what about employability
What about employability?
Great insight from Omar Aktouf
an Algerian-born Quebec intellectual, professor at HEC Montreal . It is a founding member of humanism center, management and globalization and a member of the Scientific Council of ATTAC Quebec . – more here.
His words:
Today, we say we are in a knowledge based economy, but we’ve never educated or taught so little. Yet, we’ve never put so much emphasis on so-called training and educational institutions.
Now for the paradox and nonsensical. They’re in the fact that just about everywhere, especially in North America, schools are being turned into the system’s servant factories. In other words, thinking bipeds must be concerned only about fueling this free, self-regulating market and the mechanics of production and finance.
We call this “employability”, “training the employable”, “reforming education from grade school to university” – training people to find their place in the labor market.
That’s horrible.
Would a Victor Hugo be employable today? Would a Socrates be employable? Would a Paul Verlaine or a Rimbaud be employable? No. So, there would be none.
But what would humanity be without Socrates, Aristotle, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Hugo? What would we be without them? We’d be animals.
Now, on the pretence that they’re unemployable and unwanted, we no longer train poets, literary people, pure mathematicians, or theoretical physicists.
We only train what industry, financial enterprise, wants to fuel the money-making machine.
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More from Icarus Deception:
The notion that an organization can teach anything at all is a relatively new one. Traditionally, society assumed that artists, singers, artisans, writers, scientists, and alchemists would find their calling, then find a mentor, and then learn their craft. It was absurd to think that you’d take people off the street, teach them to do science or to sing, and persist at that teaching long enough for them to get excited about it.
Now that we’ve built an industrial solution for teaching in bulk, we’ve seduced ourselves into believing that the only thing that can be taught is the way to get high SAT scores. We shouldn’t be buying this.
The industrial economy has demanded that we be true. It pushed our parents to ensure that we would be true, and their parents before them. The economy was hungry, hungry for the compliant worker, the one who would fit his round head into the round hole, his square hands into the square holes. And why not? To do otherwise is to mess up the machine. We must no longer care about messing up the machine.
The new safe place requires us to look others in the eye and see them, truly see them.
If the object of the game we are playing was merely to make the most stuff for the least money, there would be no issue with any of this. But the artist understands that there’s a different game being played, one that focuses on connection.
The most rational thing to do is the irrational work of art.
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Perhaps we wake up, and set ourselves free. Perhaps we find the bravery to change our mind.
Perhaps we realize it’s legal to think for and be ourselves.
Perhaps we redefine success in flavors most suitable to our hearts/souls.
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And that brings us to one of the most surprising things we learned from our survey. In industries across the board, employers viewed an internship as the single most important credential for recent grads – more than where you went to school or what you majored in. Even your grades.
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why your kid can’t get a job – forbes
That one kid with the high GPA and stellar SAT scores may just be a drudge who took a lot of prep classes –while that other kid making clever and obscene videos may have superior communications and social networking skills, a huge online following and an innate ability to redesign your company’s entire future.
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Useful conversation on the perceived ‘skills gap’ https://t.co/KZMjPsUFcs
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/davecormier/status/934962965933150208
remembering times when we would sit as a dept.. and map out skills kids would need to get from one level to the next.. ie: alg 2 to trig.. trig to calc.. et al.. and the refreshingly honest teachers would say.. i don’t care what skills they come in with.. they just need to be eager to learn
how much more in life.. esp when the concept of work for money is part of the problem..
we know have the means to facilitate no training.. let’s do that.. let’s facil cure ios city
same day reading George on career advice..
http://www.monbiot.com/career-advice/
The first advice I would offer is this: be wary of following the careers advice your college gives you
The advisers say that a career path like this is essential if you don’t want to fall into the “trap” of specialisation: that is to say, if you want to be flexible enough to respond to the changing demands of the employment market. But the truth is that by following the path they suggest, you are becoming a specialist: a specialist in the moronic recycling of what the rich and powerful deem to be news. And after a few years of that, you are good for little else.
This career path, in other words, is counter-educational. It teaches you to do what you don’t want to do, to be what you don’t want to be. It is an exceptional person who emerges from this process with her aims and ideals intact. Indeed it is an exceptional person who emerges from this process at all. What the corporate or institutional world wants you to do is the opposite of what you want to do. It wants a reliable tool, someone who can think, but not for herself: who can think instead for the institution.You can do what you believe only if that belief happens to coincide with the aims of the corporation, not just once, but consistently, across the years (it is a source of wonder to me how many people’s beliefs just happen to match the demands of institutional power, however those demands may twist and turn, after they’ve been in the company for a year or two).
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be you. 