Learning Without Scars
As a third-generation educator, it is easy to say that teaching and training are in the blood for Ron Slee. From his beginnings as a coach, through his time at McGill University, Ron developed a foundation for the work he does today. From working within dealerships, to operating a consulting company, creating a training business and running twenty groups, Ron has been directly involved in this Industry since 1969. Ron has been known as the industry expert for years, and has brought this expertise to bear through his training programs. Today, Ron provides specialized, job function based internet based subject specific classes, job function skills assessments, as well virtual seminars and webinars. These courses are designed for manufacturers and their dealers, as well as independent businesses in the construction equipment, light industrial, on-highway, engine, and agricultural industries through Learning Without Scars (www.LearningWithoutScars.com). This platform is a continuation of the work begun by Quest, Learning Centers which was established in 1996. This training is aimed at improving dealer parts and service operations through qualified people that are knowledgeable in using operational metrics and current market and operational best practice methods.
Learning Without Scars
America Can Rebuild Literacy And Work Readiness
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Graduation rates can look healthy while real skills quietly erode, and the NAEP “below basic” numbers make that hard to ignore. We sit down with Ed and George to ask a blunt question: how did a country that once built the best educated workforce in the world drift into producing “technopeasants” who are surrounded by technology but struggle with reading, math, writing, and problem solving?
We connect the dots between education policy incentives, classroom reality, and workforce demands. Along the way we dig into why a systems view matters, how “schools as factories” can discourage deep learning, and why reading stamina is collapsing from K 12 through higher education. We also get specific about teacher preparation, arguing that strong pedagogy is not enough without real subject matter expertise, and we look at what countries like Finland and Singapore do differently in recruiting and supporting teachers.
From there, we move into the talent pipeline beyond school: corporate training budgets, short term profit thinking, career and technical education, and employer partnerships that actually map to modern jobs in manufacturing, health care, and services. We challenge the hype around AI in education and work, treating AI and robotics as tools that amplify educated workers, not substitutes for thinking. We close with a broader view on leadership, immigration, demographics, and hope as the cultural fuel required to rebuild literacy, work readiness, and upward mobility.
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We provide comprehensive online learning programs for employees starting with an individualized skills assessment to a personalized employee development program designed for their skill level.
Welcome And The Big Question
SPEAKER_01Aloha and welcome to another candid conversation. Today is a special day for me because I've got two gentlemen that are stunningly experienced and intelligent. It's kind of scary. I just carry the baggage around here. But Ed, you're familiar with, he's been with me probably for 10 plus years with blogs and podcasts. George is new, even though he doesn't look like he's brand new. Um, and George has got an incredible background. The two of them authored or co-authored a blog called, which the headline had in it techno peasants. And that's kind of the starting point of where I'd like this discussion to go. So, Ed, perhaps you can start, tell us, remind us a little bit about who you are, and then we'll go to George. And then I'd like you guys to say what in the heck did make you decide to write that blog. So, how about we start with that? Ed, over to you.
SPEAKER_00Very
Ed On Technopeasants And Work
SPEAKER_00good. All right, thank you. Well, I've been involved for over 50 years in education and training in the workplace. Uh, both uh in higher education, I taught for 20 years, but at the same time, uh I was running consulting, uh, tutoring children, and offering corporate training to adults in the workplace. And I started writing about this uh in the late 80s and have produced a number of books talking about the need to upgrade our education system and continue to improve workforce training so that we could better accommodate the tech new technologies that were coming out in the 80s, the 90s, and now in this first two decades of the 21st century. And what became more and more apparent to me is how uh we simply were falling behind, how we continued to uh believe that only about a third of our workforce needed to be educated enough with the right skills to get decent middle class or professional, higher professional uh employment. Uh, and uh we continued to fall further and further behind. So as a result of that, uh I started talking uh and finding out about regions and communities who said, Hey, our children are leaving, our small businesses are closing, and uh the tax base has gone to hell. And we want to do something about this. So they read my books and they had me come and I started working with elementary and secondary school people and people uh as well as uh post sec uh post-secondary and trying to get companies to invest in the in their workers, but at the same time uh recognizing that the issue was not just we had um more technology, but that basically we were producing more and more what I call technopeasants, uh individuals uh who basically do not have the reading and math abilities for good employment in our uh in this time period. Uh so uh in a nutshell, uh that's I've written a number of books on this. You see some of them over my shoulder, skill wars, future jobs, future work, uh, et cetera, et cetera. Uh offering an analysis as a researcher of what needs to be done, and then offering real solutions and case studies of uh companies that actually or communities, regions, they actually uh were doing something about it. I called them retains, regional talent innovation networks, retain the people, the tax base, uh, the um small businesses, and try to attract uh newcomers into an area. So I've done this work across the U.S. uh somewhat overseas as well. And I still am right about this.
SPEAKER_01You see how he's doing this, George? It's a promotion for him. He's trying to pedal his books. That's right.
SPEAKER_00You know what I'm trying to peddle? I'm trying to peddle culture change where people recognize we need to do something about this.
SPEAKER_01I agree with you about George, how about you?
SPEAKER_03Well,
George On NAEP And Below Basic
SPEAKER_03my background uh is a bit different than Ed's. Um originally when I grew up, I was going to be a musician. I wanted to play in you know bands like uh Billy Mays and uh Stan Kenton's and so on and so forth. And uh anyway, uh uh uh clarinet and saxophone. I played claret myself. Oh, there you go. I started playing uh 15 years old. I started playing in poker bands in Wisconsin.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there was something wrong with that.
