A little more than three years ago the Grand Rapids Public Museum hosted Outsmarting the Robots: Redesigning education from the classroom to the halls of Lansing. The conference was organized around the question “How do we redesign our system for learning to build the 21st century skills that matter to meeting the needs of our children, economy, society, and world?”

The conference organizers––including Michigan Future––believed that our education system needed redesign of both what we teach and how we teach. That standardized test driven schooling is designed to teach a too narrow set of skills and is delivered in a way that does not engage students nor create lifelong learners.

The conference was organized around the belief that all schools and youth development programming needs to be designed to build more rigorous and broader skills than what is on the test and that how we teach needs to be far more engaging and experiential. Our premise? We don’t have an education reform challenge; we have an education redesign challenge.

New York Times best-selling author of Becoming Brilliant: What the science of learning tells us about raising successful children Kathy Hirsh-Pasek served as the conference guide.

Becoming Brilliant makes the case that foundation skills for all students––no matter what path they choose to take after high school––are the 6Cs: communication, collaboration, content, critical thinking, creativity and confidence.

They also are the foundation skills students will need to outsmart the robots. To complement, rather than be replaced by, machines and to compete in a labor market that is increasingly rewarding those who are good at working with, solving problems with, innovating with, and leading people who don’t look like you and don’t think like you.

Fast forward to today where the latest headline grabbing smarter bot is ChatGPT. ChatGPT is widely viewed as a precursor to a wave of artificial intelligence which will take over from humans much of our high-paid mental work. Which, of course, raises the question in a world of constantly improving A.I. “What work will humans do?”.

In an insightful New York Times column, entitled In the Age of A.I., Major in Being Human, David Brooks suggests this list of outsmarting A.I. bots skills: a distinct personal voice; presentation skills; a childlike talent for creativity; unusual worldviews; empathy; and situational awareness.

It is clearer today that if Michigan is serious about preparing all its children to be successful in life and work we need to redesign schooling. One where students are engaged, not bored; one where all students are developing agency to create and realize their own dreams; and one where all students develop the broad non-content and non-occupation specific skills that will enable them to keep learning and adapting in a world characterized increasingly by constant change.

That means we need to deemphasize standardized tests which focuses schooling on way too narrow content skills and drives out developing the Becoming Brilliant and Brooks’ foundation skills.

We need to deemphasize building occupation-specific skills. Knowing coding or welding or accounting is not what matters most to having a successful forty-year career. All of those occupational skills have a shorter and shorter half life. It’s not that knowing how to code, weld or do accounting is irrelevant to getting a job today, it is those are the icing on the cake career-ready skills, not the essential skills. 

We need to reemphasize the liberal arts. As Harvard economist Dave Deming writes:

A liberal arts education fosters valuable “soft skills” like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability. Such skills are hard to quantify, and they don’t create clean pathways to high-paying first jobs. But they have long-run value in a wide variety of careers. … But even on narrow vocational grounds, a liberal arts education has enormous value because it builds a set of foundational capacities that will serve students well in a rapidly changing job market.

And maybe most importantly we need to redesign how we do teaching and learning. Schooling needs to look like the rigorous and engaging projects featured in the movie Most Likely to Succeed. And to look far more like extracurriculars and electives than the tradition classroom.

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America has always billed itself as a land of opportunity, where anyone with grit and a dream could succeed. Perhaps because my ancestors were slaves, I have always been aware of the American Dream’s invisible asterisk. In ways big and small, this country has always given spoken and unspoken preferences to some and thrown up visible and invisible roadblocks for others.

In a recent column David Brooks of the New York Times explores how modern upper middle class and wealthy families – terrified that the wage stagnation and shrinking job options that have dogged less affluent Americans could threaten their children – have become fanatical about building exclusive networks to protect opportunity for their children. “So what?” you may be thinking and Brooks admits that the instinct for parents with means to give their children a leg up is natural. But Brooks accuses modern wealthy parents of fortifying structural barriers that are specifically designed to lock less affluent children out of opportunities to thrive.

Brooks cites Dream Hoarders:How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It, a recently-published book by Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution. Reeves believes that housing and construction policies that effectively wall off the rich from their less affluent neighbors is the most serious threat to America’s standing as a nation where equal opportunity is a sacred value. Reeves believes educational inequality is another serious threat. Beyond the obvious educational advantages that accrue to wealthy people such as access to strong schools with great teachers and impressive resources, affluent students also have access to college application-boosting activities such as international travel and unpaid internships.

