What Thailand 4.0 can learn from the 20th-century American High School Movement
While watching the TedTalk “Will automation take away all our jobs?” by American economist David Autor, I increasingly got the feeling that history is repeating.
According to many official sources our transition to the Thailand 4.0 level is staggering in a middle-income trap atmosphere, most of all due to the present “era 3.0 workforce skills” and a comparable educational system, which is lacking large scale 21st-century teaching methods, urgently needed in Thailand 4.0. The following is an excerpt from the transcript of the referred Ted talk.
David Autor: But here is some encouraging news. We have faced equally momentous economic transformations in the past, and we have come through them successfully. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when automation was eliminating vast numbers of agricultural jobs – remember that tractor? The farm states faced a threat of mass unemployment, a generation of youth no longer needed on the farm but not prepared for industry. Rising to this challenge, they took the radical step of requiring that their entire youth population remain in school and continue their education to the ripe old age of 16. This was called the high-school movement, and it was a radically expensive thing to do. Not only did they have to invest in the schools, but those kids couldn’t work at their jobs.
It also turned out to be one of the best investments the US made in the 20th century. It gave us the most skilled, the most flexible and the most productive workforce in the world. To see how well this worked, imagine taking the labour force of 1899 and bringing them into the present. Despite their strong backs and good characters, many of them would lack the basic literacy and numeracy skills to do all but the most mundane jobs. Many of them would be unemployable. What this example highlights is the primacy of our institutions, most especially our schools, in allowing us to reap the harvest of our technological prosperity. – Thanks to David Autor and Ted.
Could the 20th-century American High School Movement be some kind of guideline for the long awaited 21st-century Educational Reform?
Dirk Sumter
