19 October 2009There is a need to ensure the Australian community understands the broad issues underpinning globalisation, the knowledge economy, and the constant evolution and updating of skills in the labour force required to remain competitive in the current environment. Education and training providers hold a key role in equipping their students for these challenges.

If anything, it could be argued that recent talk in education systems around the world about “getting back to basics”, with a no more obvious example than the No Child Left Behind policy adopted by the Bush administration, is in fact returning to the “wrong” basics.

Ask an employer what skills they wished their people had more of and they will usually respond with things like:

·         Creativity

·         Collaboration

·         Communication

·         The ability to manage uncertainty

·         Emotional intelligence

These skills seem far more anchored in “right-brain” capabilities than the left brain “basics” we continue to obsess about in education. Sir Ken Robinsons, the highly respected commentator on creativity and education, suggests that we have forgotten that literacy, mathematics and science as the core focus of education is in fact a recent phenomena. In the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century our focussed shifted to these highly analytical, process based, fundamentals of education which at the time were PERFECT for the dawn of the industrial age.

In other words, schools were producing exactly the kind of thinkers their economies needed.

Is it possible that Australia, and much of the world for that matter, is producing graduates with skills based on a world that no longer exists?