Schools Need to Be Cautious of Business Leaders Telling Us What Kind of Graduates Educational Institutions Should Provide

 "...it was in the 1990s that shop class started to become a thing of the past, as educators prepared students to become 'knowledge workers.'" Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

The education system has taken on the role of distributing people in the niches needed by business and industry. When business calls for "knowledge workers," the education system reacts and cuts funding of some programs and distributes students into the chosen learning niches of business and industry. 

The problem with the education system reacting in this manner, is that students are placed in educational niches that might be short-lived due to business and industry's concerns with short-term profits and benefits. For example, when business and industry does not have the long-term interests of their workers in mind, they move entire production lines overseas or to lay workers off for the sake of short-term stock benefit or profit. In these cases, educational institutions have done a great disservice in placing students in deadend careers and jobs. These institutions should have an even greater vision that reaches beyond the horizon of the short-term advantages sought by these companies.

Education systems that purely have their students' interests in mind will look with a skeptical eye towards the kinds of workers called for from the private sector. It does not mean that the system ignores them entirely, but educators need to remember that the way business ideology is currently constructed in the United States especially, is more libertarian and tilted toward the idea that what is best for them is what is best for everybody. A quick glance at history immediately dispels this illusion. Maybe instead of shoving students into the STEM niche, we need a broader consideration of their potentials and interests. Niche-learning limits possibilities rather than increases them despite what the pro-business and STEM evangelists would have us believe. 

Schools do not need to dismantle "shop classes" nor the school orchestra or any other school programs on the advice of any business leader. They are interested in the short term: educators must be concerned with lifetimes. Educational institutions have a moral obligation to be critical and skeptical when business and industry starts dictating what kinds of graduates we should be providing. Their short-term perspective benefits them. Schools morally have to take the long-term perspective and prepare students for lives well-beyond what the immediate demands.

When Crawford pointed out the demise of shop classes in the 1990s he captured how schools often react to short-term business interests instead of advocating for the lifetime possibilities of students. Schools have a moral responsibility to students not to business or industry.