13th February 2004

Job Outsourcing to India and US Schools

posted in economics, literacy, politics |
A recent article in Wired magazine about IT outsourcing to India and other locations should drive home the importance of US schools teaching beyond the requirements of mandated testing, and encouraging student creativity among many other things. This may prove to be an issue of economic survival.

The February 2004 article in Wired magazine, “The New Face of the Silicon Age: How India became the capital of the computing revolution,” strikes me as remarkable for several reasons.

First, when we hear discussion of job outsourcing to other countries, typically we think of unskilled manual labor: like sweatshop textile industry workers. The IT outsourcing to India and other locations is a very different phenomenon, however: these are the exact opposite of unskilled jobs. On the contrary, these are highly technical “IT” positions and roles which naive citizens uninformed about current employment trends might not expect to move offshore. The graphs that accompany the article for predicted future outsourcing in the next few years are remarkable. Those are not included apparently in the online version, just the print version. As futurists encourage us, we should take note of trend lines and plan accordingly. This seems like a case in point.

So many of our schools are almost wholly focused on mandated test preparation, that a current event like this will likely slip by unnoticed by school board members, parents, and administrators. It should not. We absolutely must be preparing students today for an uncertain future, that is NOT characterized predominantly by multiple choice problems which have single answers. That is what my TCEA 2004 presentation, “The School I Love,” was all about. We have an obligation to our children to prepare them for their future, and as this Wired article points out, a significant part of our future work in the US may depend on our continued abilities to innovate and think creatively.

Are the schools in your neighborhood schools that I would love?!

On this day..

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2004 at 10:33 pm and is filed under economics, literacy, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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