'How Not To Educate the Information Age Workforce', Critical Quarterly Spring 2001, Vol 43 No 1.
By Diane Coyle
Tony Blair, in the 1997 general election campaign, famously
made education his top three priorities. He was more
emphatic than most, but it is every politician¹s top
priority, and certainly every parent¹s. Yet there are no
aspects of modern societies less well prepared for the
information age economy than their education systems. While
institutional details vary from country to country,
including the amounts spent and the split between private
and public provision, everywhere the education system is
inflexible, bureaucratic, over-centralised, demoralised and
inadequate. Policy-makers, teachers and parents are failing
their children, a failure that matters most for those who
start out with the fewest economic advantages. The
education system is guilty, amongst other things, of
fossilizing emerging inequalities as a result of its
failure to adapt to underlying economic change.
This is not to say there are no signs of awareness of the
extent of this failure. For example, Japan has one of the
world¹s most rigid and conformist education systems, in
which students come under enormous pressure to succeed in
just one conventional way. Taichi Sakaiya, Japan¹s Minister
of State for Economic Planning, speaking in Paris at the
OECD Forum 2000, explicitly recognised the link between the
underlying economic structure and education, a system
extraordinarily little changed in its broad outline for a
century. ³The educational system was built up to foster
highly patient and co-operative people with minimal
originality and creativity, perfectly suited for working in
standardised mass production industries. ... As a result,
by the 1980s Japan had achieved the most complete modern
industrialised society, based on the mass production of
standardised goods, in the entire history of human beings,²
he said.
Across the industrialised world, however, the political
response to the realisation -- and it¹s not new -- that an
education system devised to train workers for the assembly
line is failing because of the obsolescence of the mass
production economy, has been to try and patch it up. In a
desperate and entirely understandable bid to raise
standards in failing schools, politicians and bureaucrats
have concentrated massive efforts on delivering incremental
improvements in the existing education system, and its
incremental extension to broader groups of the population.
Of course it is right to seek to raise standards in
response to the past failures. Even so, the absence of
serious proposals to combine the need for a less rigid
education system with a true respect for intellectual
attainment is all the more shocking because the internet
has created a vast new array of resources and made possible
new methods of teaching. New technology has cut the cost of
extending educational provision, made it possible for the
best teachers to extend their reach and literally put the
entire Library of Congress at the fingertips of students.
One of the most thoughtful contributions on what kind of
education system the 21st century economy will need has
come from Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Board
chairman. In one speech he said: ³Skill has taken on a much
broader meaning than it had only a decade or two ago.
Today¹s workers must be prepared along many dimensions --
not only with technical know-how but also with the ability
to create, analyze and transform information, and with the
capacity to interact effectively with others. Moreover they
must recognise that the skills they develop today will
likely not last a lifetime.² Whereas once completing high
school was enough learning for a lifetime, that is no
longer true, he added.1 In other words, while it was always
true that the most able students, those climbing to the
pinnacle of the liberal education, not only learnt well but
also learnt how to learn, that meta-skill is now needed by
almost everyone. For having only generic attainments that
start becoming outdated as soon as they leave school leaves
people vulnerable to replacement either by machines or by
workers in other, cheaper parts of the world.
This need for the constant updating of skills is nowhere
more evident than on the frontier of the computer industry.
After all, this industry changes so swiftly. Programmers
acquire shelves groaning with dusty three year old or 12
month old user manuals for languages once in huge demand
and now defunct. New areas of business balloon
unpredictably, creating a jobs market so tight in some
skills that companies literally go to the ends of the earth
to hire workers. In her memoir of this manic business,
Ellen Ullman writes: ³The skill-set changes before the
person possibly can, so it¹s always simpler just to change
the person. Take out a component, put in a zippier one. Let
the people come and go; plug them in then pull them out.²
This kind of turnover in the demand for skills is still the
exception in the jobs market. Even so, it is hard to think
of any jobs now where what an employer wants in a worker is
a passive repository containing a minimum amount of
information and basic literacy and numeracy. Although
literacy and numeracy are still essential of course --
making it tricky to argue with the official Gradgrinds
focussed on achieving higher standards in this small area
of the necessary skill set -- the real need is a robust
ability to think independently. Even in the most Œordinary¹
jobs people increasingly need to be able to take
responsibility for decisions. In a factory using teams to
build products in a just-in-time system, team members need
to decide when to stop the line for quality control, or to
think up their own process and product improvements. Nurses
in a hospital are no longer the bottom layers of the
medical hierarchy, humbly carrying out doctors¹ decisions,
but have taken on parallel responsibilities. PAs in an
office are no longer just typists and tea-makers but have
significant adminstrative responsibilities. Passivity and
conformity at work is on its way out. Yet our education
system expects passivity at school for 14 or more years to
be an adequate preparation for work.
