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A young person’s ingenuity starts with a basic understanding that the “designed world,” comprised of the human designed and made products that fill our lives, does not appear magically. They are designed and made with a specific purpose in mind, to meet some specific human desire or need. In the case of commercial and industrial products, they are thoughtfully and thoroughly researched, analyzed, and optimized by engineers, designers, manufacturers, an others. What you see that you might otherwise take for granted is the result of oftentimes thousands of hours of time on task in research and development. Young people need to know that technology is not magic. They need to begin to appreciate the designed world beginning at a very young age. This is not only for the future engineers among us. This core appreciation and understanding will help all people be informed consumers and creators of new technologies. How do you begin to build this understanding? Have young children take things apart and explore their inner workings. Before you toss that broken Wii remote in the garbage, help a young person carefully and safely explore its insides. Ask them questions about the toys and games that fill their lives. Where do you think that board game was made? Who do you think invented it? What is it made of? Was it made in a factory? Asking questions and encouraging inquiry and hands-on activity at a young age will begin to develop the kind of lifelong learning and abilities that will ensure the future success of young individuals and our society. And, in some cases, it will lead to the next great inventors, engineers, entrepreneurs, and designers. I thought my family had escaped the misfortune of losing power during Hurricane Irene until our power went out late in the afternoon on Sunday for about six hours. Even that moment I had started to ponder the technologies within our power grid system that were keeping it active for most and getting it back online for others. Below are some thoughts keeping in mind what every young person should understand about the ingenuity in the design of these systems. As I began to read again about the power grid on HowStuffWorks.com and Wikipedia, perhaps the most startling factor is the age of the infrastructure. Many of the devices that bring us power from generation to distribution to the home or business are fifty years old or even older. This factor, while it entered the minds of many during the Northeast Blackout of 2003, continues to hold the system and its reliability back. Yet, just because something can still perform its task in a system does not mean that it would not improve the system if replaced. Another important concept in this discussion is that of redundancy in system design. Redundancy is a most important factor in the reliability of any system. Voting systems include software and hardware redundancy to increase reliability. In the case of the power grid, I imagine that more heavily populated areas such as my suburban neighborhood fare better that rural areas. Think of it this way: if a tree falls and knocks out a power line or if a transformer explodes due to an electrical surge (check out this YouTube video), if there is redundancy in the system circuitry that allows another path for the electricity to get to your home, your lights might flicker for a moment, but your power will remain on. As you consider the cabling around your neighborhood, you might be able to see how a suburban city layout might fare better as I suggest. But, one should also consider that redundancy designed into a system always comes with a higher cost. I also wonder how people with solar panels and other “off-the-grid” technologies made it through this storm. I thought of technologies such as solid oxide fuel cells such as the “Bloom Box” as it was featured on this episode of 60 Minutes, which could eventually take us off of a grid system entirely. A final concept for this topic is logistics. Think about the planning and logistics that go into getting the power back on where it was lost. Just a few hundred or few thousand people, machines, tools, and vehicles restoring systems for a few hundred thousand or a few million people takes planning and preparation. I imagine many systems engineers and others are working behind the scenes during this time. If not for their planning, hours might turn into days and days might turn into weeks before normalcy can be restored. So, these are some topics from this “teachable moment” as we call it in education. Part of the ingenuity of our people and society comes from understanding of and appreciation for products, systems and topics such as the power grid, infrastructure, redundancy, alternate energy, and logistics. No doubt you’ve had to type something in response to something like this when you wanted to cast an online vote, buy some tickets, sign up for a new account, or take care of some other task in your online life:  Image via Donielle's flickr photostream This is called a CAPTCHA and it is a challenge response system designed to cut down automated spam on the web. CAPTCHA is an acronym that stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Many developers have come up with such systems since its original invention and naming back in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford at Carnegie Mellon University. Yet, there is something very notable and unique about the “reCAPTCHA” brand of CAPTCHAs that piqued my interest. In the case of reCAPTCHA, when a human types a solution into the box it is checked against a database of unsolved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text from old books, magazines, and transcripts of old radio programs. As more people look at the text, which is not recognizable by computers with OCR software, and enter their response, those common responses are returned as correct responses to the system and onward you go! Each solved word then gets returned to a database to help figure out the missing text which was previously unrecognized by a computer. Google acquired reCAPTCHA in 2009 in an effort to aid its book digitization and you can read more about the technology on Google’s reCAPTCHA page. There is a short video about the technology in the own words of one of its developers here. It’s great when one technology can solve two problems, and that is the lesson that our young people can learn from the reCAPTCHA story. Think about some other technologies that came to popularity because they addressed two or more previously disconnected problems. This is the stuff that results from great knowledge, creativity, and ingenuity.
