Why do we educate our children? Since schooling began, the answer has been jobs. However, schools designed primarily for jobs no longer have practical value. The landscape is changing rapidly as noted in a 2019 Oxford Economics report on how robots change the world. The report projected that globally “robots will replace 20 million [manufacturing] jobs by 2030” and based on its “robot vulnerability index,” North Carolina tied Indiana for the fourth most vulnerable state to the disruptive impact of robots.

According to recent statistics, the pandemic has only accelerated the march toward automation. In September of this year, considering more than manufacturing jobs, the career information website zippia.com published 36+ alarming automation and job loss statistics suggesting potentially 73 million US jobs will be eliminated by 2030—a whopping 46% of current jobs. The subtitle of that article was, “Are robots, machines and AI coming for your job?”

While that is a worthwhile question, a better question is, “Why are we still educating children for jobs?” Children’s lives are not and will not be like their parents in terms of technology and employment so we cannot offer the same type of schools. We cannot possibly prepare a five-year-old today for jobs in 2040.

On the backs of our children

In June of 1980, NBC aired a documentary called “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” One of the first statements in that program was: “It’s not the American worker…that’s a major part of the problem of productivity.” Despite that declaration, the fact that the best American-made product failed six times more often than the best Japanese-made product ignited the fire for change. But what change?

Behind the ideas that fueled Japan’s quality improvement was an American statistician and consultant, William Edwards Deming. Since Deming’s results in Japan could not be denied, the need for quality improvement in America was acknowledged nationally. However, with the 1981 creation of the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE) and the release of its final report (A Nation at Risk) on the quality of education in the United States on April 23, 1983, it became clearer what the change would be. The report cited Japan as a great manufacturing competitor, stating that “history is not kind to idlers.”

Who was idling? The report’s basic message was that our children had it too easy and our schools and our children were not serious enough. Consequently, our nation faced a “rising tide of mediocrity.” By 1991, the Department of Labor Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) report expanded greatly on the 1983 “At Risk” report. That report, titled “What Work Requires of Schools,” added to a two-decade effort, from 1981 to 2001, that simply assumed a direct connection between the business sector’s problem with quality and our children’s “idleness” in schools.

The declining quality of American products was defined as a problem with the workers and since our children were “idlers,” they needed to be held accountable. The businessmen whose problem it actually was promoted a performance-based accountability system to national goals, standards, and testing. With the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002, standardized testing bombarded our children directly with 17 mandated tests from 3rd grade to high school.

Deming had written in his 1982 pivotal book, Out of the Crisis, that “he that would run his company on visible figures alone will in time have neither company nor figures.” This statement applies to our schools as well. Ironically, America’s industry leaders had ignored Deming’s ideas in their businesses but Japan had not. Now, citing Japan’s ascension, these same businessmen were setting America’s schools, using standardized testing as mass inspection, on the same faulty course, ignoring Deming’s ideas again.

Correcting course, putting children first

In the 1997 Code of Ethics for NC Educators, the first commitment calls for the accountability of educators “to the students,” always seeking to “protect students from conditions…detrimental to [their] health and safety.” By contrast, a February 2003 article, one year after NCLB, addressed “the dangers of testing” as follows: “[High-stakes testing] causes students to turn off, tune out, and often drop out; induces schools to push students out; increases grade retention; propels teachers to leave; and inhibits needed improvements. In the end, [it] will hurt students…”

Harvard educator Frank Smith in his book, Insult to Intelligence, wrote about another danger, “the short right answer.” He warned that in the effort to be “objective” and eliminate human error (prejudice and bias), testing has depersonalized education to “only those things that can be cleanly scored right or wrong, and counted.” As Dr. Smith lamented, “The cost of removing human error has been the removal of all humanity and the reduction of education to trivia.”

Despite these and other dangers, we have kept on course with testing. What time-tested theories and research led us to test our children? What adult population would willingly submit to such testing? Would legislators agree to be tested on their knowledge of bills before voting? Would judges agree to be tested on relevant case law before each verdict? Even if they did agree to it, how time-consuming and distracting would it become? It is more problematic for children as a golden hammer (a bias that over-relies on a familiar tool), having spread to kindergarten and pre-k, despite its harms.

During Reagan’s inaugural address on January 20, 1981, he offered that, as society’s problems become increasingly complex, the solutions “must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.” Testing as a solution unfortunately has not been equitable and it did “single out” one group to pay a higher price—our children. Why should children be held to account for the failures of businesses?

We must correct course. The burden of accountability should never have been on the student’s backs. Ethically, we are “accountable to the students” for maintaining their dignity with special protection from harm due to their dependency and vulnerability. We must stop educating children with the promise of jobs since most of today’s jobs may not be available and we cannot say what tomorrow’s jobs will be. Their whole well-being and the freedoms of democracy are key to children being free to develop a lifelong curiosity and love of learning and discover themselves and their interests in their pursuit of happiness. They cannot wait any longer and with NC’s apparent vulnerability to automation, neither can our state. Our future depends on making the shift now!

Part 5 will address the human rights of children.

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