If there is a single sign of the inadequacy of education
for the majority of children, it is the increasing
inequality in earnings apparent in all OECD economies but
particularly in the US and UK with their more flexible jobs
markets. By the mid-1990s the degree of inequality had
reached its most pronounced level than any time in the past
60 years and probably longer. In particular, the economic
return to education and computer skills rose dramatically.
Between 1979 and 1995 the earnings of new college graduates
in the US rose 33 per cent relative to those of high-school
graduates. In real, inflation-adjusted terms the pay of the
least educated workers actually fell during those two
decades.
Economists have tested several possible explanations for
increased inequality. For a while one favoured suggestion
was that increased competition from low-cost foreign
workers was to blame, but that was clearly rejected by the
available evidence in a number of studies. Such trade is
too small-scale to explain the trend in incomes, and nor
can it account for increased earnings inequality within
industries and companies.
Instead, the problem seems to be a vastly increased demand
for some types of skill combined with too small an increase
in the supply of such workers.4 To give an indication of
the demand shift, the proportion of the US workforce using
a computer at work climbed from 24.4 per cent of all
workers in 1984 to 50.6 per cent in 1997. And in 1997 the
proportions ranged between 11.7 per cent for high school
dropouts to 75.9 per cent for college graduates. The data
show a substantial wage premium for use of a computer at
work, one above and beyond the higher pay you would expect
for a higher level of education. One summary concludes:
³Increases in the growth of the demand for more educated
workers are concentrated in the most computer-intensive
sectors of the economy over the past two decades.² This is
not conclusive proof that computerization is behind the
pattern of demand for labour, but it is certainly
suggestive. It indicates that technical progress has been
biased towards using certain kinds of new skills and
against traditional skills. The modern jobs market needs a
different kind of worker. The pattern of skill demands is
similar in other OECD nations, although labour market
institutions mean the outcomes in terms of wages and
employment levels vary widely, with less inequality but
also lower employment in countries with a high degree of
social protection.
When asked, human resource managers in US companies said
big investments in information technology had led to
organisational changes. They had decentralised decision
making and given workers more autonomy, and they wanted
employees with a higher level of educational attainment.5
This suggests a need for independence or self-reliance,
basic intelligence and common sense, and probably more
co-operation or consultation with co-workers, less
instruction from above -- all characteristics exactly
opposite to those valued by a manager trying to run a
smooth, centralised assembly line.
Obviously computers have been able to substitute directly
for many repetitive tasks, whether in the factory or in
services like banking. Yet while the microprocessor can
substitute for some kinds of labour, it complements others.
What computers need humans for is doing all the things they
can¹t manage. In short, they need people skills. These
range from raw intellect to creativity and imagination,
through to friendliness and a cheerful smile. This is
exactly consistent with the observed patterns of jobs
growth, tracked each year for example by the US Bureau of
Labour Statistics or Warwick University¹s Institute for
Employment Research.
The evidence of history also supports the argument that all
technological revolutions increase the rewards to Œskill¹
over a transitional period. It is no accident that on some
measures earnings inequality is greater now than at any
time since the late 19th and early 20th century. For
example, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz found that during
the period of factory electrification in 1909-29,
industries with higher capital ratios and more intensive
electricity use employed more highly-educated workers and
paid them more. This was a contrast to the earlier period
when initially mechanization had been deskilling, requiring
only factory fodder. The new system of batch production
raised the need for skills once again. However, the pay gap
between the skilled and unskilled narrowed again later, for
two reasons. One is that the new technologies become more
familiar and user-friendly, reducing the comparative
advantage of the skilled.
A second, reason, however, lies in the response of the
education system. That was also the period when the US
public school system was created and the provision of
education to a standardised level spread throughout the
country to a large proportion of the population. In other
industrialised nations the same period also saw the mass
state provision of education, standardisation of the
curriculum and successive increases in the school leaving
age. Ever since the tendency has been towards further
centralised direction of education and training by
governments even in countries where there is also private
schooling. Teachers are bureacrats required to furnish
their pupils with a prescribed set of information at given
times, and achieve measurable standards on various tightly
defined metrics. It doesn¹t sound a good system for the
network age, and it isn¹t.
Of course, it is a lot easier to criticise the existing
system than to suggest a better one. For a start it is not
obvious that improving economic growth ought to be the
purpose of the education system. Even if you accept the
needs of the economy as a valid framework of reference, the
problem is that economists do not understand the links
between education and growth. We know that the flow of
ideas is the most important factor in long-run growth but
not how it works. As Harvard economist Ed Glaeser puts it:
³The critical theoretical insight of growth theory has
almost no solid empirical foundations.² The sensible
response is to experiment with a range of reforms rather
than making an instant commitment to a new model approved
by a central government department.