Brooks: “It’s no wonder that 70 percent of the students in the nation’s 200 most competitive schools come from the top quarter of the income distribution. With their admissions criteria, America’s elite colleges sit atop gigantic mountains of privilege, and then with their scholarship policies they salve their consciences by offering teeny step ladders for everybody else.”

When Michigan Future introduced our first-ever policy agenda earlier this year, we argued that if Michigan is to ever return to prosperity, policy makers need to focus on strategies that raise living standards for all Michiganders. It’s important because while the Big Three automakers have returned to prosperity, Michigan families have not. Michigan currently ranks 32nd in the nation for per capita income and according to an April 2017 report by the United Ways of Michigan, 40 percent of Michigan households cannot afford to pay for basic needs. Now more than ever, state lawmakers should be laser focused on strategies to give more Michigan families access to opportunity and prosperity.

One strategy to bridge the gulf between haves and have-nots in Michigan is by introducing inclusive zoning policies with the goal of stimulating economic diversity in Michigan’s cities, towns and school districts. Michigan also needs to boost birth-through-college educational attainment for all students, not just those who are educated in affluent suburban or private schools. Most importantly, our leaders need to demonstrate that they care that current policies are leaving large segments of Michiganders behind.

No one is telling wealthy parents that they should stop looking out for the interests of their children. But Michigan’s standing as a place where families want to live and businesses want to grow will continue to be under pressure unless policy makers leverage strategies that put opportunity within the reach of all Michiganders.

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This is our third recent post on reforming capitalism so that it works for all. The first featured the writings of hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio on the reality for forty years growth in the American economy has not benefited the bottom 60 percent and a call for action to change that reality. The second featured the ideas of venture capitalist Nick Hanauer to reform capitalism through policies that share security with all largely through employer mandates on wages and benefits.

This post features the ideas of the pro-market Niskanen Center. If Hanauer represents someone from the left thinking about how to have a capitalism that works for all, the Niskanen Center is a place thinking about the same challenge from the political right.

New Times columnist David Brooks described the Niskanen Center this way:

The Niskanen Center began operations in 2015, started by a group of libertarians who broke off from the Cato Institute. … But Niskanen thinkers like Ed Dolan, Samuel Hammond and Will Wilkinson made a simple and empirically verifiable observation. The nations that have the freest markets also generally have the most generous welfare states. The two are not in opposition. In the real world they go together.

… Last week, Niskanen released a comprehensive report called, “The Center Can Hold: Public Policy for an Age of Extremes,” written by Brink Lindsey, Steven Teles, Wilkinson and Hammond. The report is a manifesto for a new centrism based on what the authors call a “free-market welfare state” model.

They want government to protect citizens against the disruptions of global capitalism: “Without strong income supports that put a floor beneath displaced workers and systems that smooth the transition to new employment, political actors and the public tend to turn against the process of creative destruction itself.”

At the same time, they want an open, dynamic society. They want to reduce restrictive zoning and land use regulations that favor the rich and entrenched. They see immigration as crucial to America’s long-term prosperity. They want charter schools and wider choice, but within strong government structures to ensure quality. (It turns out that bad charter schools continue to attract students; the education market doesn’t work totally unregulated.)

The Center’s approach to economic policy that works for all is laid out in a policy essay entitled The Free-Market Welfare State. In it they write:

It is one thing to admit that the social insurance state is better for economic freedom relative to some other, abjectly worse alternative. It’s another thing entirely to reconcile the fact that social insurance states like Sweden and Denmark routinely score near the top in rankings of personal and economic freedom, even when such rankings are constructed by conservative and libertarian organizations that stack the deck against a high-tax-and-spend approach to fostering an open society. For a Hayekian this makes perfect sense: Central planning is an enemy to freedom because it does damage to the individual’s capacity to plan for him or herself.

Social insurance, in contrast, exists to enhance an individual’s capacity to plan by imposing a degree of certainty on future states of the world. The societal value of social insurance is thus not unlike the societal value of rule-bound monetary policy, property rights, or the rule of law. In each case, the institution evolved to provide a level of social continuity—
whether in terms of stable prices, secure ownership and contract, or “regulatory certainty”— needed for more specialized and complex economic coordination.

So they like Dalio and Hanauer believe that to preserve capitalism you need a set of policies that insure that the economy is working for all. Samuel Hammond, the author of the policy essay, writes:

I argue that the contemporary rise of anti-market populism in America should be taken as an indictment of our inadequate social-insurance system, and a refutation of the prevailing “small government” view that regulation and social spending are equally corrosive to economic freedom. The universal welfare state, far from being at odds with innovation and economic freedom, may end up being their ultimate guarantor.