Last week, I posed a question to author and leading futurist Richard Worzel in a Facebook Q&A session sponsored by Canada’s The Mark News. Below is the excerpt from the conversation. Janosz: What and how do we need to teach our young people to best prepare them for the future? Worzel: Well, I can tell you what they don’t need: they don’t need to be force-fed facts to memorize and regurgitate on a test, only to have them forgotten quickly thereafter. Yet this is what our education system specializes in today, even though kids can do it faster and more effectively online. Yet, there are things they need to know so they can research and assemble knowledge systematically, and that’s what we need to point towards. Yet, what parents often mean when they ask this question is “What path can I set my child on that will guarantee their employment, financial security, and welfare until they retire?” The answer to this question is: there ain’t no such animal. But your question is still worthwhile, and is not being asked very seriously by our education system, specifically by the various ministries and departments of education. Today’s education system should teach two things, both difficult: it should teach mental skills, such as critical thinking, creativity, research, and the ability to apprehend new areas of knowledge quickly; and secondly, it needs to teach context or understanding, also known as wisdom. This is hard. How would I go about it? I’ve discussed that at great length in various columns I’ve written over the past 15 years in “Teach” magazine. I was going to provide a link to a relevant column, but something has just fowled up my website server. If you come back a little later, hopefully I’ll be able to point you to such an article. Sorry about that. In summary, though, what learners need is to have their interest piqued, and their talents, interests and skills identified, and then put on a path to pursue those interests AS A MEANS OF educating them in the broader fields of knowledge. If we can capture a learner’s interest, then we won’t have to force them to go to school, they’ll drag us behind them because they will be so eager to learn. As it is, we force them through 12-13 years of servitude and boredom, killing much of their native curiosity. Worzel continues: OK, my website server is back up, so here are some links: http://www.futuresearch.com/futureblog/2010/09/14/follow-the-red-brick-road/ http://www.futuresearch.com/futureblog/2010/09/01/why-education-must-change/ There are more, but this is a start.
Janosz: To The Ingenuity Series: Thank you for the opportunity to ask the question. To Mr. Worzel: Thank you for the thoughtful response! May I repost the comments up to my blog at TeachIngenuity.com along with a link to this discussion? Some additional thoughts…
Interesting that you point to creativity as one of the desirable personal qualities to be garnered by way of their formal education. I’ve reflected on this term a great deal over my career and now favor the use of the term ingenuity, hence the name of my blog. I find that creativity is inherent in ingenuity, but that ingenuity is what we really want to develop because it evokes the APPLICATION of one’s creativity. The way I see it, a person’s ingenuity, a personal quality, is key to any uncertainty of their future lives and careers.
Worzel: First, go ahead and repost the comments on your blog, and thanks for the interest. Second, no argument from me on ingenuity as a critical issue. I believe all related techniques are desirable, and teachable as well. We’ve been raised to believe that only “artists” are creative, and only “inventors” are ingenious, yet I believe everyone has these qualities. They can be trained and practised, just like any other mental muscle.
