A generation without work!

A few days ago Pope Francis, enroute to the Catholic World Youth Day in Brazil, warned of a global crisis of unemployed young people.  He said we run the risk of losing an entire generation of young people to unemployment. The pope has probably had a look at the OECD 2013 youth employment projections where Spain and Greece are expected to reach about 28 percent (in both countries) in 2014.

(Courtesy of Freedigitialphotos.net)



The Economist also addressed this issue a couple months ago. It was reported that about 300 million 15-24 year olds around the world are without work. How did all this begin? What can we do about this crisis? Is it failure of individuals or system failure?

I think that a close look at the ways our schools and other institutions of learning operate and the ways employers (especially industry) seek out, recruit and retain workers may provide some clues. In this post, I will address the school system.

A fair portion of young people without work are those who may have left school early or had to leave prematurely. Others have in fact attended university or a college and still find themselves jobless.

A key problem may be the expectation that spending a few years at university or college equips one for the world of work. It turns out that a whole new mindset is now required to avoid the unemployment trap. Young people should be encouraged to reach an engagement level where they aim to do something with what they know other than simply passing knowledge tests and qualification certificates.

Tony Wagner, a Harvard professor has outlined the skills our schools and homes should seek to impart if young people are to innovate in an increasingly competitive world. They are: critical thinking and problem-solving, collaboration across networks, agility and adaptability, entrepreneurism, effective oral and written communication, how to access and analyze information and curiosity and imagination.

School experiences of young people should engage them in real work and prepare them to work, not to seek work. The management consultant Charles Handy has observed that the work of the future is portfolio work. A portfolio worker will not depend on an employer in the long term. They will only look for individuals who require their services and once they get a job done (probably short contract), they move on to the next task. We can already see the rise of freelance work with such sites as oDesk and Elance.

Finally it is time to reform our schools to reflect the new circumstances in which we live. We must prepare young people to perform in the real world and not simply remember facts here and there.

This, in my view, is one way to deal with the crisis of youth unemployment.

Asiana flight 214 crash and the problem of workplace training

On 6th July 2013, Asiana airlines Boeing 777 flight 214 from Incheon, South Korea to San Francisco in the US crashed during a landing attempt at San Francisco international airport. Most of the 307 people aboard were able to evacuate safely, 182 were injured, and two Chinese students and another unnamed minor died. As the US National Transportation Safety Board continues its investigation into the accident, the Board chairman has said preliminary work shows the aircraft was ‘too low, and too slow’ during its approach.

It has also been noted that the flying pilot Lee Gang-kuk, with about 10,000 hours of commercial pilot experience, had only about 35 hours operating the Boeing 777 and was flying the big jet into San Francisco for the first time.  The instructor pilot, Lee Jeong-min, an experienced pilot who has landed a this same aircraft at San Francisco airport 33 times was in the Boeing 777 trainer role for the first time. It is not clear what qualified Jeong-min as an instructor other than many years of experience.

Although I do not intend to speculate as to the cause of the crash, I would like to isolate the issue of workplace training and what organizations might learn. I will argue that length of work experience as basis for selection as an trainer/instructor is erroneous because knowing how to perform and teaching others to perform are different skills. The many years of experience that enable one acquire and master job skills do not naturally translate into ability to instruct novices.

To teach another individual how to perform in real life requires giving them a performance challenge. 

In the case of an aircraft pilot, this would be spending hours flying until a particular qualification threshold. I will use an example that many a reader will be more familiar with, driving a car. Knowing how to maintain control of a car on the road, monitoring speed and paying attention to road signs and other road users are crucial skills for all drivers. Knowing how to maintain speed in one’s car, for instance, is a different matter from teaching another individual to do the same. 
A good driving instructor knows how to maintain required speed and how to see others through performing the same task. They know crucial points when not to let one make mistakes with speed that can be fatal or at least criminal. They will watch out for what a novice driver may not see, like people who may suddenly choose to cross the road.

The same can be said of a good school teacher. A biologist, holder of a PhD, considering high school teaching may be asked to join a secondary school teacher preparation programme.  Those who would consider this uncalled for soon realize teaching is not just about content, it brings other matters to bear. The good teacher is called not only to try to engage the student to the point that they take responsibility for their own learning, but also pay attention to realize when the student is astray. The teacher is often called to admonish the student in a stern voice, but will also be found offering a sympathetic ear as a parent would do with their own child. 

In fact very experienced workers may be worse than less experienced colleagues because sometimes the former bring experience that is mis-educative to the job of training. Mis-educative work experience has the effect of arresting growth of further experience. For instance, one may propose the work methods they used through the many years of work as the only successful ones in spite of knowledge advancement.

