E-M8 Entrepreneurial Management for Eternal Mission

EDUCATION DRIVES ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS

While strengthening our education might do little to avert our current economic crisis (it will help if for no other reason than injection of cash in to economy and confidence building among the students) it is essential for long term competitiveness of the American economy.

We are rapidly moving to a world, where ideas and thoughts are the only things that have value, yet most people have never had a reason to learn how to think. This is largely due to our mass production approach to education that takes everyone through a standard program (which therefore has to be reduced to lowest common denominator) and cram forces a bunch of knowledge in to the heads of the students without ever teaching them to question, to explore, to investigate or to arrive at the ideas on their own.

American system of education focuses on teaching by analogy, discourages interpersonal relations, and tries to produce standardized students. This ill prepares the students to deal with unknown, to deal with people and fails to accept that people are unique.

The other problem is that old infrastructure no longer fits our needs. In an increasingly virtual world, the standard school buildings are increasingly becoming a tremendous cost that generates very little return. After all, students can interact with the experts across the globe even without leaving their homes. 

The great news is that alternative education systems in US have had a long history of success and can be replicated easily in to the classrooms.  There are also a number of examples of quality education that we can copy from other countries around the world.

It is up to us, then to design an educational system that really serves our needs well.

EDUCATION BEGINS AT HOME

The key is that education begins at home and in the community. This can be fostered by developing community places where kids would feel safe to get together to work on their homework. This can be fostered by having a number of classes and extracurricular activities being conducted close enough to their homes to avoid having to rely on the bus (using the space in Elementary Schools comes to mind). We can start by creating a social pressure for parents to spend QUALITY time with their kids. If necessary, we can even provide counseling and classes for the parents and for the entire families, so that families can learn computers, or entrepreneurship, or taking care of their health, or working out, or new technologies together. Even learning family vacations can be slightly subsidized, if they meet basic educational guidelines.

By providing the small informal classes free of charge and even issuing a small stipend to all who attend, we can rapidly improve the education of the whole community while also helping parents and children spend quality time with each other. This would pay for itself in lower health costs, lower crimes and better prepared workforce in no time at all.  We can even have the requirement that they as a family teach the class to the next group, to receive their stipend.

One way to fund this would be to heavily tax some of the less healthy activities that our young people engage in: non-educational video games (especially the violent kind), texting, McDonalds, etc. 

The best part is that there is plenty of infrastructure that can be used after school hours for these projects. So, the cost to the school districts is only the time of the facilitator. Considering these facilitators do not need to have a bachelor’s degree, many of them can be hired at under $30,000 a year. Alternatively, college kids can receive scholarships for acting as instructors in their junior and senior years. Many people would love to teach in these settings just a supplement to their retirement. The school districts only need to facilitate it. The payback can be easily demonstrated, so even a federal loan program (or better yet, outcomes based grants) can pay for this development.

Even though the program will result in a long term revenue increase, we need to be able to pay for it. I propose high sales taxes on non-educational video games, on any not family friendly establishments, on non-educational TV programming and on any luxary toys (the kind that cost over $250). Not only will this provide the necessary funding, but will reduce the ammount of time wasted in non-family friendly, non-educational activities. Do anything and everything to make meaningless entertainment expensive and quality education affordable.

While the system should be voluntary, it is essential to enroll most of the community. So, making participation a requirement for the receipt of tax credit, unemployment benefits and benefits from other government programs, for example, at least initially will be necessary. Once people participate and recognize the benefits, this can be dropped, since most people will continue participating on their own.  

Not only will that cause us to strengthen  our families, but it will allow the community to get to know their neighbors and get involved in each other’s lives. The quality of life will improve drastically.

TAKING CARE OF OTHER STRESSORS

It’s not easy to learn when you are hungry, did not get enough sleep, or feel sick. On the other hand, if the government starts getting too involved in to how people parent, this will not be a good thing either. Russia is full of “orphans” who actually have parents, but whom the government has deemed them unworthy of raising kids. That is both counterproductive and unAmerican.

Extending JobCorps for families as a way out, as well as helping those who come for help is part of the solution. The other part, is a realization that we might not overcome all poverty and definetly are not likely to overcome it in one generation. It is a harsh reality, but by helping those whom we can, rather by focusing on those whom we cannot, we can often change the lives even of the latter group. Once their parents recognise that their neighbor’s kids receive help, they will be more apt to ask, and then we can help them. 

