Educators who speak the language of ‘skills’ are losing

It is conventional wisdom that it is solely the guidance system s job to provide students with skills enabling them to succeed in the market system How did we get to this place where teaching has become primarily about skills training To answer this question we must understand the radical transformation of the U S economic system that occurred in the s and s Throughout much of the th century the schooling system was mainly understood as an institution that created informed democratic citizens Schools prepared students broadly for life and employers trained their new hires in the bulk of the day-to-day tasks of their jobs And as the institution charged with growing well-rounded citizens the learning system was not held responsible for the population s economic well-being Rather employers guidelines makers labor unions consumer demand and countless other variables including individual abilities luck and family connections determined people s job prospects and income levels But starting in the s business and willing protocol makers initiated a monumental change in the modestly regulated capitalism of the middle th century by creating an market system built exclusively for the limited In this new economic system known as neoliberalism employers were no longer committed to employees or communities Rather they were committed only to owners and shareholders and all decision making reflected this new cutthroat system we take for granted the present day Unsurprisingly economic inequality has skyrocketed as wages for the majority have remained flat Because the daily business operations and inhabitants policies of neoliberalism serve the interests of a tiny minority this system could never be adopted on the merits For example crushing labor unions fighting all wage increases except for those at the top shipping good-paying jobs overseas even when corporations are profitable and making workers sign non-compete agreements are all significantly unpopular Replacing defined benefit pensions with k plans and the widespread use of independent contractors similarly favor the sparse And because a company s worth would be measured by its short-term stock price all these draconian cost cutting measures became incentivized Under neoliberalism for corporations and the wealthy rather than being seen as patriotic paying taxes became understood as nearly treasonous hence tax avoidance is aspirational Still corporate and income taxes for the wealthy were cut and general services increasingly deregulated and privatized Regulation of the sphere in the masses interest a modest th century consensus became loathsome in the board room Trumpism is the logical endpoint of this Therefore to impose such a tremendously unpopular and unjust economic system corporations and their allies in governing body needed a bad guy to blame And their bad guy became the development system The so-called skills gap was born In the biggest changing-of-the-subject one can imagine the administrations of President Reagan and the first President Bush helped to fund a business-driven political campaign that was so ubiquitous even the least informed citizens became aware of its main proposes The business sector was becoming dominated by high-skill high-wage jobs yet the tuition system continued to churn out a perpetually inadequate number of sufficiently skilled workers The major media including the nation s the majority prestigious new outlets breathlessly facilitated the skills gap myth The first reference I can find to the labor arena purportedly upskilling was on the front page above the fold of the New York Times in the fall of The article entitled Impending U S Jobs Mishap Work Force Unqualified to Work conveniently coincided with President George H W Bush s Instruction Summit with the nation s governors and reveals the extraordinary coordination of this political campaign But the skills gap is among the biggest myths ever perpetrated on the nation The educational requirements of the labor realm have changed only marginally in the last several decades as a substantial majority of jobs still typically require no guidance beyond high school Moreover despite the instruction system s worshipping of S T E M only of all jobs are in all S T E M fields combined including hardware But ever since Reagan the language of skills has been the air we breathe in the guidance system and both K- schools and higher development have been remade accordingly The skills gap is a continuous deflection that keeps the constituents conversation of economic opportunity focused squarely on the learning system and individual workers and away from the dreadfully unpopular and unjust economic system we ve been living with since the Reagan era According to corporate America it s the instruction system s fault that our graduates work in unstable jobs with flat wages and their kids have large pupil loans for attending what were formerly inexpensive substantially publicly funded colleges and universities Nowadays words like upskilling and reskilling are casually invoked in the consultant-driven teaching system with no knowledge of their history as if these are new concepts Tragically most of educators repeat this language uncritically mainly because it s the only language that we have heard Of syllabus guidance helps students develop a wide range of skills But coaching is so much more than this A good coaching provides students with knowledge about a range of subjects inspires and challenges them and at times makes them uncomfortable It also helps instill confidence in students and allows them to understand the perspectives of those who are different It helps students to grow Training enables students to critically think in a world in which much mainstream discussion has degenerated into complete lunacy Training creates democratic citizens To reduce teaching to the advance of skills all these critical functions of instruction disappear and coaching is solely assigned the role of job training for a fictional job industry consisting of large numbers of highly skilled technically oriented jobs Neil Kraus If as educators we frame our purpose as providing skills we ve lost the debate about the purpose of teaching before it starts Why do we even have college majors in arts humanities or social sciences Why teach these subjects in K- schools either Why do we teach anything besides S T E M and business We will have no real response to these questions as our schooling system is further narrowed in the arrangement of an market constructed for the sparse and in direct opposition to the interests of our students and the society Let s center the discussion of jobs and wage levels where it belongs on employers and protocol makers And let s reclaim the purpose of schooling as creating informed well-rounded citizens in what remains at least for now a democracy Neil Kraus is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and the author of The Fantasy Business activity Neoliberalism Inequality and the Guidance Revision Movement The post Educators who speak the language of skills are losing appeared first on MinnPost