Lack of educational attainment among Hispanics is one of the biggest crises facing the American labor force, according to a report by Excelencia in Education, a Washington research organization that focuses on education of Hispanics.
“You can’t meet our national goals and our workforce needs without having a tactical plan for Latinos,” says Deborah Santiago, vice president of policy and research for the organization. “This is just a factual statement given what the current population numbers are.”
Of the 47 million new workers entering the labor force between 2010 and 2050, a projected 37.6 million, or 80 percent, will be Hispanic, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report. Their share of the workforce will grow to 18.6 percent by 2020 and to 30 percent in 2050, doubling from 15 percent in 2010, according to the BLS. READ MORE
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Getting a college degree is good but getting some knowledge with it is the best.
Unfortunately, latter is becoming less and less possible mainly because our universities and colleges are increasingly devoting their time to research and getting away from systematic teaching. We are thus increasingly producing degree holders with high hopes but not analytical workers. This fact gets masked in all analyses because when we measure workers doing the work, we do not account for the fact that the demonstrated success is not due to good education but due to learning on the job where the workers end up using their own innate analytical abilities and not what they learned at school. So we end up having a distorted picture of the role of education (which in fact is schooling) in the workforce development. But as time goes on and the society and the workplace change, employers will be demanding more knowledgeable and analytical workforce which our current educational system because of its fragmented, subject based mode of teaching is no longer geared to produce. You can see this already happening because even the Dental Assistants which used to be OK with a high school diploma, are now being asked to have a B.A degree!
I have been looking into this looming dilemma for a while and am coming up with alternate ways of educating the masses via an integrative approach to teaching thus not only to produce an analytical workforce which will also be knowledgeable enough to make their life decision on their own and not be taken in by infomercials and the like.
What I am proposing and also doing is to eliminate all subjects as they now exist (it is the subjects and lecture format of teaching which breaks down knowledge into bits and pieces making it harder to understand, learn and thereby use) and in their place teach by integrating all knowledge chronologically and then teach in the same chronological order.
This enables me to integrate art, music, science, humanities, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics etc., into a continuous interconnected logical and chronological whole pretty much the way we learned them in the first place, which is also analogous to what the proverbial Renaissance man used to know and lived by.
Integration also shrinks knowledge (reducing science to mere 150 concepts and skills as opposed to the voluminous subjects of chemistry, physics, and biology etc.) as it takes out much minutia and redundancies that our subject mode of teaching actually ends up introducing. As such integrative teaching can be taught in much less time and with less money.
For integrating science with all the other components of our knowledge base, I bring in the essential hands-on component but again teach it not through books (which make science extremely abstract for the starting student) but by using all the basic instruments, concepts and skills scientists use to do science. Students thus get actual bench training and not only get a head start on becoming scientists but also on becoming the kind of bench-trained workforce most industries and employers look for and will be increasingly looking for in the future.
The reason for this post thus is to reach out not just to educators but to most everyone for most everyone is involved in education one way or the other and I would like them to consider how this form of integrative teaching can reform education including cutting both time and cost of education (can be taught in half the time now spent on lengthy schooling) and, two, for people to become the spokespersons of this integrative form of teaching so more people could learn about it and benefit from it.
There is also one additionalfactor of rising world population that we have to keep in mind. The world population is expected to reach to fourteen billion from the current seven billion in just fifty short years from now. Since our existing schooling system cannot adequately handle the current population, how are we going to deal with the population double of its current size?
Our failure to look into this problem now, with rising world population, will only bring us more global distrust and chaos instead of the global peace we all long for. Integrative education which can be delivered to many more people in much less time and with much less money seems to be one and perhaps the only answer.
Additionally, since what I am doing is so far out of the box and so unbelievably simple that the best way to know it is (at least for the Chicago people) to come visit us to see our whole set up where all knowledge gets organized, integrated and enjoyed. Just contact me at haqueriaz@aol.com to arrange for a visit.
Regards
Riaz-ul Haque, Ph.D.,
Associate Professor (Emeritus)
University of Illinois at Chicago.
Founder Center for Integrative learning
And the Science Skills Center.
Phone: 312-243-7716; Fax: 312-243-2041