The Right Stuff

It is clear that with this new flat world education is the key to survival. It is important to transform educational systems so as that workers can actually get jobs that exist in their societies. So now many are asking, "how do we educate our children?”

According to Friedman the first skill you must develop is “learning how to learn”. In other words what you know will become out of date quickly so you must constantly learn and develop new skills. To me this is a given as it has always been the key to remaining competitive.

The next thing he point out are navigation skills. I had not even thought of this much less how important this was. It will be important for us and our children to effectively navigate the virtual world and separate the noise from the facts. As Freidman points out this has always been important but today more and more people are getting from news sites that are not edited.

CQ + PQ > IQ embodies Friedman’s third theme of passion and curiosity. This mean that that your curiosity quotient and passion quotient are more important than your intelligence quotient. Basically if you have these factors you have a competitive advantage in the job market. These people are self-educators and self-motivators and essentially this is the key to success in the flat world.

Stressing liberal arts means teaching your kids to essentially think outside the box. Friedman describes it as teaching people early to think horizontally. I think this important because today we see math and science as main focus while the arts and music seem dispensable. I like Freidman believe these areas are essential for innovation.

Finally, Friedman discuses how we need to help our students develop the ability to think horizontally. They need to mesh together different perspective to produces a third one. This would essentially involve using the right brain so it is important to nurture that. This is simple if we want our children to become untouchables we have to help them develop both left and right brain skills. It will be nice to see this come to fruition as we have traditionally focused on our analytical left-brain abilities.

The final piece of the puzzle is how we make this happen. What does all this really mean for education? I think the example he gave with Georgia Tech really does set a standard. We have to begin changing our policies and the way we look at students. The goal after is not just to produce an engineer but a good one. Therefore, we need to promote our test tubes and out tubas!