Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Well Worth Reading
Admittedly (and probably obviously) Mike does most of the blogging in the family, but every once in awhile I'm inspired to make a contribution. And this is one of those times. Although the following article is not my creation, it expresses exactly what I would want to say on the subject which, as an educator and for many years a South Carolinian, is very close to my heart:
Governor Sanford, We All Pay For Poor Education And Obsolete Economic Development
For those of us with a vision of an educated, affluent South Carolina, it is often baffling to figure out what Governor Sanford can be thinking. In a recent Op/Ed in The State, Governor Sanford succinctly stated the driver of his governing philosophy.
- In today’s political process, the Forgotten Man seems to be the taxpayer... Each day I find myself asking 'Who will pay for this?'”
Once you see the world from the perspective of an individual taxpayer sending his tax payment to the government, you understand more clearly why the Governor makes the decisions he does. Almost nothing, it seems, is as important in the Governor's world than reducing the size of that check. As a taxpayer who wishes he could pay less, I get that.
But, does that myopic focus on the individual actually cost the individual taxpayer in South Carolina money out of his pocket? In fact, two obsolete institutions where state government needs to spend money for individuals to make money, education and economic development, are costing the average South Carolinian everyday.
If three of us live in a community, each of us can take care of our individual needs every day. But if one of us will develop the specialized skills of a farmer, that is if he will become more educated in a specialized area, he can grow more food than the three of us individually. And if one will be the tailor, through specialized skills he can make more clothes. And if one will be the builder, he can build more housing. And if three of us trade, we will have our needs for food, shelter and clothing met, and we will have a surplus left over, which is the wealth each of us earns from our enhanced productivity.
This is not a new fangled idea promoted by some geeky Harvard economist. It is an ancient insight of why communities form from Plato's Republic. Note that for each of us to be more prosperous, each of us has to live in a community where education improves the skills of others around us. If one of us falls behind, we all pay a price for that in reduced productivity as we compensate.
What those who myopically focus on individuals miss is that no matter how hard any given individual is willing to work, it is much harder to be prosperous in a community where others lack education than in an affluent, educated community. Each individual's share of taxes that support education are not just a charitable contribution to help others, it is an investment made in the enlightened self-interest of each individual who is more prosperous living in a more educated community.
Education and economic development are both obsolete and need to be reinvented to drive prosperity. Public education is based on an industrial factory model where students show up on time, do their job, and go home. Children enter the first grade innately curious and creative, and we spend twelve years beating that out of them. Writing recently in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman observed,
- In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. dominated the world in K-12 education. We also dominated economically. In the 1970s and 1980s, we still had a lead, albeit smaller, in educating our population through secondary school, and America continued to lead the world economically, albeit with other big economies, like China, closing in. Today, we have fallen behind in both per capita high school graduates and their quality. Consequences to follow.
Like education, economic development in South Carolina is based on an obsolete industrial factory model. The top economic development official in the state has told me he is in the buffalo hunting business; that is, he sees his job as recruiting the next large manufacturer to the state. That model was obsolete before the recent economic crisis, because the competition for the few large manufacturers still building new factories in the United States was intense. The economic situation we are in only increases that competition.
We need a fundamentally different education policy focused on building the creative thinking skills that students will need over the course of their lives, and increasing the educational attainment of all citizens in the state. And we need an economic development policy built on creating deep pools of talent in focused areas that are among the best-in-the-world, with a highly skilled workforce to support those strengths.
We are not individual islands to ourselves, benefiting only from our individual efforts. We are people who live in communities, and each of us individually is more prosperous if others around us are also more educated and prosperous.
To answer Governor Sanford's question, 'Who will pay for this?," with regard to poor and obsolete education and economic development in South Carolina, the answer is we all do.