As an example of the kind of social insurance policy the Center supports take a look at their analysis supporting the child tax credit proposed by Democratic United States Senators Sherrod Brown and Michael Bennet. The proposal, called the American Family Act, would enact a huge increase in federal support over the current child tax credit and would provide income monthly rather than annually when one files their taxes. As the Center writes: “Under the American Family Act, households would be eligible for: $300 per month ($3,600 per year) for each child under the age of 6; and $250 per month ($3,000 per year) for each child under the age of 17. The benefit would begin phasing-out at a rate of 15 or 18 percent (depending on the household mix of young and older children) for individual and joint filers with incomes above $130,000 and $180,000 respectively. The maximum credit amounts are also indexed to inflation.”

The Center’s preference, as represented by the American Family Act, is for cash benefits and for those benefits to be universal––not just for those below a certain income.

What Dalio, Hanauer, and the Niskanen Center (and Michigan Future) have in common is a belief in capitalism as the system that best creates a growing and innovative economy and a belief that that is not enough. That what is desired is an economy that also benefits all. A standard that the American economy has failed to meet for four decades.

And each explicitly rejects the notion that small government/low tax places have the best economies.

Each has different approaches to policy to achieve those ends. That is what the debate should be all about. What we need first and foremost is a bipartisan agreement that the mission of economic policy is an economy that benefits all. Where all really means all. Then let the debate begin over how to achieve that mission.

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Putnam provides compelling data that this division has substantially reduced economic mobility for American kids. That increasingly those growing up in the bottom three quartiles are unable to rise into the top quartile. Many end up doing worse than their parents.

Putnam argues that there are two forces that are increasingly contributing to an American caste system, where one’s economic well-being is largely determined by your parents economic well being. One is, more and more, of the economic growth going to those at the top. The other is the top quartile increasingly segregating themselves from everyone else. That there are real negative consequences from increasingly concentrated affluence, just as there is from concentrated poverty.

In a recent New York Times column entitled How We Are Ruining America, David Brooks deals with this topic. The column includes reviews of two books written about the topic: Dream Hoarders by Richard Reeves and The Sum of Small Things by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett. All worth checking out.

Brooks explores a number of ways in which the affluent are making sure that their kids do better than other’s kids. In this post I want to focus on education––more broadly human capital development––as the primary vehicle for accelerating an American caste system.

As Brooks notes affluent families from the day their children are born are insuring that their kids are well educated, in a world where college attainment has become, by far, the most reliable path to a good-paying forty-year career. He writes:

Over the past few decades, upper-middle-class Americans have embraced behavior codes that put cultivating successful children at the center of life. As soon as they get money, they turn it into investments in their kids.

…. Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.

So the affluent are spending more and more money on their kids education while far too many of them support candidates who have made lower taxes a priority at the expense of public investment in education from birth through college of other’s kids.

To make matters worse far too many of the affluent have decided other’s kids don’t need to go to college. As we explored in my last post far too many of them are pushing narrow occupation-specific training for other’s kids rather than an education that builds broad, rigorous, college prep skills in all kids.

The result is that we increasingly have an education system from birth through college that is designed and executed differently for affluent kids than it is for non-affluent kids. One system well funded and delivering a broad college prep (dare we say liberal arts) education, the other underfunded and delivering an increasingly narrow education built around developing discipline and what is on the test or to narrowly preparing non-affluent children for a first job.

If we want to live up to the core American value of equal opportunity for all this must change.

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Cameron writes:

Over the coming weeks, I will set out in more detail our second term education reform agenda. But let me explain some of the thinking that will underpin it and how, in particular, we want to help the most disadvantaged children.

We now understand far more than we used to about how we take in information and learn, what it takes to be a great reader and even be creative. Much of the answer is knowledge; we understand new information in the context of what we already hold. As Kahneman, Daniel Willingham and others have described, the more information is stored in our long term memory the better our processing power – our working memory – can be employed.

It is by knowing the past that we can invent the future. That’s why it is so absurd to call a knowledge–based curriculum ‘traditional’. It is utterly cutting edge – because it takes real notice of the great advances in our understanding of the last few decades.

Dismissing knowledge is frankly dismissing the life chances of our children and that is exactly what people like the General Secretary of the NUT are doing when they say, as she did last weekend, that children don’t need to learn their times tables because they can use their phone instead. That is utterly the wrong thinking.