A counter-argument may be advanced that experienced workers learn to train by training. This is only true to the extent that organizations acknowledge that training is not a role that one simply switches to given many years of job performance. Training others requires understanding how individuals learn, what may impede learning, what can go wrong (especially when errors may result in loss of life) and the circumstances under which the student should have lee-way to take risks and experiment.

The false assumption that experienced workers can seamlessly become trainers leads many organizations to expecting too much of experienced staff who do not know how to perform in a teaching role.  In a follow-up post, I will take up the issue of how employees in a bureaucratic work environment think and react in the face of emergencies.

*The author is a mechanic engineer with several years of experience in education.

Writing by hand helps mental efficiency

We are experiencing ever growing use of mobile devices like the smart phone to do the sort of things we did solely on a computer many years ago. Hand writing is now threatened with extinction.  There you have students with an entire quarter of a year for holiday taking a break from school work that requires writing anything.

With the proliferation of computers and all manner of electronic word-processing tools, people migrate from paper to keyboards. When one’s job does not involve any serious writing, planning and constantly working with teams studying situations and proposing solutions, there’s hardly any writing by hand. You may also not be surprised to discover that most of the elegantly dressed men and women going into offices do not have a pen with them. 

For many, the pen is simply décor that tops their neat shirt and tie or corporate uniform. They hardly use the pen to write anything personal save for completing papers that are part and parcel of their day routine. Writing by hand is costly when one has to spend time word-processing their notes. But the activity is useful in other ways. Reader, here is why you should not fall for the trap of easy word processing facilities.

Mental efficiency

The writer Robert Stone was once asked whether he mostly types his manuscripts. He said he types most of the time until he encounters difficulty going forward. He prefers writing with the hand for greater precision. The pen compels lucidity. The exercise of writing is indispensable part of effort towards mental efficiency. It helps for one to be able to compose sentences and achieve continuity. I do not know how many people keep diaries today. They are certainly fewer than they were few decades ago.

Writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. Research has established that we do not only learn letters but also idea composition and expression when we put pen to paper. In a 2008 study, adults were asked to distinguish between new characters and a mirror image of them after producing the characters using pen and paper and a computer keyboard. Those writing by hand had a stronger and lasting recognition of the characters’ proper orientation. 

This suggests the movements one makes when writing help visual identification of shapes. It has also been found in a separate study that students who write essays by hand write more words, write faster and express more ideas than when they write with a keyboard. It is also true that people often judge the quality of our ideas from handwriting. Teachers who grade homework or examinations know about this. There’s often mental bias when you see a script with neat handwriting and orderly presentation.

Culture

After school there may not be many opportunities to write by hand other than those created by the individual. In order to avoid getting out of touch with the practice, I propose the use of a diary or a journal. Diaries are not as engaging as one may enter details about their day into a diary with very little mental effort. They also allow for exaggeration of our egotism. When left lying loose, they may cause strife in relationships and homes.  

A journal is better. Whereas a diary mostly caters for self and one’s activities exclusively, a journal roams wider. A diary relates that one woke up with a headache that may have been attributable to mental stress. The journal follows through to the way the young lawyer at the corporate dinner that day had brown eyes and a trick of throwing her head back when asking a question. Writing a journal helps one to discover motivations for their actions and to uncover other internal tendencies. Many people today tend to reproduce idly the thoughts of others and to swayed by every passing gust of emotion.

Our new handheld devices may have many advantages, but I doubt that they can capture what happens when a human hand and a pen meet paper.

(This article was first published in the Daily Monitor newspaper)

Why students enter reading frenzy at eleventh hour

Students across world tend to descend upon libraries and reading rooms a few weeks to examinations in a bid to catch up. In most of the universities I attended there is a special fortnight in which the library operates 24 hours. This is usually to allow students more time to use resources they might need to prepare for examinations.

Why do students always get into a reading frenzy only weeks to examinations? I will try to examine one possible view. It is the failure to translate an objective meaning of time into adequate preparation for everyday school tasks and examinations.

Preparation

I think a student who finds that they still have so many untouched reading tasks a month to final examinations may be found to have problems with using time well. At the beginning of the school year, there is always plenty of leisure time because everybody looks at exams in the distant future. It is at that point that a student would consider that all their preparation can be broken up into bits and spread over eight or nine months.

I know of some schools that give students year-planning notebooks replete with all the guidelines for daily, weekly and monthly monitoring of study and homework time. Interestingly, the students may feel it is not fair to compel them to do this kind of planning. Students who won’t use this kind of planer argue that they have mental timetables which they have recourse to when they feel like studying!

Meaning of time

One important aspect I’d like to highlight here is the problem of time: that human life is uniquely personal, but also absorbed in the life of our cultures from which we draw the first meanings of time.

