• Jenny Stewart

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16 July 2009The jobs of the future are beginning to be shaped right now, in the world of work, writes Jenny Stewart IT’S NOT OFTEN that an article in an academic journal makes you think about the world in a different way. But one such article appeared late last year in Prometheus, an Australian-based journal that publishes a wide range of research on science, technology and society and the intricate relationships between them.

The paper, called The Ignorance Economy, was written by two academics from the north of England, Joanne Roberts from the University of Newcastle and John Armitage from nearby Northumbria University. Their argument goes something like this. Most of us are familiar with the idea of the knowledge-based economy. We understand that, increasingly, economic activity is underpinned by the development and application of new knowledge.

While not denying the reality of the knowledge economy, Roberts and Armitage point out that, in focusing on knowledge, we forget about its counterpart, ignorance. Indeed, so enamoured of the knowledge economy have we become that we forget that, for every advance that we make in the knowledge-based economy, we create an equivalent deficit in the economy of ignorance.

Take specialisation, for example. As more and more knowledge is produced, the capacity of any one person to be across even a tiny proportion of it diminishes. The specialist knows more and more about less and less. Ignorance increases, because the specialist’s knowledge is accessible only to the specialist. The proportion of a society’s knowledge that is generally known, that is part of its general knowledge, falls. As technology becomes more complex, we develop skills in using it, but lose the ability to relate more directly to the world around us.

It is easy to think of personal examples of this phenomenon. Compare, for example, a taxi driver who knows how to get from A to B in a given city because he knows the geography with one who is totally reliant on a GPS system. The first taxi-driver will know the quickest route for a particular time of day. The second, as I found on a recent trip to Melbourne, will get you stuck in traffic.

On another occasion (this time local), the driver must have misheard the direction from the oracular GPS voice, and the cab flew past the street we were looking for. “It’s back that way,” I told him. “How do you know?” he asked, executing a reverse three-point turn in the midst of the evening traffic. “I saw it on the street sign,” I replied.

Anyway, as I read the Roberts and Armitage article, I began to think of the recent moves to raise the school leaving age in the Australian Capital Territory to 17. From next year, if the plans go ahead, no ACT student will be allowed to leave school before the age of 17, unless he or she either has a job or is in some form of training. As a public policy idea, it seems excellent, a good way of ensuring that all participate in some way in the knowledge society.

But from the perspective of the ignorance economy, it may just make matters worse. With unemployment on the rise and the training system in disarray, the risk is that kids who should be learning something useful are simply warehoused a bit longer, before falling through the cracks a bit later than would otherwise have been the case.

More generally, Year 12 retention rates are put forward as a measure of knowledge-based success. More than that, we say we want a higher and higher proportion of the population to possess a university degree. There are even plans to extend time at university by offering college-style degrees which students must complete before they are allowed to proceed to more specialist qualifications. We think of changes such as these as responses to the demands of the knowledge society that by forcing kids to stay longer in educational institutions, we are somehow preparing them more thoroughly for the world that lies ahead.

I really wonder, though, whether we increase the “knowledgeableness” of our society through these kinds of measures. It is more likely, I think, that we simply slow down the rate at which knowledge is acquired. To paraphrase the great C. Northcote Parkinson, education expands to fill the time available for its completion. As a society, we seem comfortable with our kids being sexually active at ever-younger ages, but are determined to keep them in a state of vocational infantilism for as long as possible.

Part of the problem is that we equate knowledge with formal education. Work is, I would suggest, where most people do most of their serious learning. Universities nurture those with academic talent or interests, but universities would quickly cease to exist if they did not also prepare people for practical careers in engineering, medicine, accounting, law and architecture.

The drive to credentialise everything we do is very strong. Nursing used to be a profession taught predominantly in hospitals, or in the community. Now it is predominantly a degree-based course. Nurses emerge from university with a greater theoretical understanding of health care, but knowing less than in the past about the work they will actually have to do.

The fact that jobs requiring degrees are growing faster than jobs that do not, partly reflects the fact that more and more jobs now require degrees. It does not mean that we are a more knowledgeable society. A recent visitor to our shores, the British educationalist Sir Ken Robinson, told us that, as most of the jobs of the future are not yet invented, the best we can do for our kids is to encourage their creativity. Sir Ken believes that the schools have an important role to play in this, and I am sure he is right.

From another perspective, though, the jobs of the future are beginning to be shaped right now, in the world of work. It is not unusual, when reading about the careers of successful entrepreneurs, to find that they left school at 15. The people who will create the future are generally impatient with the restraints of formal education, however creative that education tries to be. It is a furphy that if we keep them at school for longer, bored and disruptive kids will somehow be transformed into model citizens.

It is true that schools can provide work experience, but it is just not the same as the real thing. What matters is that schools should do a good job with reading, writing and numeracy, still the basic tools for the acquisition of knowledge, and that education and training should be available to people throughout their lives, so that they can take full advantage of them when they have sorted themselves out and know what they really want to do.

• Jenny Stewart is professor of public policy at the Australian Defence Force Academy, University of NSW. This article first appeared in the Canberra Times.