Everybody Works For Somebody Else. Really?

Headline:  "School board hears report on approach to curriculum"

"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.