Spencer Education for the New Thesis

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Granted it is argued that not all new employment opportunities are managerial in nature, but even if the 20% figure frequently quoted regarding the percentage of managerial occupations open today, competent lower-level employees who can deal with problems and the public in a creative fashion and perform the secondary and tertiary activities in a manner to make customers want to return cannot be undervalued. Reduced job security also makes it a moral and social imperative for government educational paradigms to focus on making an investment in people, not viewing people work products. Even if not all workers entering the workforce can be classified as "knowledgeable workers," all workers have to have some knowledge to do their job and to learn new knowledge at their job every day. The knowledge of learning from experience can be fostered in quality adult education programs that are not merely technical in nature. Basic skills like reading, learning from a manual, generalizing principles through deductive learning, are all critical aspects of education as is the ability to be educated and to change one's professional perspective and paradigm with economic ebbs and flows.

Learning at work is an essential aspect of doing quality work, and the desire to learn and to make meaning out of one's work is an innate human impulse and activity. A frequent polarization of modern enterprise is that of the 'Costco' versus 'Wal-Mart' model, one of which views workers as valuable resources, the other that sees workers as expendable, and tries to keep costs down by limited benefits. Both stores are successful, but one makes a greater commitment to worker satisfaction, the other to shareholder and customer satisfaction. However, the fallacy with both models is that neither really invests in workers' futures, or workers as creative individuals.

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To do so creates a learning organization, and long-term improvement, regardless of where the economy may grow. The current sorry state of General Motors is ample evidence of the fact that good benefits and salaries for workers alone is not enough, if these workers cannot be retrained in their skills to meet the needs of the new economy, when a sector such as manufacturing dries up. An organization must be a learning organization and change with the times and not simply shuttle out the same gas-guzzling vehicles or even the same employee benefits that once made it profitable a long time ago.

Education is an important investment, and the fallacy of forecasting where the economy will shift points in the direction of the importance of investing in people not in labor as capital. Perhaps the most telling anecdote comes from an example of one of the best technical schools in America, which one would think could provide ample evidence of the need to teach specific rather than general skills:

He graduated from MIT, one of the best engineering schools in the country. During lunch, I asked him how much of his schoolwork applied to his current engineering job. His response? I can't think of a single thing from my MIT classes I've used on the job. This blew my mind. What's the value of a marquee college degree if none of the skills you learn are useful on the job? At first, I was incredulous. But after considering my own high school educational experience, it started to make more sense. And certainly after attending college for a year, I knew exactly what he meant. The value of education isn't in the specific material you learn-- it's in learning how to learn" (Atwood 2007).

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