The CNN special report “Don’t Fail Me: Education In America” originally aired on CNN on May 15, 2011. The report chronicled three students and teams engaged in the FIRST Robotics Competition during the 2010-11 school year. Below are some of my thoughts on the documentary. FIRST FIRST teams in schools are comprised of about twenty students. FIRST reports that in 2011, they are reaching 66,875 students with their high school programs. Let’s dig a little deeper into that number because it sounds like a lot. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there are about 26 million secondary school students in the United States. So, FIRST, a program which most consider to be wildly successful, is now reaching only about 0.25% of American high school students. Even if there was a FIRST robotics team in every one of America’s 41,000+ secondary schools, with only twenty students on each team, this program would be for only about 3% of American high school students. The other thing that might strike you is the makeup of the FIRST teams themselves. In photos of teams of just over twenty students, I counted only three and four girls on each of the teams pictured. Let’s put that against some of the numbers mentioned previously. Assuming that the teams pictured are indicative of female participation in FIRST programs, and based on my research and involvement with this issue in the state of New Jersey I have no reason to think this is not at least in the ballpark, this means that FIRST programs are reaching only 0.08% of all female high school students in the United States!
INSANITY I was surprised and somewhat pleased to see a former prominent public official in former Governor of Tennessee Phil Bredesen speak so frankly to a wide public audience about the insanity of the accountability system we employ in statewide testing. I conclude from his comments and CNN’s analysis that any data presented by any state education institution can be considered invalid. I also believe that this is closely linked to another thing I noticed in Don’t Fail Me. Pretty much any time you saw anyone teaching mathematics, it was as we all remember it; it was an overhead projector with the teacher writing on it; it was students doing math problems on the board in front of the class. The relationship I would point out is this: The insanity of the testing and accountability system in place in educational institutions is perpetuating us in the same stale, demonstrably ineffective instructional practices that have lead us to where we find ourselves today. Ask any teacher in a tested subject and they will tell you clearly that they know that how they are teaching does not hold up in what research shows as effective. They basically will tell you that they do know better, but that they teach this way because of the test for which they are preparing students. After all, Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We are clearly epitomizing his definition in the tested “core academic” subjects and this is done at the expense of programs that can deliver authentic learning experience such as those that FIRST and other technology and engineering programs in schools provide. — I am thankful to CNN and Soledad O’Brien for taking up the effort to try to raise awareness about some of the issues that they brought to light in Don’t Fail Me. But, call it cautiously thankful since I know that so much more needs to be done. If we want to do more, we don’t need another robotics competition. We need a strong, rigorous, scalable program institutionalized in American schools that can reach every student, not just a few. My colleagues and I are working on a plan to do just that and I look forward to sharing our ideas in the near future. Everyone seems to know that one needs a solid background in math and science in order to be an engineer. Math and science are part of what I call a student’s “ingenuity toolkit” and professional engineers draw upon this knowledge every day in their professional life as they set out to design, create, invent, innovate, and solve problems. Yet, there is an important piece of that ingenuity toolkit missing from the public’s consciousness, and that is to have students that aspire to be engineers study technology during their K-12 education. Just because a student is good in math and science doesn’t mean that they would like being an engineer. Further, with the dropout and transfer rates in engineering programs at the university level so high, we owe it to our younger students to teach them more about what engineers do and how they design and develop new technologies. Part of the reason we import engineering talent from other countries is because students do not explore technology, innovation, design, and engineering in every K-12 school. I’ve asked several engineers what abilities they think are most valuable to them in their profession day-to-day. Many cite things like the ability to create and innovate, the ability to apply math and science to practical design situations, the ability to work as a member of a team, and the ability to solve technological problems. While math and science courses K-12 provide an appropriate math and science background, where are students given opportunities to explore and develop these other, sometimes intangible, things that seem to be so important to professional engineers? In other words, where are they given the opportunity to develop and apply their ingenuity? Many do not realize that there are Technology Education programs in some schools that introduce these things with a direct approach and give students a taste of what it would be like to be an engineer. Teachers in such programs challenge their students everyday with problems designed to spur creativity. I’ve also asked a number of engineers if and how they got interested