[NLA] Thursday Notes, 3/14/02

[PDRNRI@aol.com]

Gloria,

In your posts you note that businesses cannot agree on what level of 
investment in workforce education would yield the highest return -- in other 
words, what is the least amount necessary to invest to ensure more efficient 
production and (as a result) enhance competitiveness.  I'd like to suggest 
that they don't have those figures because they don't know how to measure it. 
  

What I have seen measured are income gains to individual workers relative to 
their levels of investment, which suggests that business seems willing to pay 
more for better educated individuals.   This is in accord with your quote: 
"... it is now commonly understood that the acquisition of knowledge is 
central to the competitive advantage of individuals and organizations in 
today's economy...".  Obviously today's economy, characterized as it is by 
flexibility, calls for flexibly trained workers -- thus the value of 
education to business.  But what the rest of the quote suggests, in essence, 
is that while business knows and accepts this as common wisdom, it can't 
measure the value with satisfactory precision.  Because it can't measure it, 
it hesitates to overspend.  

It's important to consider the possibility as well that business is 
interested in training more flexible workers and nothing more.  If this is 
the case (and why wouldn't it be -- after all, the struggle here is for 
maximizing return on investment) than regardless if how clearly it is 
demonstrated, business will never invest to the levels that we would like to 
see.   

Unless, that is, if their purposes become our purposes.  

What is troubling to me is your inclination to fault our field for this 
hesitancy, and suggest that we are somehow failing to do our jobs as 
educators because we struggle to convince business of the value of education. 
 If we as a field begin to blame ourselves for failing to align our interests 
with theirs -- when it is abundantly clear that our interests are in many 
ways radically different from theirs -- then we resign ourselves to a 
subservient position.  This is a struggle between two groups which have some 
common interest but, in most ways, are radically different.  To make their 
purposes our purposes in order to continue is to surrender the type of 
struggle Catherine articulates.   

There are people in our field who know at an expert level the vocabulary of 
business and how to communicate.  This is not the cause of the conflict.  The 
interests of education and the interests of business are different.  To be 
sure, there is common ground, and it is upon this common ground that we make 
our main arguments.  But when we begin to make their arguments our arguments, 
we surrender.  

In many very important ways, this is precisely as you say -- "us against 
them".  In my mind, this is not a bad thing.  Nor does it "diminish our 
importance". 

David Hayes 

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