All the things knowledge helps infuse – innovation, creativity, problem solving – are the qualities our employers want. That is why the Ebacc – which puts the core subjects of English, maths, science, history and geography at the centre of what students learn is such a massive move for social justice. It will give every the vast majority of children – not just the wealthy – the education that gives them the opportunity for great jobs.

We also understand something else. Character – persistence – is core to success. As Carol Dweck has shown in her work at Stanford, no matter how clever you are if you do not believe in continued hard work and concentration, and if you do not believe that you can return from failure you will not fulfil your potential.

It is what the Tiger Mother’s battle hymn is all about: work, try hard, believe you can succeed, get up and try again. It is if you like, the precise opposite of an ‘all must have prizes’ culture that permeated our schools under the last government. Put simply: children thrive on high expectations: it is how they grow in school and beyond.

Now for too long this has been the preserve of the most elite schools. I want to spread this to everyone. So as we reform education further, we’ll develop new character modules so that all heads are exposed to what the very best schools do.

Wow! New York columnist David Brooks in an op ed about this speech pines for a Republic presidential candidate running on Cameron’s approach to poverty. When it come to education it would be great if we had a candidate for office in either party or for that matter a business leader that was articulating Cameron’s education vision. It is exactly what all Michigan kids need if they are to be successful in an economy being constantly transformed by globalization and technology.

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Which, of course, is the exact opposite of conventional wisdom. Adults––business leaders, policy makers and parents––keep pushing our kids away from the liberal arts and towards job specific training in things like STEM and business administration. Big mistake for our kids and the economy!

In a terrific Washington Post column entitled Why the tech world highly values a liberal arts degree Cecilia Gaposchkin (associate professor of medieval history at Dartmouth College and assistant dean of faculty for pre-major advising) lays out the value of the liberal arts for all. No matter what career you are preparing yourself for today. I highly recommend you take a few minutes and read her post.

She writes:

Skills. Breadth. Critical thinking. And the ability, like Abelard (12th Century philosopher), to push forward, beyond received wisdom and practice and to create a new world. This is still the aim. Rhetoric has given way to English Literature. Arithmetic is now Math. Music is now mostly what we would call Physics. Modern liberal education still trains the basic intellectual skills of query and discernment that Abelard aimed for, generally now through general education and major requirements. Once mastered – just as in the Middle Ages – these skills can be applied to specialized training – medical school, the public sphere, business, whatever – what the Middle Ages regarded as the practical arts.

But I think those of us who teach, advise, and administrate in these schools routinely fail in explaining to our students just what liberal arts are — and why they matter. I don’t mean the historical explanation based on Abelard. I mean an explanation that seeks to show how and why learning to think critically, to reason, to push the boundaries of received knowledge is the value that they should seek to gain from their college education. Economic value, career value, and social value. Great and successful careers rarely end up having much connection to majors. They do to intelligence, leadership, innovation, creativity, aptitude in assessing uncertainty, ability. Not surprisingly, the corporate representatives I have interviewed to gain insight about why they recruit from Dartmouth routinely echo Abelard in what they are looking for: critical thinking, an ability to deal with ambiguity, to reach conclusions based on considered mastery of research and context, and so forth. (Emphasis added.)

New York Times columnist David Brooks writes about the same topic in a column entitled The New Romantics in the Computer Age. He writes:

… You shouldn’t even ask, What jobs can I do that computers can’t do? That’s because they are getting good at so many disparate things. You should instead ask, What are the activities that we humans, driven by our deepest nature or by the realities of daily life, will simply insist be performed by other humans?

Those tasks are mostly relational. Being in a position of authority or accountability. Being a caregiver. Being part of a team. Transactional jobs are declining but relational jobs are expanding.

Empathy becomes a more important workplace skill, the ability to sense what another human being is feeling or thinking. Diabetes patients of doctors who scored high on empathy tests do better than patients with low-empathy doctors.

The ability to function in a group also becomes more important — to know how to tell stories that convey the important points, how to mix people together.

These are the kind of skills that are built best getting an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts on college campuses. Not online and certainly not in STEM focused programs or skilled trades training.

All three of which are being pushed by far too many business, political and media leaders as the direction higher education should move in. Although many who are pushing for online higher education and job focused higher education don’t take their own advice when it comes to their kids and grand-kids. Who in large numbers are enrolled in college prep, liberal arts focused k-12 schools in addition to colleges. That education is good for all kids, not just their kids.