SPEAKER_03And uh that's what I mean. I mean I I as I was studying music, uh, I ended up like that crosswise with my instructor, and he gave me two F's in a course that was taking courses that I was taking from him. And so I was taking some sociology course, a field I didn't even know about in high school, and uh I was doing very well in them. And uh I told the uh professor that I wanted to uh to major in sociology. He said, Well, the first thing you got to do is get out of here. And he said, You're from Wisconsin, you have a great sociology department. But he said, if you go there, you better start studying some mathematics and statistics because you got to give a PhD if you're gonna do anything in sociology, and you're gonna have to pass those damn methods of statistics exam. So I followed all of that and I went to the University of Wisconsin and I ended up uh uh actually taking the whole graduate statistics sequence as an undergraduate. And um uh anyway, so I ended up eventually actually writing a couple of statistics textbooks and and uh methodology books and sociology. But anyway, uh when I got out, I was uh I was a uh uh a uh uh I stayed at Thompson for two years as a lecturer, and then I got invited to the University of Minnesota uh as an associate professor. I never was an assistant professor, and I got there and I was there for four years, and the place was in in need of desperate repair. And anyway, uh after complaining enough, they said, Okay, well, we're gonna make you the chairman of the department. And so at the type age of 31, I took that over. And I can tell you that was a when I immediately became an adult. Um within weeks, the dean had told me there's gonna be a 12% retrenchment in your budget, and uh, and of course, you know, a budget's fair almost all people. So it was a it was a rough stage. Um anyway, I was there for four years, and then I went to Indiana University, which was a really wonderful department where I spent uh 15 years. But I've been doing mostly what I would call academic work, and I was increasingly frustrated about trying to do something that had a more practical uh uh uh uh uh approach to it. And as it turns out, that uh a friend of mine became president of the American Institutes for Research, and he was looking for somebody to run the Palo Alto office. And I'd been at Stanford the year before at a think tank that I had invited to, and so I my family and I loved uh that area. And I took a two-year leave of absence from uh Indiana, and I did take that job over, and I never went back, and I stayed at AIR for about 37 years. But anyway, one of the first projects I got involved with was um uh a congressionally mandated evaluation of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This is called the the uh the nation's report card. Uh NAPE uh assesses uh the nation's fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders uh uh typically every two years. There's much there's been much more focus on on the fourth and eighth graders than the twelfth graders. But anyway, it's our way of knowing how our kids are doing. We plot uh progress over time. And uh so I uh uh I was uh the project director for this evaluation of what was called uh trial state NAPE. NAPE originally was only uh uh a national assessment, but a lot of the states were interested in being able to compare themselves with another, Indiana with Kentucky, or you know, and so on and so forth. And so uh Congress uh said, well, let's give it a try and see how it goes. And that's that was a five-year project. It was a huge huge project, but it really acquainted me with uh uh with the national assessment. Um but throughout my career at AIR, I was involved in NAPE all the time. And one of the things that the National Assessment of the National Center for Education and Statistics did is they put together a committee whose sole job was to oversee the reliability and validity of NAPE. And I chaired that committee for for 25 years. But more recently, uh uh uh I was involved with uh uh and Ed knows about this, there was a committee where uh Peggy Carr, the commissioner, had said, you know, we're finding a large, a large number of our students are are uh performing below the basic level. NATE reports on three achievement levels that percentage at the basic level, percent at the proficient level, percent at the advanced level. But there's this residual category, below basic, where a lot of our kids were not only performing, but were there was a growing number of kids that was performing there. So she asked if I would chair a committee that took a look at the below basic group. And that's very relevant because that's part of what we talk about in uh in this article. So anyway, uh I did other work as well, but uh I wanted to just focus here since it's most important on the national assessment of educational progress.
SPEAKER_01So what what got me to add in the first place, George, which ties directly to what you're saying, is one of his statements in I think it was future jobs, was that by 2030, 50% of the American workforce will not have the skills required to be employable. And then I've been using NAPE as as one of my measurements. I I taught education in Montreal at McGill University for a long time. Um what my last look at NAPE was that plus or minus two or three percent, grade four, grade eight, grade twelve was thirty percent were at grade level. And I found that to be disgraceful, and so that's what twig me when techno peasants came across. This is such an important subject, and I'd I'd like us to to be talking about that. How
Graduation Gains With Hidden Skill Loss
SPEAKER_01the hell do we get out of the hole that we're in? Where do we start who's standing in the way? And and again, this is all opinions and it's a candidate conversation. Pretend we got a bottle of scotch or a glass of wine, whatever suits your fancy. What what do we do, and how how do we get out of this place?
