Academics in America Need Reform for America's Future

In the 2008 presidential election, most of the campaign fodder will focus on the war in Iraq, the economy, and our relationship with the rest of the world. What you will see is Republicans push their positions as the protectors of America, while Democrats will try to position themselves as the party that most represents America as a whole. Divergent and sometimes disjointed, the Democrats will try to wholesale themselves to the vast majority of non-conservatives around the country.

With Hillary Clinton looking more and more like the Democratic nominee the question of her presidential running mate has begun to be debated. Even in Republican circles, where the nominee is far from being figured out, the party's candidates are being evaluated. What comes to mind most though is what is not being discussed. With President Bush's No Child Left Behind legislation the thought was to hold local schools accountable for the education of the next generation of Americans. However, when you compare what kids are learning here with what they are being taught in classrooms around the country the truth is, the legislation could better read, All Children Left Behind.

Certainly you will find schools that do a fabulous job of educating. The question is no longer the capacity but the information being communicated. With us living in a global world with a continually progressing global economy, the world is growing at a rate faster than our educational system can keep up with. Kids in China and Japan are mastering information our students may not ever see, let alone be graded on. This creates an unfair playing field in the global competition for jobs and salaries over the next fifties years. Is it unfair to ponder whether a high school diploma in Japan is just as lauded as a college degree is here? But with four in one new jobs being knowledge-oriented, preparation is mandatory.

That thought sounds blasphemous but it really is not. Foreign countries have grasped the fact that the best drivers of their economy are not manufacturing plants. The Industrial Revolution is over and we have entered a new paradigm globally. Today, the question is how many high school students in America can really be called knowledge-fluent? Knowledge-fluent is a new term used to define someone functioning in information and knowledge, akin to technology in today's marketplace. The fact is that a large segment of the 2008 graduates will not be knowledge workers because they are not knowledge fluent by the time they graduate college. This will be tragic as 88% of jobs will be knowledge workers in the future.

Today the need for America is to reinvent itself academically by making a concerted effort to compete in a changing global marketplace that will be heavily dependent on knowledge workers and information to drive the modern economy of a country forward. If America chooses to remain in the Industrial Age and focus on plants and facilities then it will remain on its trajectory of becoming a second class country behind those forward-thinking entities that have pushed technology into the hands of every child as soon as humanly possible.

When Peter Drucker first coined the term in the late 1950s I am sure he had no idea of the complexities within which our world would be governed by today. We live in an Information Age that is driven by developing systems and infrastructure based on knowledge as opposed to yesterday when strength and power were in mines, plants, and the like. Business intelligence has more to do with information now that it ever has in human history and it is not going to retract any time soon.

That being the case the need is growing exponentially by the day for American classrooms to prepare young minds to compete in a world where programming is taught as much as foreign languages; where business theory is as pronounced as civics was when I was a kid. Twenty-five years ago, the question asked every freshman in high school was whether you wanted to go to college or get a trade skill. That question can no longer be asked. If America is going to continue to be one of the most prosperous nations on the planet no longer can a question even be asked? Knowledge must be taught as central to a child's education as mathematics and social studies. The need is too great the divide to vast for a child to play catch up on a university campus. Soon, colleges and universities will only accept kids that are knowledge-fluent. And when that day comes, America will suffer first and foremost.