Education of Today & Tomorrow's Job Market

Education of Today & Tomorrow's Job Market

My opinion on this issue is that I agree that education should be relevant to tomorrow's job market. First of all, this type of teaching keeps students motivated and inspires them to continue with their education after high school. For example, when I was in high school many students would often wonder and ask why we needed to learn math or history. They did not see any use to learning these subjects.

It is a fairly common complaint, nowadays, that education in general and higher education in particular seem to be lagging behind other sectors of our society. The causes of this lag are many, but a number of them can be traced back to the fact that our current educational systems are rooted in the nineteenth-century transition from agricultural- to industrial-based economies and the creation of the modern nation-state. Therefore, they have largely been structured to prepare our youth for citizenship, employment, and a moral and productive life within the nation-state, focusing mostly on the national economy, security, and welfare. But we are now moving toward an entirely different world, in which old national boundaries will no longer serve the same purposes. Our communities have become increasingly interdependent and our patterns of living as well as our language, ideas, culture, ethics, environment, health, security, trade, and systems of values and beliefs are rapidly changing under a renewed human drive toward a global society.

But rapid change can also be socially and culturally destabilizing. Problems have become highly complex, nonlinear, crossdisciplinary, and transnational in nature, requiring the best innovative solutions on the part of our communities in order to achieve sustainable patterns of human development and avoid human suffering through deprivation and violent conflict. Yet our traditional centers of higher education and research have not been designed to address such problems. In the United States, for example, whereas individual practitioners and exceptional scholars at outstanding universities are currently utilized as consultants in tackling global questions, it is difficult to assemble multidisciplinary teams of committed faculty and students in sustained programs to address real-time, global challenges. Departmental course requirements and the prerequisites for tenure-track preparation inhibit the efforts to build transdisciplinary and crosscultural curricula at most universities. To compound the problem, academic administrators often perceive study abroad and experiential education as expensive extras that interrupt most students' commitment to campus life, athletics, and extracurricular activities. Consequently, today's academy largely misses the opportunity to identify and encourage intercultural civic entrepreneurs, those few remarkable students in each class whose career service will make significant contributions to the peaceful and prosperous development of our world communities.

The importance of global education has increasingly come to public attention in the wake of recent world events. But our educators and other practitioners in the field of learning and research have, at least so far, stopped short of adopting a genuinely global approach to world education. For example, a white paper on "Beyond September 11: A Comprehensive National ...