World is a rapidly changing place

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, May 15, 2007

It’s graduation time again, and as this current group of my students gets closer to that time when they enter the job market, there is a lot of emotional feeling. The sentimental feeling is probably there on both our parts. That feeling is hard to put into words, but I’ll try.

They’re ready to get the hell out of there! And me? I’m ready for them to do it.

Yes, I’m trying to inject a little humor into all this, despite having come into some recent information regarding their—and my—future.

This information came in the form of a presentation to a gathering of the tech school’s faculty not too long ago, and it consisted of dozens and dozens of factoids, bits of information each somewhat related to another, but more related to the future, really. Here come some of them.

First, each of us thinks of ourselves as unique, as “one in a million,” for example. Should we truly be one in a million in the USA, we’d be pretty unique. However, if we truly were one in a million, there would be 1,100 of us in India, and 1,300 of us in China.

Not so unique over there, where the population is so much larger.

If we took 25 percent of the very highest IQ students in China, that would be more students than we have in our entire system. China has more high honor students than we have kids.

Which country has the most English speaking people?

China.

If we gave all of our jobs — jobs in teaching, manufacturing, selling, buying, building — you name it — to China, they would still have an unemployment problem.

While you were reading this, 60 babies were born here in the USA, 244 were born in China, 351 were born in India.

Today’s graduating college and tech school student will have had 10 to 14 different jobs by the time they reach the age of 38.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the top 10 jobs that will exist in the year 2010 did not exist in 2004. The obvious conclusion? Teachers today are training students for jobs that do not currently exist, with technology that will be found to be antique and will itself no longer exist in 2010, for students who will be faced with problems we cannot predict.

Here’s a question: What nation was the richest; the best educated; the center of business and finance in the world; had the strongest educational system in the world; was the center of world invention; established the benchmark for the world’s currency; had the highest standard of living in the world?

England, in the year 1900.

What? You thought it was us? Really, your decision is between China and India, whether you like it or not. And the point of the question is: change comes unexpectedly. (Another way to put it: Shift happens!) One major technical advance might place any one nation at an advantage over all others.

Speaking of technical advances, last year Nintendo spent approximately 120 million dollars on research and development of computer games. The U.S. government spent barely half that on research to improve education. We are currently barely hanging on to 25th place in the world as far as how our schools and students compare to others.

And England was once first. I don’t think you have to be a rocket scientist to see how this may well work out.

Last year, there were more text messages sent on cell phones than there are people on this entire planet. Too bad some of that time wasn’t spent in math and science class. It would be a dubious honor to be the first people in the world to grow extra fingers.

When I graduated from college, they estimated the half life of my education at seven years. Today, technical information is doubling every 2 years, which means that for today’s freshman college student, half of what they learn will be outdated by the time they’re a junior. By the year 2010, half of what they learn will be old information in 72 hours.

Look at what has happened in the last fifty years, while I still remember the frustration of loading an ink pen from the wet well in my country school desk: Computers, commercial air flight, antibiotics, heart transplants and bypasses, the promise of a cancer cure, no polio, cell phones, the Internet, weapons of mass destruction, interplanetary space flight, television, and last but not least, peanut butter that doesn’t spoil.

Welcome to the world, students.

Alan Linda is a New York Mills resident.