There may be some clues in looking at the kinds of people
who have succeeded in the ur-New Economy industry itself,
computers. Two researchers from the extraordinarily
innovative Xerox PARC note that successful software and
hardware innovators are anything but conventional. John
Seely Brown and Paul Duguid write: ³Much digital innovation
has come from people who spent their time on campus
wandering around in the arts, theatre, psychology and the
humanities -- areas not well supported in the
unplug-and-pay model of education.²
It is also noteworthy that almost all the world-class
universities in almost all subjects, attracting the best
students from many countries in an increaingly global
higher education market, are the private US universities.
These have two features that distinguish them from
universities in other countries. One is the freedom
available to students in the curriculum. The range of
subjects studied by undergraduates is far wider than in
other countries, providing a much greater choice and
variety, and educating students more broadly. They have
stayed closer to the classic educational ideal of forming
well-rounded graduates, leaving narrower professional or
vocational skills to post-graduate training. At an earlier
stage it does not matter what they have learnt
specifically, only that they have learnt something and can
therefore do it again.
The second feature is the weight placed on having to
attract the paying customer, tapping into the great merit
of markets, that they convey unparalleled information about
what people want. At present in most countries outside the
US public funding is committed to the institution rather
than the individual. Students can in many cases shop around
in the sense that they can choose their university or
college but, within limits, their choices have little
impact on the institutions and there is no price mechanism
to signal preferences. In hiring academics, too, only the
US has anything like a market creating incentives to excel
and attract students. Professors there have to compete to
attract students to their courses, and universities have to
compete for the best teachers and researchers. Elsewhere,
universities are frankly stuffed with undistinguished
jobsworths who put up with declining relative pay and
status in return for a quiet life.
In their book Seely Brown and Duguid, writing about the US,
suggest an refined university model, one that takes
advantage of the new technologies. Universities would
continue to exist as research centres and degree-granting
bodies, but a student¹s education could be more fluid in
time and place. ³Essentially a student¹s university career
in such a system would no longer be through a particular
place, time or pre-selected body of academics, but through
a network principally of their own making yet shaped by a
degree granting body and its faculty,² they write.6
Students could stay home or travel, work online or meet
their teachers face-to-face, work with a class or with
mentors, and learn continuously rather than for a fixed
period. Such changes seem inevitable. Indeed, many
universities are already experimenting with more flexible
schemes. Harvard and Oxford are collaborating on a scheme
to provide online learning to their alumni, allowing them
to refresh and update their education. Distance learning is
well-established and much improved through use of the
internet.
Although extending access to higher education and
exploiting new technologies effectively will be
challenging, especially in the highly bureaucratic and
centralised tertiary education systems outside the US,
reshaping primary and secondary education looks far more
difficult. Inevitably, the economic and social costs of a
failed experiment at this stage of children¹s lives are far
higher. Still, some of the necessary features of an
education system that goes beyond the mass production of
standardised workers are clear.
For example, the content of many school lessons is of no
use in adult life. This has been true at least since I was
a child, making education a process of jumping required
hurdles and then, mercifully, forgetting whatever it was
that got you over them. But that is no excuse for it to go
on. Ministries of education ought to stop wasting time
prescribing the detailed content of lessons in specialised
subjects at every stage of a pupil¹s school career. They
are perpetrating an intellectual fraud, one whose biggest
victims are those children who are least able in the
conventional academic sense. It condemns them unnecessarily
to failure, both financially and in the more important
personal sense.
Even somebody who is going to become an academic will
acquire the necessary content matter in their undergraduate
and postgraduate courses. After all, that material has
never been more easily and cheaply available than it is
now. What they need to learn at school, rather, is some
general Œhow tos¹ rather than Œwhats¹. The good old 3Rs,
obviously, are the basic building blocks for acquiring and
processing information. But also needed are skills of logic
and powers of argument, and, in an age when we are
saturated with images, visual skills.
Subjects that have come to be seen, at least in the
ministries, as frivolous such as music and drama are almost
certainly more useful for both the pupil and the economy as
a whole than the narrowly academic, core curriculum
subjects edging them out. For example, charitable
welfare-to-work schemes in New York and London focus on
giving young people written off as no-hopers at the end of
their school careers, who are long-term unemployed, key
life skills they should have learnt in school if not at
home. As well as punctuality and politeness, for instance,
these include presentation, speaking confidently and
clearly, good posture -- all skills a drama teacher could
have offered.
At a time when in so many subject areas there is obviously
no such thing as a static body of knowledge it seems
madness to imagine we should nevertheless be instilling
such a set of information into the minds of young people.
The knowledge economy is not about what you know but how
you know, and knowledge is a process or experience, dynamic
rather than static.