Elizabeth Taylor, in a 1989 Time Magazine article noted that for a child in kindergarten, the day is typically divided into time for listening, playing, colouring, eating and sleeping. As children grow up their development is determined by how well the social setting supports an organised approach to everyday activities. But for many young people today growing up in challenging family circumstances, the structure of the school day seems totally unfamiliar. They often resist the idea that they should stop doing one thing simply because it is time to do something else. 

Taylor was interested in understanding why many children of the urban-poor were so uncomfortable in school.  She drew an explanation from the work of University of Chicago Professor Dolores Norton, who had conducted a unique study of the intellectual development of children in poor families. Dolores’ concluded that growing up in an unstructured home environment prevents development of a sense of time that enables adaptation in school. ‘When these children come to school, they enter a world that was not created for them and that does not build their known skills,’ Norton noted.

She compared these young people growing in challenging homes to students in a classroom with adults who speak their language, yet are unable to interpret what they want them to do, even though they wish to please them. A failure to understand the meaning of time, she asserts, is a handicap that may partly account for the poor academic performance of many inner-city children throughout their school careers.

Norton’s insights came from years of observing forty children born to young mothers living in the most blighted, impoverished pockets of Chicago. Norton found that references to time were rare. Most parents hardly ever provided instructions like ‘finish lunch so you can see your favourite TV program at 5:30,’ or ‘you can play for about half an hour.’ Daily routines, such as parents leaving home for work at a particular time and regular times for bed and meals, are usually non-existent in these homes. Students from disorganised homes may be able to read a clock, but that does not mean they understand time. Norton found that most of her young subjects scored lower than average on tests which measured their abilities to understand sequences of events.

These insights may challenge parents to provide support in developing students’ capacity, not only for managing time well, but also managing their actions.

(A slightly edited version of this article was first published in the Daily Monitor newspaper)

Ability groups may demoralize weak students

You seldom come across a secondary school teacher who has not felt the pinch of increasing failure to take charge of the conduct of his or her students on account of strong peer influence. I have previously supported the need to teach young people to think for themselves as one way to address negative influence. But sometimes seemingly well-adjusted and capable students are misled by peers (commonly referred to as mates) into activities that do not contribute to their school success. I argue that this tendency is often rooted in such practices in school like ability grouping and the negative appraisal teachers often give weak students.

Self esteem and ability groups

Self-esteem is a self-maintenance motive. It is can be seen as a social product (consequence of social influence) or as a social force (a cause of social behaviour). School performance may be a cause of self-esteem. This is because academic success is a public and visible indicator of a pupil’s standing and society generally upholds academic success.

There are causal connections between low self-esteem, juvenile delinquency and poor academic performance. Prior poor performance in school brings some school authorities to draw categories of top performers, mediocre and poor performers. Ability grouping is a practice in some schools to place students in a given year in different streams according to their previous academic performance. You may have streams A, B and C with C being the class with the poorest grades. The aim of keeping these groups separate may be to give each group (especially C) the attention they need to improve. Unfortunately the C group may come to be looked on by some teachers as the students in whom there’s very little hope for improvement. I recall that my primary school had four streams with pupils achieving aggregate 4 and 5 learning together. With time even friendships I had with second grade students weakened because there were no longer close. In the A stream pupils who fooled around where sometimes threatened with instant deportation to stream D. In stream D the methods teachers used where different and sometimes 

To understand how teacher feedback is important in building or eroding esteem, let’s take a look at one principle of self-esteem formation—that is, reflected appraisal.  The principle of reflected appraisal holds that people’s feelings about themselves are strongly influenced by their judgments of what others think of them. Here self esteem is a product of social interaction. This principle has implications for ability grouping. 

The success of failure

Young people are very keen and can tell when a teacher does not care enough when they need help. Students with low self esteem often face undesirable conditions in school experiences that create feelings of doubt about their self-worth.  A peer group who live for entertainment may be the place where a youngster finds favourable reflected appraisals. This group replaces the negative feedback from teachers with positive reflected appraisals they receive from one another. In addition, defiance of authority in school may be played out before an appreciative audience of mates yielding positive reflected appraisal. A student may come to compare more favourably with peers in keeping up with the music charts than he or she does in classroom study. This student considers that they gather more positive self-attributions by observing success in keeping up-to-date with music than school work. A student’s failure to keep up with others in class becomes an avenue for acquiring positive appraisal from peers in activities in which they have genuine interest!

The stream of poor performers or those students who have little interest in school sometimes resist alteration of the image they have developed of themselves. As a result students are motivated to maintain the level of positive or negative judgments of their ability. The A class know they are good and often work hard to maintain their good grades. The trailing group is also constantly aware of their weakness and may not work any harder.

