America’s Tech future does not look good
Umm… uh oh!
WASHINGTON—The topic was education and the talk was not optimistic at the Institute for a Competitive Workforce’s Sept. 25 workshop. A part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, ICW drew several hundred participants to its event, held with the goal of promoting effective and sustainable business and education/work force partnerships.
“Our continued leadership is not inevitable and may not be sustainable,” Fred Tipson, Microsoft’s senior policy counsel, said in an afternoon panel discussion focused on upgrading the current and future work force’s digital literacy and math and science skills. “The question is whether our work force or some other country’s will be beneficiaries of new technology.”
Tipson referred to America’s ability to continue to produce high school and college graduates with the skills needed to be successful in today’s technology work force as “dire.”
Panel moderator James Whaley, president of the Siemens Foundation, added, “We can no longer assume the talent pipeline will be here.”
Judy Moog, national program director of the Verizon Foundation, gave the panel participants little reason to question Tipson or Whaley’s statements. According to Moog, 70 percent of the nation’s eighth graders are below sufficient levels in reading skills and “might well never catch up.”
Moog also pointed out that in terms of “quality” of high school graduates, America has fallen to 19th out of 26 nations surveyed. Moreover, she said, nearly half the U.S. adult population—some 93 million people—have very poor or marginal literacy skills.
“Literacy is the price of admission for competitiveness,” she said. “People need to access a torrent of information over a vast array of devices. America isn’t succeeding fast enough.”
READ: Gloomy Forecast for IT Work Force
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Jim:
This type of apocryphal thinking has been the bain of globalists and free market-lovers for decades.
The argument is flawed as America draws from the intellectual talent of countless countries. The positions we can’t incubate sufficiently in our own school systems, i.e. science / technology, are replenished by the influx of candidates from countless countries. America still has the best tertiary educational system of any country in the world, and great minds flock to it.
Other treatises on creativity, such as The Victory of Reason by William Stark, that respect for individuality, a precursor to individual thinking and hallmark of Western cultures, has heretofore not been embraced by Eastern societies. Case-in-point: America still files 10-1 more patents than any country in the world, including China, who outstrips our population 4:1.
Not to mention that a little competition is healthy too ;p