SPEAKER_03Let me just say something about this. You know, one of the things is is that uh our federal government tries in uh to to do things that will improve education and uh uh very often gets involved with large programs, very often which don't have very positive results. But um, one of the things that was of great concern was that uh there were high numbers, uh percentage of our 12th graders that were dropping out of school. They weren't finishing uh and so there was an emphasis that was being put on how do we get these kids to graduate. And of course, if you provide incentives to do it, uh money, uh the states and districts are going to try to do something about it, which they did. And uh ever since there's been an increasing percentage of the students who, in fact, are getting their degrees. But Ed and I talk about the importance of looking at things like this from a systems point of view. So in the in the in the uh in the emphasis put on uh getting kids to graduate from high school, uh it turns out that they were there were things like giving uh degrees based on credits earned and so on, without necessarily looking at what students knew and could do. And so at the same time that we were increasing the percentage of students who were graduating from high school, you could just watch the the what was going on with the percentage of students who were performing below basic on the tape. And I sent at a little graphic that I put together on this recently, and it they track each other uh very, very closely. So uh, you know, it's uh it's kind of like a whack-a-mole, right? You can push the down here, but you should see to see what the unintended consequences are if you don't look at things in a systems way, and that's part of what the uh you know the emphasis has been, but what's been revealed by these analyses. So we didn't talk about that in the article, but it's an important fact.
SPEAKER_01I think that's something that you guys should consider as a follow-up article. But let me let me come in a different way. We have people in the classroom, the teachers, teachers' aides, we have the call it the management of the schools, the principals, etc. And we've got the school board, and we've got the school districts, and we've got the state departments of education, then we've got the federal department of education. So we've got the the classroom people, we've got the quote administrative people, we have union people, and we have government people. And where where should we start? Which one of those four will give us the best and and biggest improvement, do you think?
SPEAKER_00And maybe Ed, you start on that one. You know,
How Culture Shaped American Schooling
SPEAKER_00my doctorate is in history and Ed Psych, particularly learning theory, all right. A hundred years ago, over a hundred years ago, between 1890 and 1920, all 48 states mandated K-12 education, tax-supported good currency laws. And it was a hell of a fight to do it, because you were gonna put take children out of factories and farms, you're gonna put women in high school, and you're gonna start educating immigrants. And if you think there is a lot of dissension now about some of those issues, you should have heard it then. This battle was fought out state by state. And the reason that it was fought out this battle was fought out state by state. What year last state demanded between 1890 and 1920. Okay before that, we did not have compulsory tax-supported uh education in the United States. It was very hit or miss, all right. What changed it, what changed it and what and what pushed it forward was the industrial revolution that took people off the farm and into the cities, into factories and offices. Now, farms did not die, they became very mechanized. All right, and during the rest of the 20th century, we gradually built what by 1970 was the best educated workforce in the world. Uh, because why? Well, World War II, the the uh massive uh expansion of manufacturing, the GI Bill, all right, but we got in our culture the idea that only a third of our population really needed to be what we'll say to be well educated, all right. And the next third needed some things beyond high school, but not a lot, and the bottom third, there were a lot of basic skill jobs out there that they could eke out a living, and some even uh get into the lower middle class, and then Bill Gates goofed up the whole thing by introducing that damn PC in the 70s and 80s and started doing well in the 70s and 80s, there was an increasing demand for training in the workplace. By 1995, 40 percent, 45 percent of companies had training departments, and they realized they had to retrain workers to use this technology to apply it to jobs, to tasks, task analysis. I owned a training and development business, and we were involved in helping them to do task analysis and apply the technology then to the task. The technology did not replace the the employee, it was an intelligent employee using the technology that would produce innovation, performance, productivity. All right, so that that went pretty well. But then in the early the mid-90s, it all changed again because everything became even more so short-term, and then technology continued to race ahead. However, the culture stiltified, it did not change. American expectations did not change overall. Most people still believe that it's only the eggheads that need a really great education, that they we don't need writing and reading skills. And now with AI, it's even more apparent, fewer and fewer people are reading. And I just read one study that said not only are fewer and fewer younger people reading, but now instead of IQs rising generation to generation, in the current youngest generation, IQs are beginning to fall because they are not reading. So where do you start? Well, maybe I always have thought that Americans, this is a consumer-driven society. It's a capitalistic driven society. And if people pocketbook and if people's lifestyle is threatened, they begin to try to figure out what to do about it. Well, now technology without the education is threatening a lot of people. They're leaving the middle class and being forced below. Right now, we have 34 million people between the ages of 18 and 55 who are not working. We have one of the lowest labor participation rates and is continuing to fall. Not just because boomers are retiring, but because a lot of young people have given up looking for work andor they're not trainable. They're techno peasants, they're reading at such a low level in math, writing skills, even interpersonal communications. But do parents get that message? I don't think so. A third do, but others still believe that sports are more important than learning to read, write, and do math, and that a career it can be sort of by luck. Um let's say, you know.
SPEAKER_01Let's let's take that as our third, third, third. George, do you agree with what's Ed saying, or do you want to color it a little bit?
