Most kids today send and receive hundreds of texts in a month, their fingers clicking at a staring pace as they carry on as many as dozens of text conversations at a time. They text between classes, at the moment physical practices end, while being driven to and from school and, often, while studying. However, this proficiency comes at a cost: they blame multitasking for the three Cs on their progress reports.
Unemployment today in most industrialized countries is not only because of the financial crisis. There are some deeper problems. If they are going to get more people in America or Europe back to work, they will need more stimuli from the governments — from the top down. However, they will also need more stimuli from the P.T.A.'s — the Parent Teacher Associations — from the bottom up.
The deeper problems fostering unemployment in most developed countries today can be summarized in three paragraphs:
Global competition is stiffer. Just think about some elite colleges. When these colleges were all male, applicants had to compete only against a pool of white males to get in. However, when they admitted women and more minorities, white males had to step up their game. Moreover, when the cold war ended, globalization took hold. As these elite universities started to admit Chinese, Indians, Singaporeans, Poles and Vietnamese, both men and women from these countries had to step up their games to get in. And as the education systems of China, India, Singapore, Poland and Vietnam continue to improve, and more of their cream rises to the top and more of their young people apply to League schools, it is only going to get more competitive for these men and women at every school.
Then, just as the world was getting flattened by globalization, technology went on a rampage — destroying more low-end jobs and creating more high-end jobs faster than ever. What computers, hand-held devices, wireless technology and robots do in aggregate is empower better-educated and higher-skilled workers to be more productive — so they can raise their incomes — while eliminating many lower-skilled service and factory jobs altogether. Now the best-educated workers, capable of doing the critical thinking that machines can't do, get richer while the least-educated get pink slips. Receptionists at offices are replaced by microchips. Voice mails are over.
Finally, just when globalization and technology were making the value of higher education greater than ever, and the price for lacking it more punishing than ever, most developed countries started slipping behind its peers in high school graduation rates, college graduation and global test scores in math and critical thinking.
"50 years ago if you dropped out, you could get a job in the stockyards or steel mill and still "own your own home and support your family." Today, there are no such good jobs for high school dropouts. "They're gone," said an American diplomat. "That's what we haven't adjusted to." When kids drop out today, "they're condemned to poverty and social failure." There are barely any jobs left for someone with only a high school diploma, and that's only valuable today if it has truly prepared you to go on to higher education without remediation — the only ticket to a decent job.
Beyond the economic crises or recession, this triple whammy is one of the main reasons that middle-class wages have been stagnating. To overcome that, they need to enlist both the governments of nations and the P.T.As. they need teachers and principals who are paid better for better performance, but also valued for their long hours and dedication to students and learning. They need better parents ready to hold their kids to higher standards of academic achievement. They need better students who come to school ready to learn, not to text. In addition, to support all of this, they need an all-society effort — from the highest levels of governments to the classrooms to the living rooms — to nurture a culture of achievement and excellence.
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