Knowledge Society: Moral & Ethic
In the past thirty years, the U.S, and Europe have contributed to the globalization trend by outsourced manufactured products to developing countries to take advantage of lower labor costs. As the manufacturing outsourcing grows, globalization is becoming widely accepted as the way to do business. However, in the past ten years, developing countries began to offer "skilled workforce", at lower costs, as their new export. Instead of manufacturing products, they sell "services", especially information technology (IT) services. Unlike manufacturing in textiles, clothes, shoes, furniture, equipments and others that require significant investment in manufacturing facilities, machinery, equipments and training, the export of IT services does not require a lot of investment, except skilled workers, so it happens very rapidly across developing countries. Developed countries can send business, projects, works, and tasks to "virtual workforces" across the globe quickly, cheaply, and almost transparently.
The key factor making IT outsourcing more attractive is the advancing of information technology such as the Internet that allow works to move from one place to another seamlessly, less costly and much easily that ever before. As more businesses outsource, the demand for high skilled workers increases and that suddenly put a lot of pressure on the education system of the host countries. As more outsourcing happen, software developers in one country could hear about certain methods, techniques in other parts of the world and demand additional trainings. As outsourcing became popular, students in certain disadvantaged education systems will demand curriculum changes to bring their knowledge into alignment with those of their peers. Meanwhile, companies in developed countries will continue to demand better skills to provide values to their business, creating pressure for the host countries to have better education programs. In the long term, continuous pressure for equitable education will "normalize" the knowledge among developing countries. Currently, the knowledge gap between developed countries and developing countries is large but the gaps between fast adapting countries such as India, China to slower adapting countries is also large. If nothing changes, it will be difficult to compete with these two large population giants, as the outsourcing business opportunity narrow down.
As global competition intensifies, more and more businesses will compete aggressively for top knowledge workers, even with higher salaries. Business that fails to compensate accordingly will find their top workers moving elsewhere. This will put pressure to produce more knowledge workers, because with higher salaries than unskilled labor, more knowledge workers can improve the local economy. Currently India and China are graduating over a million software engineers a year in combination, and they could have ten million software engineers to meet global demands by 2015. If it happen than they could dominate this market as they had dominated the product markets (Electronics, textiles, shoes, machinery etc.) and it would be impossible for other countries to compete with them. Without significant capital influx in services industry, many developing countries will have to rely on product manufacturing or agricultures. As China and India are expanding the "clean industry" (Services) they will outsource their "dirty industry" (product manufactures) to developing countries to get rid of pollutions, toxic wastes, and others that could cause devastating diseases. Actually these things already happened in some countries.
The global competition already begins and as the globalization rule state: "The big will NOT beat the small but the Fast WILL beat the slow", we need to ask ourselves: "Are we making progress to have a share in this service market?" More than ever, education improvement is essential, especially in technology areas. Since it takes a long time to create new curricula, new training programs, and we do not have time in this fast changing world. That is why I believe we need to bring in the best programs, the best curricula, from the best universities, into our education system so we could progress faster. However, by adapting somebody education does not mean we will accept everything; instead we must maintain the best from our tradition such as moral and ethic. Today many young people become restless (Truy Lac) and wayward (Lac huong) because there is no coordination between education at home and education at school. Both sides have failed. Many young people are controlled by television, video games, chat rooms, all many bad influences and not thinking about their future, their family future, or their society future. They think that is the new way of living, the new way of expression because they have adapted things from many bad influencers in western society.
I believe when adapting something, we must know how to select the good and discard the bad. Everyone should come together to study this education issue and apply effort to solve them with collective wisdom. If teachers could behave as role models and teach students to study hard in science and technology in schools but when go home, they could also listen to their parents, respect their elders, and be a good citizen, responsible to the society, loyal to the country than I think we will achieve our education purpose. The important thing is that if we don't know how to teach students the value of moral and ethics, then any other things they learn will only take care of the symptoms and not the source. The new prescription will not solve the illness. The new education will not bring prosperity and benefit to our country. The current global financial crisis is deeply rooted in the unethical practices and immoral behaviors of several people in the financial world and this should be a good lesson to people in other professions too. With regard to this lecture, my proposed solution is that we should start with teachers because they should be role models and teach the foundation of moral and ethics as part of the new curricula, new training program. In conclusion, I would like to quote the speech of Mahatma Gandhi who lectured at The Indian Institute of Technology: “ There are seven sins in the world: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principle”.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
