"Common Core Standards, the current approach to education
that is being implemented in 44 states, is a curriculum designed to prepare
students for college and employment, [a Director of Learning Services] told an
area K-12 school board of education Monday.”
This headline and opening paragraph appeared recently in one or our area newspapers.
The ONLY thing we're going to prepare our students to do is go to
college and work for someone else? Really? Do we really think the people that will work
on our cars in the future need college to make $45,000 to $60,000 per year?
How are we supposed to have businesses and organizations that are
successful enough to need all these employees we're creating if our “Common
Core Standards” only creates employees?
What do we do about the nearly half of recent college graduates
that are deep in debt and unemployed? Should we just keep creating more
graduates who only know to look for a certain kind of employment so they can
take their place in the unemployment line behind those already there?
Apparently, boards of (K-12) education in 44 states think that's
the answer.
This play-book, the one that directs us to tell our young people "Go
to college, get your degree and go to work for someone else" is at nearly
100 years old and much of it began becoming obsolete sometime in the
mid-1980's.
It's not just K-12 that's missing the boat. For the most
part, higher education, and the state and federal governments that control
higher education purse strings, are all using the same obsolete play-book.
I attended a focus group of higher education leaders in Southeast
Kansas a few months ago. The organizer wanted us to discuss the role of higher
education in economic development. I listened as participants talked
exclusively about how higher education's job was to do a better job preparing
their students to find jobs. Finally, after a solid hour, a Kansas Small
Business Development Center representative spoke up and said "Wait a
minute. What helping create the businesses that will hire the students?"
She might as well have been from Mars.
There's a problem. Ever notice in the last few years its
smaller, entrepreneurial start-up companies that are growing and employing more
people than the mostly dying, huge, bureaucratic dinosaur companies that were
thriving in the 1950's, 60's and 70's?
Times are changing and change is only going to accelerate. Many of today’s careers will be gone in five
years and we have no idea what the new ones will be because they haven’t been
invented yet. We're training much of our
youth for the wrong stuff, in the wrong way and we're conveying the wrong
message. Otherwise, why would so many not be able to find jobs upon
graduation? Why would so many be disillusioned and angry about being
so far in debt and not able to work? How are we supposed to support the
creation of entrepreneurial start-up companies if the idea is not even
mentioned in the "Common Core Standards" that are now used in 44
states?
The entrepreneurial mindset is about learning to recognize
problems as opportunities and creating solutions that other people--either
customers or employers--find of value. Entrepreneurial mindset is about
being adaptable and ready for the life-long learning (in many forms) that will
be required to survive and thrive in the accelerated, drastic future coming to
our world. We need to update the play-book in the "Common Core
Standards" of K-12 and in our approach to higher education.
The best thing we could do for economic development, job creation
and personal well-being in Southeast Kansas is to work to develop an
entrepreneurial mindset in everyone; the students in our schools, the employees
in our workforce and the businesses that hire those employees.
