Schools are moving toward a model of continuous, lifelong learning in order to meet the needs of today’s economy.
We are moving, not just in “schools” … from a learning model of silos and bureaucratic one size fits all approach… to an adaptive approach where “learning is just part of our daily life” and which we are continuously connected to and participating in. One of the largest challenges is how to conceive of a model for that new world… which involves transitions to a “just in time” model for information.
We need a model which involves learning that is not so much storing Dewey decimal silos of information in the brain… as it is recognizing patterns of information and the specifics of a particular real world situation that we need to be able to address, IRL and IRT.
Not surprisingly this process is moving ahead in fits and starts, but one of the areas where innovation has a lot of backing and perhaps fewer status quo restraints, is learning that helps businesses and employees. So in the arena of on the job learning, there’s intense searches for practical and pragmatic “bottom line contributing” solutions. .
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Higher-Educations-Push-Toward-Lifelong-Learning-The-Atlantic.pdf”]But the Community College of Rhode Island, New England’s largest two-year college with more than 15,000 students, is working hard to change the tired image of two-year institutions as places for high-school graduates who can’t hack it on four-year campuses or for the unemployed trying to figure out what’s next. Led by Meghan Hughes, a relatively new president with an academic background in art history, the college is overhauling its approach to workforce development by better aligning programs with the state’s economic priorities than is currently the case.
lifelong learning as a hybrid of liberal arts skills and technical skills does make sense moving ahead. My niece was laid off from Washington Mutual with a degree in technology and I suggested she go to her workforce board as a displaced worker. She was able to use those benefits to pick up skills she thought she needed and seems to be doing well in her current transformation.
Good example Kris: as they say, we all need to be able to re-create our job skills “on the fly” as the market for employment changes. The Debbie Downer position is that automation is going to replace more jobs than we can train for, so to speak. Since we are very unlikely to have millions or billions of people sitting around with nothing to do…one supposes our economy and society and culture will make big adjustments. How to do that?
One approach is to rethink what we mean by “Job”. Formerly a job was pretty much a static set of duties, responsibilities, and compensation. Tomorrow, a job might be defined as a much more ad hoc and less permanent arrangement. Instead, and we see of this already with Uber, perhaps a new understanding of “job” would involve a sort of aggregation of duties and responsibilities and compensation from new structures the mobile “cloud” makes possible. With perhaps only a small amount of permanency and stasis.
Some present versions of this are referenced as the “Gig” economy. Yes a pun on a unit of file storage, but derived more from the definition of work common to performing artists in the “music industry”. Those were sort of “one offs”…a job for night or nights here, and then on to a job in a different city or town. It’s a gig because it’s a temporary arrangement with little structure that sells a service or product to a short term marketplace. BTW, I wonder if any economists had a big problem with calling commercial activities involving music an “industry”? There may be many more of these same types of “industries” which barely resemble at all the way that term used to be used.
Even corporations may look much much different in years to come,, The emphasis on the individual, family, or just in time group as the “locus” of economic activity may replace or redefine some of today’s economic structures. Of course, this is just informed speculation, which is better than un=informed speculation, but not the same as a reliable prediction of the future!
The point is, humans have always been good at “filling in” a vacuum, which is something that life in general is oriented to do (evolution). Some of our problems tend to arise when change is so rapid, we can’t make effective adjustments as needed. Lifelong learning thus has a tremendously important role to play in helping us cope with change.