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That said taking tuition off the table as an obstacle, is not nearly enough to dramatically change the college completion rate. Which is what matters for both individuals and the country.

Three New York Times articles/columns provide a good overview on the topic. All are worth checking out.

In an article entitled “The Roots of Obama’s Ambitious College Plan”, David Leonhardt lays out the case for the President’s proposal. Based largely on the findings of Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz in their book “The Race Between Education and Technology.” (Its a must-read book for anyone interested in how economies grow.)

What Goldin and Katz clearly demonstrate is that the 20th Century was America’s century primarily because we were the most educated nation on the planet. And that we are struggling now because we are no longer the most educated nation.

Leonhardt writes: “However important these details may be, it’s also worth acknowledging the potential impact of the plan — which is huge. Battles over health care, immigration, gun control and other issues may attract more attention. But both history and economics suggest that nothing may have a greater effect on the future of living standards than education policy. (Emphasis added.)

Eduardo Porter in a Times article entitled “The Promise and Failure of Community Colleges” makes clear that more than tuition free is needed to raise college attainment rates. Porter writes:

... The first is that they (community colleges) could be the nation’s most powerful tools to improve the opportunities of less privileged Americans, giving them a shot at harnessing a fast-changing job market and building a more equitable, inclusive society for all of us. The second is that, at this job, they have largely failed.

Whether his (Obama’s) plan ultimately delivers on its promise, however, will depend less on how many students enter than how many successfully navigate their way out. Today, only 35 percent of a given entry cohort attain a degree within six years, according to government statistics … And it’s getting worse. Community college graduation rates have been declining over the last decade.

Porter is right. College completion is what matters and community colleges do not have a good track record of graduating their students. Tuition free helps, but unless colleges change the way they support their students it will not change the graduation rate much.

David Brooks in a Times column entitled “Support Our Students” proposes an alternative to the President’s tuition free plan. He agrees that community college graduation is important both for the students and country. But thinks there is a better way to spend the billions proposed by the President.

He writes: We’ve had two generations of human capital policies. Human Capital 1.0 was designed to give people access to schools and other facilities. It was based on the 1970s liberal orthodoxy that poor people just need more money, that the government could write checks and mobility will improve.

Human Capital 2.0 is designed to help people not just enroll but to complete school and thrive. Its based on a much more sophisticated understanding of how people actually live, on the importance of social capital, on the difficulty of living in disorganized circumstances. The new research emphasizes noncognitive skills — motivation, grit and attachment — and how to use policy levers to boost these things.

Rather than free tuition he would provide funding for low income students for: living expenses (textbooks, housing, transportation, etc.); guidance counselors and mentors; child care; and fixing what he calls the remedial education mess.

Its clear that unless community colleges deal with the issues raised by Porter and Brooks the promise of the President’s proposal will be largely unrealized. Its time we make college completion the priority at our community colleges.

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The article continues: “Three skills—creative problem-solving, strategic thinking, and leadership skills—were named as both important and hard to find by more than 40 percent of recruiters. If you made a New Year’s resolution to get a competitive edge in your job search, figuring a way to lead groups at unraveling complex challenges in a creative way (become an Eagle scout leader?) would be a good start.”

What’s interesting about this list is how consistent it has been for years when employers are asked about the skills that they most look for in new hires. Unfortunately these broad skills are not what we increasingly want as student outcomes from our schools. Where we are focused either on content specific skills or even more worrisome narrow job specific skills. Big mistake both for our kids and the future prosperity of the country.

We have previously explored the approach to student outcomes that the Partnership for 21st Century Skills takes. Its the best description I have seen of what our education system should be focused on. Check out their web site here for the specifics as well as information on schools across the country that are building those broad skills.

Also worth reading is a 2005 David Brooks New York Times column. Brooks too believes that broad skills are what matters most. He writes: “But skills and knowledge — the stuff you can measure with tests — is only the most superficial component of human capital. U.S. education reforms have generally failed because they try to improve the skills of students without addressing the underlying components of human capital. These underlying components are hard to measure and uncomfortable to talk about, but they are the foundation of everything that follows.”

And for those wanting more on the skills that we and our kids will need for a successful forty year career check out a list of the ten most important work skills developed by the Top Ten Online Colleges as reported by Inc.

Although the specific skills listed in each is somewhat different, what all of them have in common is an understanding that the combination of people living and working longer; smarter and smarter machines; and globalization increasingly means the employers need workers with broader skills, not narrow job specific skills. Its these broad skills that we should design our education system to build.