SPEAKER_03Well,
Reading Collapse And Factory Schooling
SPEAKER_03no, I agree, I agree with what it's saying. I mean, he's an historian, so he understands what's going on. I think it's it's a difficult lift. Um it was interesting when Ed said that uh, you know, kids went from the factories to schools, but uh over time now, I think what's happened is that the schools have become factories. And uh I'm not sure that the education that uh that they got then is the education that we need now. And um so uh taking a systems point of view uh of this, uh I think the important thing is that you begin with the end in mind, you know, the old thing that came from the Seven Habits book. And uh and so if you take a look at it, I think that where you have to begin to focus is the relationship between teachers, students, curricular materials, and pedagogy. Okay. And we have to ask ourselves, what outcomes do we need? Um, you know, historically, we've sort of let education define what those outcomes are. And uh uh and I think what we need to do as a society now is to say, well, uh uh one fit, you know, one shoe fits all is not really probably what we need anymore. And uh a lot of our students simply cannot engage in anymore. And Ed mentioned the whole issue with reading and uh and the and the role that uh social media and uh and technology has played there. They only have a short term uh uh way in which they can engage with reading anymore, and they do it almost all online. And uh uh and uh getting students to read more than 10 or 20 pages at a time, any teacher will tell you, has become increasingly difficult. And this now, by the way, is actually creeping up into higher education as well. There was a story in the New York Times now a couple of months ago where they were talking about the the teachers in in American or world literature assigning the number of books they did for students to read. They can't do that anymore. They can't read nearly the percentage, you know. If they were assigning 10 books before, they maybe will assign three now. And it'll probably be the shorter books. They're not gonna be the heavy book where people were required to work their way through. Now, you know, is this what kind of a problem is this? Um, I don't think we know yet. I mean, uh, AI is an important tool. So the question is, uh, how do we use AI? Uh and to answer that question again, I go back to well, what is it you're trying to accomplish? And I think if you define what the outcomes are you want, you'll see places where, well, why wouldn't you use AI? Of course you use AI because it's probably going to give you the most bang for the butt in terms of what we want to know. But uh we also have students who have to know how to use it to achieve those outcomes. So in other cases, we don't want to give up on writing. We're a literate society, for goodness sakes, and Ed knows this better than I. Uh, part of what's defined uh Western civilization is written and read literacy. I mean, that's what makes us uh who we are. So we don't want to give up on that. Um, let me just focus on some of the things I think that are important for us to consider as we think about this. So, number one are the teachers, right? Number two is is the is what it is that we want kids to know and need to know. And you know, if we had a Congress that did a damn thing worthwhile, they would help us with this problem. I'm not sure they can they can do it. I mean, but we need somebody like a McKinsey that comes in and works with us and asks, what is a society that we need to do and and and know and do to retain our uh to retain our uh prominence in the world? I think we can say for certain a lot of things we're doing are absolutely ass backward. We're heading the wrong direction.
SPEAKER_00Could
Teacher Prep And Subject Mastery
SPEAKER_00could we talk a little bit more though about teachers? Yeah, there are there are societies where you get a in college, you will get a bachelor's degree in math, you will get a bachelor's degree in biology, chemistry, English, and then if you want to teach, you will get a master's degree in the teaching of math, in the teaching of history. The problem now is this is not what we do. We have education majors who then are given uh courses on how to teach, and then they get certificates to teach certain topics, but they don't necessarily have a good grounding in those topics. I'll give an example, which always has amazed me. A lot of history teachers in our post-secondary school system, most of them are not history majors. They many of them were phys ed majors. Now, there's nothing wrong with physical education. I'm not saying that that's a bad major, but how does that prepare someone to teach history? Someone asked me, I'm a professional historian, I've written many books. Well, how do you know something? Well, George is the same way in statistics. There's one uh expert that said you become an expert in the field once you've read a thousand books on that topic. Well, George, I guess I've read a thousand books about history. Good, bad, and indifferent, but I have read a lot of books about history, and I still do because I'm interested in it. But that is the problem. The problem is if we have a math major, do they become a math teacher? No. Why? Well, why should I start at 45 or 50 grand when I can go to a bank and use my math or an investment firm and make a hundred thousand dollars to start and I'm 22 years old? Well, guess what? Finland, in Finland, in Finland, they do that. In Singapore, they do that, and they make it very difficult to become a teacher so that you have the right personality and interest, and they reward you up front so that you stay in teaching.
SPEAKER_01Let me let me interrupt at this point and put some commercial on it. What what I think Ed is pointing at is teachers know how to teach, but they don't know the subject matter. And what I've I've noticed, I started in the 60s, but what I've noticed is that people that lead in business no longer know the job functions that they're leading. So we've got a person who's kind of good in theory, maybe I'm good with people, maybe I'm good to give criticism or praise or whatever, but I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. And as a result of that, we have a lot of turmoil, a lot of tension, a lot of anxiety, because people don't know what the hell to do. So then let me add another little feature in here along the lines that in the construction trades, the capital goods industries, that's from lawnmowers to washing machines to airplanes to whatever, every 20 years the number of companies competing in the supply chain drops by 50%. We're seeing a consolidation within industry, partially because of poor management, partially because of poor financial approaches, part of not understanding their business, whatever. But that makes owners of businesses feel comfortable. Why? Because their sales revenue continues to grow. And when I'm talking to them, nothing's wrong, Ron. My sales are going up. And I say, Well, dear God, I hope they are, because you're only competing with half the number of people. What's the matter with you? So we've got that world that Ed is trying to fill, and George, the teachers and the pedagogy comes along. I don't think those two understand each other. Am I wrong? They don't.