in the field as children, and they almost always say, “I was the kid that was always tinkering with things around the house and driving my parents crazy in the process.” That tinkering by the way, is early development of the ability to conduct critical analysis, an ability that is at the heart of engineering. Technology Education programs at all grade levels seek to afford students opportunities to tinker, to discover how things work, and to explore the designed world. At the elementary school level, students may learn about the basics of electricity by actually building simple circuits or about simple machines designed for specific tasks. In middle school, students may explore concepts in more detail, perhaps by designing and building a model of a bridge or a gliding aircraft. In high school, students may have opportunities to design an affordable home, take something apart to see how it works, or design and build a robot that would be used for a rescue mission or some other specific purpose. They also can and should solve problems of their own choosing and direction. All of these experiences are akin to the processes of engineering. This is the type of learning that can enhance a future engineer’s experience, but also the type that cannot be included in the typical upper grade level math or science classroom for one main reason: math and science teachers generally do not have the time and most likely do not have the interest nor the expertise needed for in depth study of technology. There is another underlying issue related to this discussion, and it is the under-representation of women in the engineering field. One of the reasons the study of technology and engineering should happen early in elementary school is because research shows that negative attitudes about such topics stem from a lack of experiences at primary grade levels. Unless Technology Education is required off all students at all grade levels, it will be tougher to get young women interested in engineering and technology related fields. This is the foremost reason that elementary educators will also need the tools to be able to integrate these concepts into their lessons. Technology education and the development of students’ ingenuity can have other broad reaching impacts for all students. While engineering is considered by most to be a challenging field, there is an element of technology education that is good for all to know. It is important for all students to understand the nature and process of technological development and activity on some level. It will help them make informed decisions as consumers about whether to buy a hybrid car or whether to invest in that new high-tech device. Finally, it would help them to develop the needed in any job such as teamwork, creativity, and the ability to apply knowledge. Right now, most schools have two parts of what may be considered the ingenuity toolkit in place in math and science. What’s needed to ensure future economic prosperity and technological innovation is the third piece, the study of technology. Versions of this post have appeared on NJ.com and the New Jersey Tech News. Johnny is entering the ninth grade in Springfield High School. Having been historically an “average” B-C student, mathematics has always been exceptionally challenging to him. During the past summer, his parents arranged for a personal tutor to do one session per week with him. Also wanting a fresh start of sorts in math going into his new high school, Johnny actually welcomed the opportunity for the one-to-one support. He even happily agreed to cut back on video games to fit in the sessions and also the additional summer assignments provided by his tutor. All in all that summer, he did spend less time playing video games, he improved his math skills with the more personal attention, and he looked forward to beginning his new math class. Johnny’s new math teacher, Ms. Mathematica, has a reputation. She is a twenty year veteran in the classroom and she is known for having a tough and very disciplined approach to teaching mathematics. She has even had three students go on to earn doctoral degrees in mathematics and another two of her students actually have gone on to become math teachers themselves. Ms. Mathematica is one that doesn’t believe in partial credit. Either the entire problem is done correctly or it is wrong. After a strong first few weeks in class, Johnny soon reverts to old “habits.” Ms. Mathematica’s class is highly structured. Even when students are working together in groups, they are all expected to be doing the same thing at the same time. Johnny can often be seen gazing out the classroom window during class. He hasn’t caused any disruptions during class, but despite Ms. Mathematica’s reminders to stay focused on the work, he has simply lost concentration. Instead of doing his homework after school, Johnny goes to his room and plays video games. Interestingly, he is good at one particular game called World of the Sorcerer’s Magic. Typically, he plays for about an hour and a half after school, then breaks to come to dinner. He eats hurriedly, but not fast enough for his parents to tell him to slow down. Throughout dinner he is always just so anxious to get back to playing. Between chatter about the day with his family, his mind is thinking about the maneuvers that will get him to the next level of the game. Because he participated in the family discussion and he didn’t eat too too fast, somehow it doesn’t seem impolite for him to excuse himself to go back to his room to play some more. So then, where and how did Johnny become more apathetic toward math and more interested in his video game? The answer to both, I believe, is all about motivation, and, more specifically, his ability to envision his own success in each endeavor. How is the