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Both David Brooks and Thomas Friedman wrote recent columns that illuminate what the economy of the future will be like and what skills matter most to do well in that economy. Both worth reading!

Friedman in a column entitled Need a job? Invent it writes:

This is dangerous at a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever. … My generation had it easy. We got to “find” a job. But, more than ever, our kids will have to “invent” a job. (Fortunately, in today’s world, that’s easier and cheaper than ever before.) Sure, the lucky ones will find their first job, but, given the pace of change today, even they will have to reinvent, re-engineer and reimagine that job much more often than their parents if they want to advance in it.

In the column Friedman interviews Harvard’s Tony Wagner  on the education that our kids will need to succeed in the economy he describes. Wagner says:

“Every young person will continue to need basic knowledge, of course,” he said. “But they will need skills and motivation even more. Of these three education goals, motivation is the most critical. Young people who are intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent, and willing to take risks — will learn new knowledge and skills continuously. They will be able to find new opportunities or create their own — a disposition that will be increasingly important as many traditional careers disappear.” …  Reimagining schools for the 21st-century must be our highest priority. We need to focus more on teaching the skill and will to learn and to make a difference and bring the three most powerful ingredients of intrinsic motivation into the classroom: play, passion and purpose.” (Emphasis added.)

Brooks in a column entitled The practical university explores the skills students need most from higher education. He writes:

… universities are places where young people acquire two sorts of knowledge, what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott called technical knowledge and practical knowledge. Technical knowledge is the sort of knowledge you need to understand a task — the statistical knowledge you need to understand what market researchers do, the biological knowledge you need to grasp the basics of what nurses do. Technical knowledge is like the recipes in a cookbook. It is formulas telling you roughly what is to be done. It is reducible to rules and directions. It’s the sort of knowledge that can be captured in lectures and bullet points and memorized by rote. … Practical knowledge is not about what you do, but how you do it. It is the wisdom a great chef possesses that cannot be found in recipe books. Practical knowledge is not the sort of knowledge that can be taught and memorized; it can only be imparted and absorbed. It is not reducible to rules; it only exists in practice.

Brooks uses Sheryl Sanderg’s book Lean In to explore the practical knowledge one needs to succeed in today’s and tomorrow’s economy.  He writes:

Focus on the tasks she describes as being important for anybody who wants to rise in this economy: the ability to be assertive in a meeting; to disagree pleasantly; to know when to interrupt and when not to; to understand the flow of discussion and how to change people’s minds; to attract mentors; to understand situations; to discern what can change and what can’t. These skills are practical knowledge. Anybody who works in a modern office knows that they are surprisingly rare. But students can learn these skills at a university, through student activities, through the living examples of their professors and also in seminars.

Play, passion and purpose. The ability to be assertive in a meeting; to disagree pleasantly; to know when to interrupt and when not to; to understand the flow of discussion and how to change people’s minds; to attract mentors; to understand situations; to discern what can change and what can’t. Think about how aligned our education system is with these skills that may well matter most to doing well in a career of forty years or more. Think about how well you can learn these skills –– in what is increasingly becoming the preferred delivery system of policy makers and pundits for future education –– online or in a virtual school. And then be very worried that we are headed in the wrong direction.

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David Brooks is right when he writes in a column: “For example, we are now at the end of the era in which a rising tide lifts all boats. Republicans like Mitt Romney can talk about improving the overall business climate with lower taxes and lighter regulation, but regular voters sense that that won’t necessarily help them because wages no longer keep pace with productivity gains. Americans are still skeptical of Washington. If you shove a big government program down their throats they will recoil. But many of their immediate problems flow from globalization, the turmoil of technological change and social decay, and they’re looking for a bit of help.” (Emphasis added.)

Thomas Friedman explores this disconnect between productivity and labor in a column about the new skills needed to be successful.  He writes based on an interview with Erik Brynjolfsson, co-author of “Race Against the Machine”:

How bad is it? Steven Greenhouse in a New York Times article entitled Our Economic Pickle provides the data:

Wages have fallen to a record low as a share of America’s gross domestic product. Until 1975, wages nearly always accounted for more than 50 percent of the nation’s G.D.P., but last year wages fell to a record low of 43.5 percent. Since 2001, when the wage share was 49 percent, there has been a steep slide.

If you care about –– as almost everyone claims –– the American middle class, figuring out how to be more worker friendly rather than business friendly is the policy priority. The assumption that by being business friendly –– the core of supply side economics –– it would benefit American workers is increasingly unsupportable.

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