SPEAKER_03Well, that's that's my point. I I don't think we yeah, I don't think as a society we can continue to on without asking ourselves, what is it what is it that we actually need? And we don't need one thing, we need several things, as you're pointing to. And so that's why I think we need to rethink education. And it's not just teachers and pedagogy, but a focus on what the society needs for us to in fact continue to thrive as we have. And um uh, you know, but but but but but in terms of schools, one of the things is, you know, there's like science and science is such an engaging subject. But uh my late uh son-in-law was a teacher here at one of the schools, and he taught science, and they're they only taught science out of a book. I mean, they didn't get any hands-on experience of the students. There's no way in which to engage a student in science by reading a damn science book. Well, I'm exaggerating, but you you get my point. So we I think we have to think about number one, what is it that we need? Number two, how do we in fact make it interesting and engaging? And of course, the teachers are a huge hugely important part of this. And Ed's touched on that. I don't need to repeat that. I think he's he's got it exactly right. But um we also need to have parents more engaged, right? Um, part of you know the research that's been done indicates that uh parents all agree that we need to improve education in the United States, but my school's doing okay, right? They think their school is doing fine, but uh maybe not somebody, not so much everybody else. So we we've got to that's that's getting the parents engaged is important. And um uh uh so I I I think uh one of the things that we we I think we want to touch about, that we touched about in the article here is is this whole problem of the mismatch between the skills that are needed for the kinds of new uh uh jobs in uh in industry and manufacturing we have, but but more generally, all fields of medicine and health as well are changing. And we need kids who actually have some skills that they can bring to bear on these. And so, how do we provide that kind of an education in our schools at the same time that we want to make sure that we have people that are dealing with that one-third and was talking about before, who who are gonna go to college and do well, and you know, they basically have the the kind of uh social networks and social capital that uh uh that we talk about that's necessary. Uh, so that in fact uh we would maintain that sort of leadership as well. So I think we need uh somebody to do another book that you know was done with The Nation at Risk in 1983, where they put together a commission of people to say, what do we need to do? We need a new, because the nation is at further risk, uh let's put it that way. And so uh if we could get Congress and uh and we had the Department of Education, which is now totally almost demolished, uh I would say we need to bring in the best minds in this country who represent the various outcomes that we think are needed in education to see how we restructure this education and build it systemically instead of one piece at a time. Let me stop there.
SPEAKER_00All right. Well,
Career Reality Checks For Students
SPEAKER_00to answer some of that, I was engaged in doing that on a regional basis with many groups, who, in part, what they did was they wanted to raise standards, but at the same time, they wanted to educate parents and students about what George is talking about. Careers and jobs.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00Career education programs can start in career information in elementary, the middle grades, and go into high school through career uh liberal arts, career academy high schools, and continue in post-secondary through community colleges, technical colleges, regular colleges, and universities. What I saw happening is that people say, Well, boy, when I get when I uh I want to be a nurse because there's a big shortage of nursing. Well, then they graduate from high school and they go to a local community college and they say, Well, how what did you uh how are your grades in biology, in chemistry, algebra, trigonometry? And the student says, I don't need any of that stuff. I just want to be a nurse, you know, bedpans and thermometers. People have unrealistic expectations as to what careers, first of all, how many do we need? What do they pay? What's the demand? And what kind of education do you need in order to do this? Well, I want to be a mogul and start a small business uh in uh uh music and uh uh the the the latest uh uh uh new social media platforms. Okay, that's fine. Well, what kind of education do you need to do that? What kind of math do you need? Marketing, what kind of writing skills, uh, musical training, etc. Well, those types of things I saw being done at the local level in certain communities in this country, and they're happening now. And I saw companies go putting money into these career education programs and uh these high schools, not because they're nice guys, but because they wanted employees to operate. Now that brings us though to a second problem that you both have touched on. Who runs hotels today? Are there people in the hotel industry, the banks, uh, any industry you can think of? Uh, when I came out of college, I degrees in uh my bachelor's in history and psychology. I was offered to be put in executive training programs to become a banker or some other field or industry. Well, you know what? Those people don't run those industries anymore. They are finance people who run the railroads, finance people who run the airlines, finance people who run the hotels, finance people who run the hospitals. What do they know about those industries? Right uh, not a lot, but they they do but but they're really interested, you know, in making a lot of training of thought just for a second.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I agree with you 100%. And and the other thing that we've got is in in society we have determined there's a bunch of metrics we need to have. So I need list degrees, etc. We have population group statistics, we also have how many doctors do they need to be for every hundred thousand people, how many beds, how many nurses, how many operating stations? So, in the case in point, look at Britain and look at America with dental care. I don't think anybody wants to have the teeth that the British people have versus the American people, and it's strictly a function of density of dentists per population. That's that's one. Two, we we fix the numbers. Post domestic products, goods and services produced in a country divided by the number of people in the workforce. So I know publicly traded companies that at the end of every quarter, the last month of every quarter, they let go of a whole bunch of their people so that their sales per employee statistics look good for the public when the stock comes out, and the first month thereafter they hire them all back. We're manipulating ourselves, and and George, I agree with you 100%. Parents have no clue until COVID, most of them didn't know what their students did during the day. There's their children did during the day. My mother was a teacher, she was the vice principal of like grade school. I couldn't hide from her, for God's sake. She knew from my the teachers that I had, because she picked them, what I was doing and how I was doing, and what I wasn't good at. And holy crap, I heard about it all the time. My grandmother got a master's in 1915. She was the oldest girl of three, and her father treated her like she was his son. She was unbelievable. We don't have those stories anymore. The family structure, the family culture is not here. Mother and father are both working. They get home at night, they're tired. If they don't have enough money, the kids go home and there's nobody home. I mean, this whole thing is sociology. I read an article last week, George, that sociology is close to becoming extinct in American education. What a bloody that would be.
SPEAKER_00Well, so is history.