motivation to succeed in math any different that motivation to succeed at video games? The rewards for both seem to be about the same. You don’t ordinarily and immediately win money when you play video games, nor do you if you are good math. You can win praise from your peers for both; I’ve heard just as many students praise a friend for being good at math as I have the same for video games. Johnny’s not necessarily going to find a nice girlfriend just by virtue of being good at one or the other. Motivation, by the way, to those outside of the education profession, is THE KEY to learning. So many education research studies point to motivation as the main factor in student learning, but most of the education world is slow to catch up. You see, I don’t believe that motivation in this sense is innate or intrinsic. In fact, anything you’d probably say is intrinsic about motivation is probably due simply to earlier experience and successes. But, I do believe it is closely linked to vision on the part of the young person. If someone can see themselves succeeding at any task, they can become motivated to achieve. In video games, players can easily envision success and can also SEE and FEEL evidence of it quickly. New levels of performance are constantly obtained. Although people may spend hours trying to get passed that one level, they will continue onto the next because they have done something similar before. Wow, just writing this is bringing me back to the journey to navigate Super Mario Brothers as I did as a kid. Now let’s take this out of the learning math and video games context and talk about what it looks like in trying to develop one’s ingenuity. Technology and engineering teachers are among the few in schools that are willing to let students set their own direction for projects. Ultimately, it works best when students can choose and frame their own projects and constraints. Choosing and directing projects of their own is about as motivating for young people as it can get. It’s not uncommon to find a teacher that is encouraging their students to write down information about everyday problems with the hope they can focus on one of them for a class project. Even if the project work is contrived or set by the teacher, motivation is enhanced because the hands-on nature of the work allows more students the chance to be able to succeed. No matter what the project is, the fact that there are many many different possibilities in terms of how to approach and solve a design problem allows students to see just as many possibilities for success. Even though there may be constraints of the problem to deal with, there are still so many possibilities. So then, is there any hope for Johnny in Ms. Mathematica’s class? Where Johnny saw no chance to succeed, his motivation disappeared. He was feeling some success earlier that summer with his tutor because in that one-to-one situation it was much easier to succeed and in that particular setting the motivation appeared much faster. But, this is why I try to advocate for learning about technology and engineering and for the development of the ingenuity of our young people. It’s because the motivation that I’ve witnessed students feeling in these settings not only helps them to develop and apply their ingenuity in a real and more motivating context, I’ve also witnessed how it can help students envision success in other school subjects. So, where we would normally say “he’s got a lack of concentration,” we should be admitting there’s a lack of motivation. And, we’ve got to lose this attitude that all kids should want to learn just so that they can better themselves. The lack of concentration comes more from the school itself, so then the school itself should take responsibility for the motivation. Let’s also hope that Johnny is able to feel some success in mathematics by applying it in his technology and engineering class. Genrikh Altshuller was an engineer, inventor, scientist, journalist, and writer of science fiction and many books about inventing and innovation. He is best known as the creator of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving known by its Russian acronym TRIZ (pronounced ‘trees’). He founded the Azerbaijan Public Institute for Inventive Creation, and was the first President of the TRIZ Association. His science fiction was written under the pseudonym of Genrikh Altov. Altshuller received his first patent at age 14 for an underwater breathing device. In his early twenties, having gained a reputation as an inventor, many people came to him for help with their inventions and he then began his quest to develop a method for invention. He found no existing methods and, being skeptical of the then current psychological methods of creativity, he looked to the accumulated results of invention as documented in patents. Altshuller analyzed more than 200,000 patents and made several important discoveries. He defined a truly inventive problem as having one or more internal contradictions. He discovered that there were identifiable patterns of solutions to inventive problems and abstracted more than one hundred of those patterns. He discovered that technological systems evolve over time according to patterns that have predictive power. He also developed several methods and tools for applying this knowledge and he and his colleagues tested the validity of each of his discoveries through extensive practical work solving tough technological problems. Altshuller established training and certification programs and educated hundreds of students in the use of his methods. He engaged in continuous development of a science of invention until his health declined and further development of TRIZ passed entirely to his students and colleagues. TRIZ was virtually unknown in the West until the early nineties. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union many TRIZ masters immigrated to the United States, Israel, and Western Europe. Development of TRIZ as a method for innovation and invention continues today and the community of practitioners has grown worldwide. The concepts of TRIZ are used by professional inventors and engineers and are taught in many colleges and universities. Profound enough for the professional, TRIZ principles and methods have also been successfully learned by children and youth in elementary and high schools including schools in the United States. To learn more about TRIZ, click to Halliburton Associates. The most important change to hit the business world in the last few decades has been the need to be more broad thinking in one’s approach to problem solving. Business has become global, much more complex and interconnected…. and solutions to problems should reflect this. This requires employees who can think multi-dimensionally, seeing the relationships between various aspects of a problem; and knowing how to blend and integrate these constraints together into an acceptable solution. Schools, and their prescribed daily 50 minute blasts of knowledge we call subjects, are not now able to educate students in the kind of multi-dimensional thinking the business world finds most desirable. This mismatch is becoming more apparent with every graduating class. The cost of remedial education for incoming new hires is increasing for many companies, and in some becoming terribly expensive. There is great room for change and rejuvenation in the modern school curriculum. Technology education is the best available discipline toward achieving a multi-dimensional approach to problem solving. Technology education personifies how students really learn, actually appealing more to students than the traditional forms of education; and in complete agreement with recent brain-based research findings that recommend daily doses of open-ended, contextual problem solving exercises. It is just what is needed to foster a school-to-work mindset, and assure global competitiveness down the road. Why specifically does technology education appeal to the business world? Here are a few key reasons: Team Learning Environments To solve problems in a multi-dimensional and integrated fashion in the business world requires cooperation and coordination among a number of experts, working on project teams. Very seldom will the world find a “lone wolf” expert involved in the implementation of a global enterprise. Single inventors may conceive of new products and processes, but interdisciplinary teams and teamwork are needed to bring them to the marketplace. Technology education students know how to work in teams, making the necessary compromises and tradeoffs, much like engineers and project managers do. It is fine to have outstanding intellect, but it will be more important have both intellect and be a team player. Performing solo for a while is fine, but the orchestra is what will get the job done. Discipline, Discipline, Discipline Technology education is a highly structured approach to using data, information, knowledge, and technology to solve problems for society. It is scientifically based, and hence reproducible. It is not a fad or trend. There is a large body of national experience to support the importance and efficacy of technology education. In fact, technology education is a valid model for problem solving in all areas, whether technical or not. It is a disciplined inquiry best suited to solving unstructured problems-just like the kind most likely to be found on the job. Content and Process Science is often seen as the preferred subject of study for students regarding matters technological. Critics have argued that science has both process and content and technology education has only process. This is incorrect. The story of humanity’s progress is the story of technology application. Humans were technologists and engineers long before they were scientists. The pyramids, the medieval cathedrals, and the Roman aqueducts were built centuries before the laws of science were codified in the 15th/16th centuries. Science is about discovery and technology education is about application. Science has content in its various subject matter like chemistry, physics, material science…etc; and of course it has the scientific process of hypothesis and synthesis through experimentation. Technology education has for its content all the subjects (and more) that students study. It has science, history, social studies, mathematics, politics, government, the environment….etc; and it has a scientific approach in its process of synthesizing a resolution or compromise between these competing constraints. It mirrors engineering. Science is an introvert to the world of application. Technology education, the extrovert, teaches students how to apply what they have learned, and solve problems for society right now. It is contextual problem solving extraordinaire. The world of business is about application, and problem solving in support of customer needs…..even if the science underlying exactly why applications work is not yet completely understood. The Capitalist System Technology education is a passion play for the study of American capitalism. Today’s economy is driven by application of technology. Economists estimate that over 60% of the annual growth in the Nation’s gross national product is due to technological advances. Science is the raw material for technological advances. It is one of the subject components a technology education student would use to study the history of technological advances and determine how technology could be used to solve a critical need in society. It shows students how new products and services start out as ideas and concepts and culminate with