This year India will graduate 3.1 million grads. All speak English. The US will graduate 1.3 million and I don't know how many in Canada - let's say 130,000 (The usual 10% of the US). The New York Times leads off today with a plea for Americans to take technology more seriously by going back to school and taking even more courses thus widening their portfolio.
I wonder about all this school thing? All the most creative people in the field that I know started as teens and were self and group taught. Yes some of them latterly went to school but not to develop the skills that are now most differentiating.
I wonder is school in fact the problem - it seems to make almost any topic utterly boring to the more creative people? What is the global competitive issue anyway. Sure people have to be competent - very competent. But if the world is competent, then differentiating key is surely creativity and school tends to knock that out of us. Neal Stephenson describes a post Flat World America in Snow Crash where America only has the global edge in Music, Movies, Game Software and High Speed Pizza Delivery. Is this what is ahead of us?
It's so sad it's funny. Here we are on PEI and in the west generally lamenting the poor outcomes of our school system that cannot even produce a generation of industrial workers anymore and we are in the post industrial era where India and China will have the competence to take not only all the blue collar jobs but the white collar ones as well. Is any one talking about this?
An Amazon review of The World Is Flat Follows
Recent Comments