SPEAKER_03Well, but some of it, some of it's self-inflicted, Ron. Oh, I agree. I we have just had a convers, uh, email conversation with one of my uh friends who teaches at Purdue uh about this very topic. There was a uh article in the Wall Street Journal about it, and uh there have been uh a couple. Uh and uh uh some of my good friends and I uh have for for many years bemoaned uh whether whither go with sociology and much of what was really important in sociology, like population studies, family studies, criminology, and so on, they've broken off into separate departments uh or subdepartments within the department. And what's become the core many times has a very strong political sense to it. And um, as I mentioned to my friend, and she had mentioned to me independently, we ought to get back to meeting Max Weber, who talked about value-free sociology. Um and uh and uh uh but but it's a huge issue. But I'm glad you uh I I by the way, I I I think uh I'm glad you picked up on that point because Ed and I had talked about this. I have a son who's an MBA, so I have to be a little careful. But um, yeah, everything's if you have MBAs running the company, it's all about short-term profits, right? Right. You don't do the long-term planning that you need to do. Never mind whether they know anything about it or could put together a committee to help them know where they're going. But all they know, I gotta have damn good numbers the next quarter.
SPEAKER_00The the graduate schools are giving students formulas to run their business. Yep. So when
Short Term Profit Thinking Hurts Training
SPEAKER_00we when we were doing cons uh training work with Motorola, Robert Galvin, who is then the president, spent was investing $2,500 and every employee each year in training. And he said to me, that doesn't cost us a dime because it increases our predictive performance, productivity, and long-term profit. Hey, I taught strategic planning, short-term, long-term. There is no more long term, it's all short-term this quarter, and training is a cost. We need people who are job ready. So you have 34 million people right now who are out of the job market. Many of them have degrees, and they're not, they don't fit perfectly into a job, they won't hire them. Others are real techno peasants because they graduate from high school and even from college, and they can't do research, they can't write, some of them are poor readers, etc. All right. So how again, how are other countries? People always ask, well, who's doing it right? Well, the Finns are doing it right. Finland has very high literacy. Now, Finland doesn't have the greatest economy in the world, I admit that. But at least they're well-educated people. Singapore seems to be doing pretty well with it. Now, they're an autocratic society, they're not a democracy, but they seem to be investing in people. There was a time in the 1990s when companies would say people are most important resource, and the the the our company has to be a learning organization if it is going to have breakthroughs. Let me let me scientific breakthroughs.
SPEAKER_01Let me go forward from what you're saying. Let me go forward from what you're saying, George. Or excuse me. Number one, a client of mine in Canada that's been in existence 170 years. This year is the first time they have a budget for training of employees that are not technicians and salesmen. That's disgraceful, number one, going back to Motorola and others. Number two, my daughter's got a master's of education. She happens to be a really good teacher, and that's a father bias, but she was the avid coordinator, advancement by individual determination for her school and then her school district. This year at her school, this past year at her school, they determined they were going to go to STEAM as science, technology, engineering, arts, and math as from STEM. And my daughter suffers from the same family problem. We can't say no, so she ended up doing that. After a couple of a month, 30, 45 days of that, the people that had been doing it that were retirement age decided they'd retire. So here's my daughter by herself, 15, 16 hours a day, and nobody gave a damn. So that's the other piece of education. Let me go a little further. She taught in an agricultural community down in the eastern end of the Palm Springs Valley, the Coachella Valley. Agricultural people, class size, she taught six classes. Class size average 40, 60% second language learners, no technology at home, no wireless at home. Here comes COVID. Guess what? The kids went home. They lost two years of education. Who the hell's thinking? And then the last thing for Ed, Singapore. I I worked all around the world, so I've got weird perspectives. Singapore is being replaced now by Jakarta and Manila. Why? Because salaries and costs in Singapore are too damn expensive, regulations too costly. So the people that used to have head office, regional offices in Singapore, they're going to Jakarta and Manila. I don't know if you've been to Jakarta. If I had a choice, I'll take Singapore over Jakarta. Similarly, over there's corruption everywhere in this damn world. So here we go with education. Why don't we teach life skills for that bottom third? Like buying a car, renting an apartment, opening a bank account. We we have to reevaluate everything. George. Am I am I going down the wrong path?
SPEAKER_03Well, I think I I think that's uh that's exactly right. And by the way, one of the uh within this last uh six months, there was uh um an op-ed which uh excuse me, I think I have C O P D and I I I don't mean to interrupt our conversations with this, but it was argued, it was showing that Ford is is seen the like. And they're now in fact putting together programs with school districts uh in areas where they have manufacturing, where they're actually trying to work with the teachers and say this is what our kids need. They're providing uh scholarships for kids who actually uh are willing to uh to uh uh uh To uh get on board with these programs. And they're putting a big carrot out at the end. They're saying we need people who, for example, can manage our service departments. And those jobs are paying $120,000 a year. And so they're really trying to now whether they're going to be successful or not, I don't know. But it builds on what Ed was saying before. And so that's one example of a company that's actually forward-looking in this regard. But but that's one, that's one company. But that's that's exactly what we need, is we need to have, and and and by the way, I think, you know, I having done I've done some very major evaluations. In fact, I evaluated the class size reduction in California Ron when uh 96 when uh the governor put uh had all this extra money and to know what to do with it. Uh we didn't show much of and I can tell you why, but but um, and I also worked with Bill and Melinda Gates on their National Small School Initiative. So um uh I've worked on some of these big programs. I think that the best thing the federal government can do is to invest in uh especially school districts and states, and saying, we want to provide innovation money. We want you to experiment, we want to learn from you, but we but we want good data about what works and what doesn't work and who works and what works for which students and what doesn't work for which students as as a way to get better investments than some of the big programs that's invested in in the past. Um and you can do much more better innovation at the regional and and and district levels, as Ed was saying before. And that was, by the way, one of the conclusions we came to when we evaluated class size reduction in California. One of our uh recommendations was that the state should use some of this money to get to get uh school districts to, in fact, experiment better with uh with uh issues of of class size. And uh Linda Darling Hammond, whose name you may or may not know, uh, has argued that it's really teachers more than class size, because we know in a lot of the Asian uh societies they have much larger classes we do, but with much but with much greater success. So these silver bullets practically never look.