an improved standard of living. It also mirrors the invention process. Patents are the driving force for protecting the unique and novel techniques made possible by the judicious application of technology….. or industrial know-how. Making Connections Because of the multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary nature of technology education and the need to use higher order thinking skills, technology education students naturally look for linkages and connections between subject fields and technology areas. This makes them ideal strategists and planners for companies, able to appreciate the synergies and trends on the horizon. Many high tech companies have introduced new executive positions within their corporations like the title of Vice President of Technology, to draw emphasis to the importance of application in their never ending quest to produce products and services for their customers. The truly great companies know that the key to sustained long- term success lies in their ability to work at the interfaces between new technologies and trends, and from these confluences develop products and services before their competitors. They want employees who can see the potential connections between emerging fields and technologies. They want employees who can think both deep and broad. Technology education prepares students for this. Life-long Learning Technology education promotes self-learning because it teaches students to ask the necessary questions at the outset of a problem solving challenge. Technology education students learn how to ask the quality questions that lead to high quality solutions. In their world (and in the business world) the best answer to a problem is the one that is the most complete answer-the one that takes as much relevant information in and mediates a blended solution of the concerns and constraints. This question-asking paradigm is a key step in an employee’s process of life-long learning. Companies highly value employees ingrained with a discipline and zest for life-long learning. The companies and employees who will survive the daily rigors of global competition are the ones who know how to learn, un-learn, and re-learn in the most rapid and efficient manner. The workplace is no longer simply about access to material resources and high employee I.Q. It’s about being able to do something really unique in the marketplace with the same raw resources and intellectual horsepower as the next company. Technology education is a testing ground for students to learn how to think and act creatively…..accessing, evaluating, and applying all the information they have compiled across their studies. And I might add most emphatically…..those who can learn most effectively are also those who can teach what they have learned (both process and content) to other co-workers. School and work are becoming indistinguishable. A successful business leader spends as much time doing his/her own work as teaching others how to do theirs. *** Technology education is valuable preparation for the business world. It is the discipline of unstructured problem solving, much like the conditions found every day around the world in globally competitive companies. Too often, I have seen technology education belittled by parents, teachers, and administrators as a “blue collar”, “industrial arts” type of activity. This stigma is most unfortunate, and terribly wrong. Technology has radically changed every aspect of our civilization from the factory floor to the arts. Our standard of living is directly dependent upon our judicious application of technology. Try watching a modern stage play, movie, or concert without the benefit of current technology. In the intense technological world we are born into, how can we not afford to elevate this important discipline to a place of prominence in the curricula, making it a core skill for all students, showing them in no uncertain terms the direct relevance of school-to-work? Technology is the indisputable agent of change in our society, and technology education students learn the responsibility of minimizing the impacts of its introduction. What better example and goal could we set for our future leaders? It’s not about whether we teach technology education and not teach something else. It’s about changing the way we teach; and educate tomorrow’s teachers. Technology education draws its very strength from being a discipline that builds bridges between things…i.e. subjects. It gains strength from having as many topical areas (subjects) as possible, both technical and non technical in nature, to draw from. About 140 years ago as the industrial revolution began to take hold in our Nation, it radically changed the way schools were organized. We left the one-room schoolhouse of an agrarian age behind to transform into a mechanistic, piecemeal approach to school-a mirror image of the then factory workplace. Now with the information age and global competition upon us, our factories and manufacturing facilities have turned to integrating their operations. We hear such terms as concurrent engineering, flexible manufacturing, and computer integrated manufacturing. The new emphasis is on the whole product, not just its individual parts. And with this fundamental change, so must the emphasis in our schools be on the whole educational experience, not just its subjects. Metaphorically, we are returning to a new one-room schoolhouse experience, both in school and on-the-job. Technology education is a jump-start in this direction. It is a weathervane for the future, and the critical skill set for continuous employment in a globally competitive world. A version of this article appeared in the October 2001 edition of The Technology Teacher published by the ITEEA. |
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