ROLE MODELS

At risk young people, and anyone who does not seem to have a positive role model in life, needs an opportunity to develop one. This can be done by simply mandating every college bound high school senior that seeks to receive a government subsidized loan to link up with one of the younger at risk kids in their community and spend some time with them. This will result in millions of kids who see themselves as potentially going to college, since they will have an older friend that is already going.

The cost for coordinating this effort should be minimal, since every year when students apply for loans they would need to attach a certification by their school district guidance counselor that they spent a minimun of 10 hours with one of the kids that was assigned to them by the school district. Another such year would be required to be filed, in order to continue receiving the loan. (The whole system can be done electronically to simplify everyone’s life).

The next step would be to extend this program in to a system of lifetime personal development where everyone can be matched on online board to a mentor, peers and mentees, with whom they will be expected to check in at least once a year. The hope is that people will develop a relationship that would go beyond that, but at least this way at least few times a year, everyone will have somebody who will sit down and discuss their personal plans, review their educational and career goals. This will also insure that people have an opportunity to develop a strong personal network that in the past just developed spontaneously. Since the local communities are increasingly disappearing, this will insure a digital community.  We can get the process started by having retired seniors are incentivized to do it, but like all effective systems, this should be habit forming.  

THE SCHOOL SYSTEM MUST BE TRANSFORMED

When we addressed the home situation and when we ensured that that there are mentors available for the kids whose home situation is less than desirable, we are in a much better position to address our schools. It costs the nation over $3 million dollars when a single student drops out because they are less likely to be employable and more likely to be involved in criminal activity. There is a spillover effect that hurts even the best counties because of drop outs. The people who barely graduate, because they were pulled by the skin of their teeth are not too much more likely to be productive members of the society. Legal approach of enforcing truancy laws is not the answer. Rather we must create a path that would allow everyone to complete some kind of education that leads to some kind of a career.

There is no reason that trade focused tracks can be introduced as early as fifth grade. Certainly, by nineth grade there is little reason for the students not to have a career path in mind. The key is career guidance and early efforts to identify individual talents, interests and help students explore potential career paths. The emphasis on the industries that are growing should both motivate the students to learn and give them hope and purpose in their educational process.

If people are employable, even if they are not capable of graduating high school, they are more likely to be productive members of society. Yet, for most, having a clear goal of a career will be an excellent motivator to continue learning. Their educational experience can be much better customized if we understand their strengths, interests and goals. By making it more relevant, it will mean more for the kids. 

The students will be much more eager to learn, and thus more likely to stay in school.

Yet the schools themselves must change. There is no logic to a bunch of kids going to a drab red brick buildings, with hardly any windows, to sit in the room for close to eight hours a day for twelve years. There is even less logic in them listening to instruction in neat little rows, groupped with the same age kids. In today’s age of rapidly changing information, of abundant object lessons and of tremendous access to the universe of resources, it seems downright foolish. Montessori, Pace, Insight, WVS, WIVA are just some of the alternative school concepts that challenge many of the traditional assumptions about school.

But we can go even further than that:

1. We can create work and learn camps, where young people have an opportunity to learn by doing.
2. We can employ student aids, where coaching others is part of the learning process. This will also provide the additional needed attention to the students.
3. We can engage students in all kind of learning projects where students work on the par with adults. For example class projects to research and update Wikipedia entries will both develop a valuable skill and actually create value for the society. 
4. We can develop cross subject learning approaches: Students can participate in measurement and surveying of properties to learn dimensions; Students can learn to cook while learning fractions and proportions; Students learn geometry while helping out at a construction site; learn botany while they plant a garden.
5. We can reward the students that finish high school a year early by paying for backpacking volun-tourism adventures (since the district will be saving money in tuition).
6. We can awaken the passions of the young people by infusing our school systems with stories of the retiring seniors, who in turn would be compensated by the school district through access to the work out facilities.
7. We can turn taking care of the school grounds and operation of cafeteria in to a school project where students get to bid for different tasks, receive guidence in managing those tasks and rely on economic exchange to facilitate their school activities.
8. We can develop an internal legal system to resolve internal conflicts among the students through the legal process that would help them learn about our nation’s legal system and give them the responsibility of acting as a jury.

There are many things we can do to change the way our educational system works. Many of them can be done on a school district level. But, it is the change in our attitude toward education that is crucial to the change in our early education. I will write a separate article for post secondary education, since being a college professor, I have much to say on that topic. For some hints read my article on the topic of business education.