SPEAKER_00You've got to
AI As A Tool Not A Crutch
SPEAKER_00look at things in the system and what works best for which students where, um, and and and what the people, the leadership in corporate America has to recognize that AI is another technical tool that will be used by educated workers to do their job. It is not a standalone AI. Look, robots are wonderful. You do you maybe you saw the news how a robot just ran a race and broke the the world speed record. You see that, and at the end of the race, it it couldn't stop, it ran into a brick wall and collapsed, and they had to carry it off. Well, that's one uh you know that that's wonderful, but you know, the uh robots can lift uh a ton of material, but they can't make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. All right, when a robot, you know, you get an AI-assisted robot, and he has to take a cell phone and plug in, and he doesn't hear that click that we hear. No robot in the world can do that right now. These are tools, these are not sentient beings, all right? And the idea of them writing books and replacing authors, well, they can regurgitate a lot of information and a lot of it's wrong. And for students to just use them to write their essays, if a student doesn't know history, how can they write a history essay to know what's right and what's wrong in what's being produced by this slime that AI can produce? So let me there has to be some leadership in corporate America.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, let me piggyback on that ad a little bit more, in that like there's four or five subjects that we've already covered that should get an hour treatment by themselves. And and we should have more of this. And if I could ask both of you to put another blog for me, and then we'll just follow that up. But one of the dilemmas that we've got, robotics began, but we have to get people to understand when you leave school is actually when your learning really starts. Because now you're dealing with life, getting your first job teaches you what work means, and most people haven't got a clue. So if lifelong learning becomes important and we start learning when we get out of school, that means we're gonna have to retool our workforce on shorter terms. When I came out in '68, everybody said, Yeah, take your time on, you're gonna be there for the rest of your life. That's no longer true. You're gonna have six or eight, ten jobs through the course of your life. It might be different careers altogether. So I would encourage you guys to come up with chapter two, but then where I George, you're absolutely right. And Ed said this earlier with Motoroto, we gotta get business recognizing that the school's primary objective is to produce a work-ready individual, somebody who can think, and there's the difference today. I don't think people know how to think anymore. I'm reading a wonderful book called Data Analytics and Visualization uh proficiency. Number one, we don't know how to think. Number two, we don't know how to communicate anymore. And George and Ed both made the comment reading Christ, I have to read three, four books a week just to keep up with what the hell's going on because I'm working all around the world. George, you continue to do it. Ed, you do it on a thousand books. Today, to become a certified journeyman electrician in America, you have to have five years as an apprentice, the 2,000 hours per year for 10,000 hours, and you're a journeyman. And guess what? There's no standard certification, no test. So if you put an addition to your house and you get a building permit and you're putting more electrical in there, the guy that comes out as the building inspector, you don't know if he knows a squad about electricity.
SPEAKER_00It's nuts. What you're talking, what you're talking about, what we have been talking about this whole time, is getting more people to learn how to learn and not to be afraid of learning. The name of your company, learning without scars, it says it all.
SPEAKER_01I've got the scars, my students don't need them.
SPEAKER_00Well, many people are have had bad experiences in the classroom for many different reasons, or parents who don't give a damn about learning, or books, or schools. Learning starts at home, it does not start in schools. If parents do not esteem learning at some level, it's not going to happen. All right. This I've said this in my books over and over again. This is not a technology problem. This is not an economic problem. This is not a political problem. This is a cultural problem. People have to understand that we live in a high-tech society. We are no longer hunter-gatherers, we're not primitive farmers. People want high-tech, they're going to have to learn more, not less in the 21st century. And most people do not accept that idea. We need leadership, we need people to talk about this. Reagan was the last one with nation at risk when that came out. No other president has dared to issue a report to basically say we are falling further and further and further behind and putting more people into poverty. Crime. You want to solve these problems? Now, education isn't a total solution. But I'll tell you right now, if you have property and an education and a family, you have something that you want to preserve and not go out and jeopardize. And you have a stake in the future in our country. This is what the message. We need leadership to broadcast that message to the American people. It's not cutting taxes, it's not taxing the rich, it's not pillarizing immigrants, it's not uh uh more robots that'll do all the work for us so we can sit around and uh uh watch sports all day long. This is work, but it can be enjoyable if we teach people that learning is not to be afraid, if people should not be afraid to learn. But we don't have that message. That's not what the politicians and political leaders are talking about. Money, money, money, money, make it easier. Who needs to learn? Who needs to read? So we're and this is the wrong message.
