Education and jobs
A student wrote to me after reading the blog article on “Education debate” and asked for my opinion whether education should be linked to jobs.
My answer: Education is the process of develop knowledge for proper conduct and acquiring skills competency. You can see that the phrase “Proper conduct” is in front of “Skill competency” because education is responsible for the development of responsible, moral, ethical individuals first. These people in turn acquire knowledge and create a society that values these principles. Only by having moral, ethical, and skilled people, progress to society can be achieved. In other word, education produces responsible citizens, who contribute to the creation of wealth for a country. There are much more in education than just getting jobs.
Currently some students are focusing only on the economic factor for seeking better jobs with financial aspect rather than acquiring knowledge and skills to benefit them for their whole life. If money is the only goal, some will do anything, including cheating, copying, and any unethical behavior just to get the college degree. They believe that the degree will get them what they want. In that case, the real purpose of education fails.
When education is unable to meet the needs of people and its society but only for financial objectivities than it can become a disaster. We can see many examples that happened all over the world. For example, in Africa natural sources are vanishing fast just for achieve financial needs of a few people. We can see people exploit each other in every countries. It was the greed of few U.S. bankers and financial investors that created the global financial crisis in 2007 and of course, many more. A college degree may help a person to get a job but without moral and responsible, some people may use their positions for their own selfishness instead of contributing to the society. To avoid this issue, education system must focus on the totality of an individual by emphasize more on moral value, responsibility and citizenship. Technical Knowledge is important in today environment but education is not about teaching technical or helping students to get jobs but must be much more than that.
Today some students go to schools with one single goal: To get a job, any jobs. Many complain that what they study has nothing to do with helping them to get jobs and education should be linked to the job market. The question is: In that case, should we blame the education system? If we look deeper into this situation we can find that education is not solely to blame. When go to college, students do have many choices to select what to study. Many students do not follow the market trends to know which are the hot jobs and what the job market needs. They just take any courses, study any easy fields so they do not have to work hard. Many cut classes, many cheat on exams and have not acquire much knowledge. Instead of get educated, they only want the degree. That is why number of graduates but unemployed is rising in both developed and developing countries.
Of course, there are also many obsolete education systems. They are products of a colonial systems where students are encouraged to compete but only a few are selected through rigorous exams. Instead of develop knowledge and skilled people to meet the need of a country, they only produce few elites to work for the colonial government. That system must change. Today, good training program is still lacking in many countries, especially poor and developing countries. In those places, students at taught mainly in theories with books written many years back. Without significant improvement some fields of study are purposeless and that is why many graduates cannot find suitable jobs. I believe that as the time changes, the needs also change, and education should be changed in accordance with the needs of the society.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
