The Fifth Discipline The steps in boot-camp, in Jesuit soldiers for Christ, in the traditional Mass, in Makarenko's Road to Life, in Brain Washing, re socialization, AA, follow this pattern: Welcome: this is a special place - dress, uniforms, haircuts, music, formal ritual lets you know you are not in Kansas anymore Personal Mastery - The lessons - This is the world as "we" know it - you can try harder - Is that the best you can do ? Repent - re-think - reflect - reform - you are not fit to gather the crumbs from under the table Team work: Forgiveness which passes all understanding, not because of your virtues but just because we love you ? Learning at the gut level: The rites of passage - Take eat - do this and remember - Grace be with you - the life force is yours Systems thinking: See the big picture, Thanksgiving to the Lord and the Marines and Shared Vision: membership, the few, the brave, the good http://www.newspage.com NewsPage filters over 20,000 news stories from 600 sources every business day, populating its hierarchy of 2,300+ news Topics with the latest, most relevant news. These Topics span 25 major industries and are available on the Web for you to read and bookmark. You'll never get your news the same way again! NewsPage http://www.newspage.com An Information Service of Individual, Inc. FRAMEWORK: Global Village Synergy Schools - Learning new things in new ways - a paradigm shift on the Internet: charter schools - The Learning Organization: Using the Fifth Discipline and direct instruction; . We are one of the Internet Beta platforms as new life prototypes and Social-technical systems take off. for Example: http://pacific.discover.net/~dansyr/engines.html Beaucoup Search Engines 100 Search engins in clickable tables on one page. These pages use altavista to make footnote type references. Hyperlinks using the Netscape browser make for direct connections and a new form of writing text. RE: 1993 Adult Literacy SurveyEncouraging Teamwork in Inner-cities for Educational and Economic Progress Hugh McGuire McGuire Research 749 Farmington Avenue West Hartford, CT 06119-1611 (203) 236-6610 mcg1@ix.netcom.com Unless there are major public policy initiatives which doesn't seem likely, the working and lower class is going to expand vastly, and will be heavily unemployed over the next several decades. Dramatic changes in the structure of the job market started to affect industrialized countries in the late 70s and early 80s. Starting with less able school drop-outs, unemployment has gradually moved up through the age ranges and through all the intermediate skill levels and white-collar jobs almost to the highest levels. Demand for the bottom 80% of skills has been falling away while the demand for the top 10% of skills rose, the demand for the top 2 to 5% most of all. This phenomenon has gradually spread to all traditional industrialized countries where unemployment has been largely hidden, either by design by large employers, or by default by the highly people-intensive service industries and bureaucracies. Whereas, before the 1980s, the structure of the job market could be likened to a pyramid with a somewhat bulging middle, it has been changing to something more like the shape of an hour-glass, the middle gradually becoming narrower with every passing year as more and more middle-skill white-collar workers lose their jobs and join the increasing numbers of middle-skill working-class in the dole queue or in part-time employment. Also, year by year, the middle of the hour-glass has been gradually moving upwards so that the bowl at the top is becoming much smaller than the bowl at the bottom. It will eventually appear like an inverted wine glass. How we educate our people says as much about how we perceive the world and the future as any economic or political policy. In the United States, we are facing a major crisis in education. The 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey revealed that approximately fifty percent of individuals over the age of sixteen fell in the two lowest levels of literacy, comprehension, and quantitative proficiencies. But what is most disturbing about these findings, is that most of these people did not recognize their own functional illiteracy. It is not surprising that those falling in the two lowest categories are also in the lower categories of socioeconomic status. Today, as in the past, family socioeconomic background is the primary predictor of educational achievement. In my view, there are two major problems that we face in educating our people: The first is that we have always held the value in this country that education was the responsibility of the individual person or family. Employers have only sought to educate their workers to accomplish the tasks performed by them. There has never been any interest in educating people beyond that. Consequently, people have sought to learn "skills" or "earn credentials" which they could offer employers. Now that the employers are fast disappearing, we are at a loss for a focus as to what to learn or what to teach. The second is that in the United States, education has always been oriented toward a middle class value system. We apply the same educational model to educating poor and working class students that we use with middle and upper class students. We target education toward the individuals in a class room, test them as individuals, and hold them accountable as individuals. But the fact of the matter is that working class and lower class people are not as effective competing as individuals as are their middle and upper class counterparts. They are effective competing as teams. But our educational system, and the political interests that constitute it, are unwilling or ignorant of the need to orient education to the social class values of the people they are trying to educate. We assume that the students come to schools "ready to learn" and motivated. The schools, especially in lower class and working class areas, are generally not community centers that cater to a broad array of family needs. Educators define their responsibility very narrowly and blame the parents for not supplying all the ancillary needs of their students. There is a social class bias inherent in American education. We place the responsibility and motivation for obtaining education on the individual. Such emphasis is appropriate for middle and upper class people who come from families that provide the cultural values and