SPEAKER_01We're close to the point we need to wrap this. Um so how about George? Why don't you give me a couple minutes from our discussion? What did, if there's anything, what did you learn or hear that was different than you might have thought?
SPEAKER_03Well, that's a good question. Um I think it's consolidating some ideas that we all have talked about and and agreed upon, and Ed and I have talked about them as well. Uh I think we need a report, Ed, that's titled something like a nation at even greater risk. But um uh I I I I I I um I'm not pessimistic. I guess well, I guess I am pessimistic about what we should or can do. Um Congress seems to not be able to do anything. Uh right now our leadership thinks we need a new ballroom um and uh, you know, a few more monuments. Yeah. I I I worry about the fact that we don't have this leadership. I mean, you know, there are people like Bill Gates who actually try to provide this kind of leadership, uh, although he's been silenced right now. But you know, he really took incredible steps to change things in third world nations in terms of literacy and and uh uh and and and and and uh moving people out of poverty. I mean, it was incredible what you know, you know, the power of one as they talk about, but he can do it. But that's that's what we do need. We need that sort of leadership that says we need to take stock of of how we produce uh uh uh a set of students who come out of school that can deal with uh the the uh the occupations that are there. And I agree with what Ed said. It's it's really learning, uh, it's part of what we have to do is to learn how to learn. Um one of the assessments I really like is PISA. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but uh really, you know, looking at 15 and 16-year-olds, they really focus in on problem solving. What can kids actually do and figure out to do rather than just what do they know, right? It's it's really are they are they able to think and s and and and and do these things.
Immigration And Hope For The Future
SPEAKER_03So I think um I would like us as a nation to um to take stock of where we are because um you know one of my favorite examples, Ed is talk, uh hearing me talk about this before, you were talking about what blog we might do. I was actually thinking about this recently, and I don't know that, but it was a title would be something like uh um uh um immigration. It's the economy stupid. And making the argument about how important immigration in this society is for us in terms of a nation, if we in fact are going to uh succeed. I mean, um we have a president right now, and I don't mean to make this political, but it's fact of life, who's now saying he wants to make sure that if companies hire someone on a H1B that they have to pay $125,000 to do it. Well, that's just craziness. Instead of trying to provide a disincentive, we need to have incentives for encouraging people from every country in this nation who wants to come here because we're the ones where the action is and and uh and and uh and where you can be successful and the nation can be successful. We have a we have a um fertility rate of 1.7 in this country. Every family on average is producing 1.7 kids, okay. The only way we can do something about this is through immigration. And it's not just the people who we want H1Bs for industry, it is the agricultural workers. You take a look when you go to a hotel, who's cleaning your room, who's serving you? It's mostly people from these third world nations, right? And they will, with time, next generation, their kids will go to and get uh they'll get college degrees and so on and so forth. They will they will assimilate into the society in useful ways. So I would like to see us take stock of of how we change the culture of this country as Ed is talked about it, so that we we we take a more visionary look at what our needs are and how education fits into this, and then how we, in fact, within education, improve it so that we uh get the outcomes we want. I'm sorry that was sort of a long-winded.
SPEAKER_01No, no, that's that's that's that's perfect. Ed, how about you, Rob?
SPEAKER_00Hope. People need hope. Immigrants, our ancestors came here because they wanted a better life for themselves and their children. Hope. I came from a blue-collar background, earned a doctorate, published books, ran businesses, served on boards, all that nonsense. All right. People believed and still believe that America is the country that gives more hope for the future. That's what we need to talk about. How do you deal with the future? Postmodernism is destroying this country because it is dealing with today and only today. Forget the past, don't worry about the future. I'm interested in now, but I'm also interested in learning from the past how to better build a future. We built a 21st, a 20th century society that is the most remarkable in the history of civilization. I intend to try to help with people like the two of you and others to make the 21st century even better. I intend to give people more hope and show them how they have to make effort. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit. We need to refocus our pursuit. It requires us to put uh sweat equity and our shoulder to the wheel as individuals, students, parents, business leaders, politicians. It's not just a gravy train of exploitation of any one group or political philosophy. We need hope. That's what we need to talk about to bring about a cultural change, to reignite that feeling of hope in the minds and breasts of more Americans.
SPEAKER_01That's a wonderful place to stop, guys.
Final Takeaways And Thanks
SPEAKER_01I I really thank you for this past hour. I I hope everybody who's listening has enough material now to start thinking themselves, start evaluating what they can do, like Ed Sang, to provide hope to the next. I'm an immigrant, so I know what immigration is all about. I like legal immigration. I'd like the country to determine what we need in job functions. An immigrant's not a victim, but I don't like bringing them in and have them do the bottom third jobs all the time, George. I'd like to have a lot of if you get a degree from a master's degree or postgraduate degree from an American university, I want to keep you here the next 10 years. Longer if possible. They're all coming home now.
SPEAKER_03So no, no, I I I have to prove if I misled you in any way. No, I we need immigration at all levels. That was my point.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I don't know. I agree with you. But we're we're going to I I hope, gentlemen, you guys will get me a blog in the next couple of weeks so we can do this again. I'd really like to have another um podcast with you if you're in agreement. But at this point, we've just about run, I think, the the time that we abuse you and keep you involved. I'd like to thank everybody who's listening. I hope you got something from this, and I look forward to having another candid conversation in the very new future.