Optimism

Unless there is a deliberate effort by teachers to show that they have faith in weak students’ potential to work harder and excel, to constantly encourage and reward their every effort, weak students soon find alternative activities outside school that are rewarding and in which they obtain positive appraisal from peers. They may immerse themselves in sports, music or hanging around with little regard to any other responsibilities.

Teaching is a profession founded on optimism. It is here that people invest much time in others’ lives and future without any guarantee that beneficiaries will use their learning profitably. It is especially in the lives of students in various kinds of need (counsel, love or remedial tuition) that the most enduring and useful contribution of a teacher may be. 

(This article was first published with a few changes in the Daily Monitor newspaper)

What are we doing with computers in schools?

The last two decades have been a period of proliferation of information and communication technology in almost every aspect of life—from the mobile phone to banking and the remote tracking of motor vehicles. This technology revolution mostly driven by computer applications has also affected the education sector. There is ever growing concern about equipping classrooms with computers and to wire each of these computers to the internet. Private school TV adverts these days necessarily include a view of computers, perhaps as a up-to-date institution qualifier.

Technology-enhanced classrooms are inspired by constructionist theories that propose that learning is an active process wherein learners are actively constructing mental models and theories of the world around them. Social justice-inspired programmes like ‘One laptop per child’ also continue to roll out supplies of computers to developing world schools in view of what has been referred to as ‘bridging the digital divide’. 

The drive to provide computers is based on the thinking that if these machines are made available, they will be used; and if they are used, they will contribute to improvement of learning. Will computers deliver on the expectations of policy-makers and educational philanthropists? My argument is that the most needed energy for reviving and improving schools and higher institutions of learning should be sought in student agency manifested in reliable work habits and critical thinking skills.

Why bring computers to classrooms?

The social rationale is that digital technologies have become part and parcel of everyday life, and that schools should prepare students to be active participants in a digital age.  Similarly, the thinking behind a vocational, or market-oriented, rationale is that children should learn how to work with computers and later be able to compete for jobs at front ends of interview queues. Proponents of this position promote ‘computer literacy’ courses, concentrating on computer programming and the use of popular application programmes.  

The pedagogical rationale emphasizes a contribution to improving teaching and learning, sometimes through the use of new computer-assisted learning software in the classroom, or by using the computer as a tool that can expand and enrich knowledge acquisition and construction.

Another impulse for bringing computers to the classroom is from academics and educators in favour of self-directed learning for children. This coalition, inspired by John Dewey, Jerome Bruner, Maria Montessori and Lev Vygotsky, seek to transform schools in which learning comprises tediously absorbing large bodies of non-functional knowledge unconnected to life. They want schools in which teachers help students construct their own understanding.  Classroom learning has also been greatly influenced by growth of the internet and its World Wide Web resource stockpiles. Computer workstations that give students internet access increase the size of the available learning resources to consult and also the efficiency with which they can search huge chunks of literature for relevant references.

Although computers may be useful educational tools for quicker processing and analysis of information, they often present an opportunity for students to grow their leisure time and get away from learning tasks.

Educational tools or toys?

The potential for computers to facilitate learning is often met by a challenge of choosing what one may use from several applications on a computer. The standard desktop computer will come with word-processers, drawing applications and entertainment accessories like music and games. When the computer is connected to the internet, there are myriad opportunities for a student to access online games but also to link up with other people for a chat. When presented with a play arena and an opportunity to work out mathematics problems, the former is likely to become of secondary interest. A computer can be a collection of some of the most enticing distractions that easily overwhelms a teenage student who is still struggling to develop self-mastery.

Without appropriate guidance, many secondary (even university) students working away at a computer remain incapable of assessing the quality of the resources they have access to. Students using workstations with internet access are also susceptible to ‘pathological internet-use’ that could draw them into pornography or with the feeling that the internet is my only friend.

When computers are delivered to classrooms, they usually meet archrivals, the teachers.  Teachers are not always enthusiastic about altering their ways of working to accommodate new technology. Even though some teachers are willing to undergo training in the use of new learning support facilities, they rarely acquire pedagogic expertise to help them make the most effective use of ICT in their lessons.

Instead of new and bigger investments in computer infrastructure, schools should also invest in giving students skills that increasingly get neglected: writing and reasoning, reliable work habits, capacity for concentration and face-to-face communication. Computers are useless without primary material—ideas and concepts generated through dedicated study and thought; and this can only be done by human beings.

I’m of the view that learning mostly depends on what human beings, rather than computers, do best. The teacher may be the one to meet a most important need for the student—lighting a fire in the student’s heart, role modeling and nurturing as these can contribute more to learning now and in the future than the neatest hyper-linked courseware.