enrichment that motivate students to want to learn. For middle and upper class kids, the schools are ancillary to the education they receive at home. For lower class and working class kids, the schools are their primary source of education. Europe has been much more enlightened about orienting education toward the social class values and needs of the students they are educating. We always decry Europe's rigid social class structure, but the social class structure in the U. S. is just as rigid but we are in denial about it, and we provide no opportunity for creating meaningful lives given one's social class position. I think that one of the ways we can learn to adapt to the new global economy is learning to work as teams. Why couldn't schools organize students into teams of three to five and grade the teams rather than the individuals? I suspect that lower class and working class kids would work much harder to not let their team down than they would as isolated individuals. I did this in an urban and regional economics class I taught once. I offered the students the option of organizing into teams of three and to write a term paper collaboratively. I gave each of the students the grade that paper deserved. I told them that I expected to see a paper that looked like it was written by three people. Well about half the class took me up on the offer. The papers the teams submitted were unquestionably superior to the papers submitted by individuals. The complexity of the question addressed, the sophistication of their methodology, the lengths to which they went to obtain data and information, and the quality of the writing were all superior to the papers submitted by individual students. We do very little to teach students how to work as teams in our schools other than athletics. We do very little to teach entreprenuralism in the middle schools and the high schools in the U. S. We don't teach students how to identify economic opportunities, or encourage them to start businesses instead of seeking part time jobs. It is possible to create model business enterprises that are run and managed by high school students. To survive these global economic and social structural changes prosperously, people need to be taught to think from an entrepreneurial cognitive perspective and to analytically identify business needs that they can remuneratively serve with their knowledge, experience and interests. Business incubation facilities need to be developed that focus on specific industries and which encourage cooperative relationships among small participating firms. People need to become computer literate and given access to the vast information resources that are available through Internet communication through public libraries and other community resources. An entirely different educational perspective needs to be adopted if our people are to be taught and encouraged to identify remunerative economic opportunities that they can pursue directly. In the past we were taught to be the embodiment of a variety of skills which we presented to employers in a competitive labor market, and expected the employers to identify the economic opportunity and guide and structure our role in pursuing that opportunity. In the future such jobs will be very few and will demand high levels of skill. But if starting in high school kids are taught how to start and run small businesses, then a vast range of possibilities can become visible for them. For example, high school shop classes are directed toward skills development. It is possible to combine skills training with an entrepreneurial perspective. It wouldn't cost very much to set up a storefront shop where the kids could solicit business and, under supervision, apply the skills they learn in shop class. That store could be run and managed by the students. Over the four years they are in high school, they could cover every aspect of running a business from advertising, repairing equipment and dealing with customers, to managing the books and planning for the growth of the business. Such a model business could be advertised among the parents of all the kids in the school system for starters, and I'd bet you would get enormous support. Creating such a student run business could build their confidence that they could accomplish such a thing themselves. If you combine that with encouraging the students to work as teams, then they could learn that they can form partnerships and cooperative enterprises. Such enterprises could build neighborhood enthusiasm and encouragement. It is possible to create a model business as simple as a pizza shop that high school kids could run and manage. We could make a significant contribution to the education of youth if by the time a kid graduates from high school, he/she feels confident about his/her ability to create, run and manage a business, at the very least, a pizza shop business. If the kids are taught that they can analytically identify needs they can serve, and if they are taught how to cooperate with each other as teams in pursuing those needs, then they could look for opportunities and would have the confidence and the education to take the initiative. This is the only hope the working class has to survive the coming decades prosperously. We can educate people for yesterday's jobs or tomorrow's possibilities. If we were to initiate businesses operated and managed by students, I think we would get support from the local chamber of commerce, the local economic development agency, as well as other municipal and state and community resources. And such a approach could be expanded to include adults. We decry youth-gangs, but the fact of the matter is that many of these youth-gangs are creating businesses, illicit businesses albeit, but businesses nonetheless. Why can't we use the natural inclinations of working class and lower class kids to support each other by combining and leveraging their resources in positive ways? I think the answer is due to the political and social class bias of the educators and the local boards of education, as well as the political leaders. In the U. S. we are in the process of formally abandoning the working and lower classes. I can't even imagine what the social and political consequences of that is going to be. But I know it is going to involve enormous pain for everyone. As a nation we refuse to accept responsibility for educating our people and I think that is the saddest indictment that can be made of any country.