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Jim
Bacon finds evidence that “traditional”
economic developers in the form of the Greater
Richmond Partnership are starting to see this need,
which is good news indeed. But many more than
Partnership President Greg Wingfield will have to “get it” if
we want to move forward. As long as Richmond is stuck in its sorry
little class and ethnic warfare battles, in which
people struggle for that extra bread crumb even if
it means
they all die of starvation, we will be perceived
by potential movers and shakers as about as
“cool” as August.
One
of the requirements that appears in any
economic development model is an adequately
trained workforce, which takes us in the
direction of education. How do we pioneer education systems in the Richmond
area that aren’t stuck on traditional models
that largely evolved from colonial times?
In
the days when only the upper class
could afford an education, an emphasis on turning
out gentleman made sense. Women, as in recent Afghanistan, were excluded, so the system did not evolve
based on the need to create ladies. Perhaps if it had, it would have been
more practical in its result.
Americans
then rightfully tried to ensure the success of the democratic experiment by providing every
citizen with at least a rudimentary education. But, in so doing, we
closed schools during the
summer so students could help harvest the crops on the family farm and,
coincidentally, created the need for our educators
to paint houses, work in day care centers, and
wait tables during the summers in order to meet
their 12-month expenses with a nine-month
contract. Meanwhile,
we strained budgets with so many bells and whistles
to the educational mission that teachers often
have to purchase classroom supplies out of
their own pockets.
It
is not surprising that educators captured the
process of extending education to all levels of
society. The professional educators, including
those who ran teacher-training programs, deemed
themselves part of the intellectual elite; they
designed curricula to pull the great
unwashed upward rather than prepare students for
the world of work. In other words, as we broadened the concept
of universal education, we didn’t rethink the
premises upon which curricula were based.
Mr.
Bacon has found a great deal to admire in our old
friend Professor Rich Florida’s book, The
Rise of the Creative Class, and, indeed, it is
a strong work.
Florida has been working on these issues for many years
and has done considerable work with the Council on
Competitiveness on related issues. When he speaks
we tend to listen.
Florida
argues that regions, to attract development, need to be filled with artistic, creative,
entrepreneurial people. Perhaps that is the
prism through which we should view our local
education system if we are to become serious about
transforming the region.
Are
we stuck in a century-old educational model that
no longer fits the economic realities of the day?
Do we get so infatuated with the latest
technologies that we spend valuable classroom
preparing students for a dot.com bust rather than
for an
ever-changing future? Perhaps we should rethink
both K-12 curricula and schedules with an eye
toward fostering those breakthrough
characteristics of a local workforce that
Professor Florida has identified. Perhaps we
should consider
maximizing the return on our highly pressured
school budgets by operating the schools year
around, like the school system in Raleigh, N.C.
In
practice, overhauling schools in line with the
Rich Florida model shouldn't be traumatic. A curriculum designed to foster creativity
and prepare students for an ever changing world of
work might look a lot like current
college prep programs. Rather
than teach subjects as
part of the body of knowledge that “educated”
people should master, however, the subjects would be taught
with the goal of providing students
diverse ways of seeing and understanding the world
and addressing its problems.
Art
and music definitely make the cut for a creative
curriculum; the disciplines teach us how artists and composers have
interpreted their
world. Literature is
crucial because it
illustrates how authors and poets have used the
language to convey information and interpretation
to others.
Math
is mandatory because it is provides a language and
set of tools that facilitate
communication in an increasingly technical world. Foreign languages
teach us how different cultures
see the world. History and social studies
inform us about the events that shaped our past, how
society attempted developed systems of governance
and economics, and what worked and what
didn’t.
The
biological and physical sciences are core because
they teach us about the environment in which we
live. And on and on... until we have a full
curriculum of knowledge that will be foundational
both to success in the workplace and to pursuing
further education as the student chooses a path through
life.
Such
an approach strikes us as the only one that will
ever erase the gap between those highly vocal
parents who want the K-12 system to prepare their
children for entrance into a fine university and
those generally silent parents who just hope their kids will learn enough to get by in the
world.
A
shift like this will mean, of course, that rather than
measuring school superintendents by the
percentage of students who took advanced placement courses
or went on to college, we develop measures that
allow them to brag about how well they are
nurturing a creative and entrepreneurial
environment.
Greg
Wingfield wants to move our economic development
emphasis toward local human capital. Jim Bacon predicts: “The process will
meet disbelief, incomprehension, and outright
resistance.” In our opinion, they’re both absolutely
right. Convincing local school boards ought to
be a fun place to start the battle -- assuming
they ever get around to deciding when to make up
snow days.
--
February 3, 2003
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