What Reforms Are Urgently Needed By Modern Education

Today’s students ought to be anxious.  As technology develops, many cushy jobs are in the process of disappearing and being replaced by robots and computer algorithms.  Government policies, from increased tariffs to fickle visa regimes, make employment in an increasingly interconnected world volatile and unpredictable.  To counter these constant changes in the overall economic environment, Educational institutions need to restructure their curriculums and mindset to help students develop a diverse set of knowledge base.  Only with varied set of skills will students, upon graduation, be able to weather changing employment patterns as well as rise and fall of particular industries. 

In today’s economy, academic and professional “generalists,” with shallow knowledge of many different fields, are no longer needed.  As a society’s economic mainstay shifts from labor-intensive manufacturing to more knowledge-based creative industries, the primary need is for more workers with highly specialized knowledge base.  Specialized talent ensures industries have highly professional human capital they need to achieve their goals more smoothly and expediently, without incurring high costs to train workers from scratch. 

However, that does not mean schools should only push each student to focus on one field of study.  Quite the opposite, a more knowledge-based economy also means individual workers have greater choices to pursue different professional fields, giving them unprecedented abilities to become acquainted with a diverse set of professional skills.  To keep up with this trend, schools should reflect this increasing diversity of knowledge in their curriculums, providing students not just with a specific set of skills suitable only for a particular industry, but allowing each student to be exposed to different knowledge sets to determine their own passions.  It is unfortunate that many universities, while offering such options for students to study many different fields at once, still force students to narrowly focus on core knowledge of their particular majors. 

Such narrow focus is professionally dangerous for students as future employees.  As nature of economic compositions becomes more varied, educational institutions have less and less ability to evaluate what students is likely and unlikely to succeed in which fields.  The needs of the real world in terms of employment and skill sets are changing at a speed that schools can no longer keep up, to the point that their curriculums no longer reflect skills needed in the workplace.  For instance, looking at university-level Electrical Engineering, classes still discuss the mechanics behind analog circuitry, which has largely become obsolete in the last decades with the rapid advancement of digital software development.  

Given the speed at which new technologies emerge, it is unreasonable to expect schools to complete rid themselves of such obsolete knowledge.  But given that some obsolete materials will always be present, schools should encourage students to not blindly trust universities to help them realize their professional potential.  Instead, they should remind students that the students themselves have the freedom and the right to evaluate and focus exclusively on whichever skills taught in schools are still relevant in an increasing changing professional world.

Of course, students must also be reminded of their limits when diversifying their studies.  In some ways, the diversity of different studies on offer is the real obstacle for students to realize their full potential.  Students can be exposed to knowledge in many different, unrelated genres, giving them a highly varied set of skills upon graduation, at least on paper.  Looking at varied studies of a particular student, employers have difficulties pinpointing the professional focus of the student, much less evaluating in which of the many skills obtained is the student most capable.  This is particularly true in American liberal arts universities, where classes focus more on how students develop critical thinking, rather than provide concrete knowledge to do a real-world job.  In this extreme case, a student’s success in a particular course cannot be correlated to success in any professional field. 

Indeed, educational institutions should, in certain contexts, continue to provide career advice for students to pursue certain fields of study over others.  Schools, for all their failings in updating their curriculums to account for changes in the real world, can still discern comparative advantages of each student.  It still makes sense for students to heed some of the schools’ advice to ensure professional success in the future.  For example, in a vocational school focused on mechanics, the school can easily tell if a student is better at welding than at parts repairs.  In such case, the school should push the student to become a master welder even if the student has greater interest in becoming a repairman.  Here, the need for the student to become a successful worker outweighs the passion for a certain job.

As economies continue to diversify, the ability of educational institutions to correlate success in a particular field of study with success in the real world is becoming less and less notable.  Thus, schools should offer many different fields of study, and give students the freedom to explore different field of studies, so that they can potentially find employment in different industries.  But while students explore, they should also learn the limits of their academic and professional capabilities.  Ultimately, students should be encouraged to do as much as possible within their own abilities to acquire an arsenal of professional tools in school, allowing them to achieve their maximum potential in a constantly fluctuating global economy.