To focus on incremental improvements in redundant skills is
all the more damaging given the importance of values and
intangible social capital in modern economies. Children
know when their education is useless, and in many schools
-- especially amongst boys -- there is tremendous peer
pressure to shun conventional academic success even though
it clearly can offer a path to other and better
opportunities. Given that lack of respect for conventional
schooling, and given the need for alternative role models
or sets of values, it beggars belief that the principal
policy solution on offer is to push even harder down the
conventional route. It obviously will not work. It will not
attain the results, and it won¹t do the children any good
either. They know getting a grade C rather than a D in
history doesn¹t matter.
There is a compelling case for decentralisation in primary
and secondary education, not so much in the administrative
sense as the intellectual. Who pays for the education
system, or what the lines of organisational accountability
should be, are secondary questions in this context. High
standards for pupils are best achieved by ensuring their
teachers are high quality, and while relatively low pay
plays a big part in having creamed off some of the best
teachers into other occupations in recent years, the
bureaucratisation and centralisation of school systems has
tried to turn teachers into machines. Now that they can,
let the machines do all the boring business of churning out
facts and marking homework. Most of the material is already
there online somewhere: a motivated child could pass
through high school right now with the BBC Online and
similar websites. Free all the teachers to instill a sense
of curiosity and intellectual excitement, self-respect and
fun, personal discipline and logical thought. Some will be
good at it, some bad; after all many are natural
bureaucrats rather than born teachers. But the overall
standard of education will without any doubt improve.
Increasing standardisation has also served children, in all
their variety, very badly. The focus on academic success
alone means education systems inevitably produce first and
second class citizens. Decentralisation would also permit
more diversity, and recognise that success takes many
shapes. Most people are not stupid, but relatively few are
academically able. As it is impossible to predict exactly
what workplace skills will be needed in even five or ten
years¹ time, it is dangerously obsessive to insist on a
single and clearly already slightly archaic set of
achievements.
The financial markets provide a wonderful example of the
sudden mushrooming of demand for an unexpected set of
skills. The explosive growth of derivatives market from the
late 1980s on created an insatiable demand for traders with
a particular set of mental arithmetic skills. It was not
academically high level stuff -- they didn¹t need a PhD in
mathematics although the banks did want people with those
too. Rather, on the trading floor, they needed the ability
to add up and multiply very fast, to be thoroughly at home
with certain simple mental arithmetic skills. The City of
London sucked in tens of thousands of young men and women
working in another kind of market, street markets, or
perhaps in bank branches as tellers, people who might or
might not have left high school with a paper qualification
in mathematics but could do the business. Now, nearly 20
years later, the demand for such people is tailing off as
more trading is computerised. In the next decade there will
be a demand for another, unexpected skill.
What policy makers hate about this kind of prescription is
the thought of giving up control. Even if they can accept
the case for decentralisation intellectually, and a
minority can, they hate the idea of not being able to spell
out exactly what it is supposed to achieve. In this, they
are no different from the top executives in many big
companies who talk of empowering the workforce or
decentralising decision-making to business units, but in
the end cannot bring themselves to do it. Instead they use
new technologies to control the units even more tightly or
monitor every key stroke made by an employee. However, at a
time of rapid and tumultuous economic change, it is
impossible to predict what workforce skills employers will
need. For bureaucrats to pretend they can spell out an
appropriate curriculum and standards in every detail is
both dishonest and an appalling failure of their
responsibilities to the public. Bureaucratic planning
failed as an economic system under Soviet communism and now
it is failing under western capitalism too. Yet it clings
on grimly in ministries of education the world over, at the
expense of our children.
BRYNJOLFSSON, Erik and Lorin Hitt, ŒComputing Productivity:
Are Computers Pulling Their Weight?¹, MIT Sloan School of
Management, working paper January 2000.
CASTELLS, Manuel, The Information Age, vols I-III,
Blackwell, 1996-98.
GLAESER, Ed, ŒThe Future of Urban Research¹, Harvard
University working paper September 1999.
GOLDIN, Claudia and Lawrence Katz, ŒThe Origins of
Technology-Skill Complementarity¹, Quarterly Journal of
Economics, August 1998, Vol CXIII No 3 pp693-732.
GREENSPAN, Alan, Speech to National Community Reinvestment
Coalition, 22/3/00,
http://www.bog.frb.fed.us/BoardDocs/Speeches/2000/20000322.htm
KATZ, Lawrence, ŒTechnological Change, Computerization and
the Wage Structure¹, paper presented at Commerce Department
Conference 25-26 May 1999.
KRUGMAN, Paul, Pop Internationalism, MIT Press 1996.
SAKAIYA, Taichi, ŒThe Knowledge Value Revolution¹, paper
presented at OECD Forum 2000, Paris 27/6/00.
SEELY BROWN John and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of
Information, Harvard Business School Press, 2000.
ULLMAN, Ellen, Close to the Machine, City Lights 1997.
Copyright Diane Coyle, 2001.