about, haiku. How was it possible that in the early 1900s, at the taxpayer cost of under $1,000 per student-year (inflation adjusted), a labor force could built cars, ships, trains, radios, TVs, widgets of all kinds, domestically, with only a small fraction of the population having a college degree?