Education and business

Education and business

The currently fashionable "efficient" view that education should be designed mainly with a view to production is also seriously limited. We do not share this view as often presented, considering that education goes much further than the mere acquiring of a skill or specific know-how.

Education is the acquiring of a "second nature", a habit of mind as classical teachers would have it, impregnating all conduct and all knowledge. The habit of learning is the sign of a civilized human being. However, we must recognize that global changes in the last decade have been so prodigious that formal education has not yet been able to adequately cope with them.

We are to enter the third millennium with new educational habits, both good and bad. This can be seen from the incomprehensible exclusion of education from the world's three activities of greatest growth, the "three Ts" of telecommunications, tourism and transport. Schools continue to consider telecommunications as an expense and not as an essential investment. Distance learning and classroom education continue to have a confrontational relationship rather than complementing each other. Valuable educational initiatives in tourism are very limited, in general being restricted to end-of term school trips and the like, without creating an environment suitable for in situ education outside school walls. However, no-one would dispute that the best way to learn a language is to live in the country where it is spoken. New construction techniques enable the building of mobile schools, workshops and laboratories, with more open and flexible functional structures, well equipped and transportable rather that fixed and enclosed between brick walls. Perhaps we will one day witness a new-style "educational camp", fully equipped and connected to the network.

We recognize that the traditional educational system is often cut off from the rest of society, which in turn paradoxically frequently considers it as a hindrance, an obstacle to development. As we have said, educational establishments as such are wary of globalization. However, those establishments that do not open up to the real world, that do not radically adapt their teaching methods to the coming generations will be eliminated by society itself, as happens with obsolete industries and services. Education should once and for all abandon the isolationism in which it has become entrenched, renouncing anachronistic privileges and properly integrating into an open society.

We believe business will have a growing role to play in this process of globalization in education. Successful businesses know how to quickly adapt to changes in markets, whereas education has not yet learnt to do so, being slow to react to change. The best companies are well aware of their cost-benefit ratio and do the best they can to improve their products, seeking total quality, making adjustments as they go, without waiting for a final exam to reject a product. In education these lean production techniques are still foreign, although some pioneers have begun to apply them. Nor is malpractice penalized, as it is in medicine or engineering. Those in charge are not accustomed to giving satisfactory account of the strictly educational results obtained from the massive resources allocated to the education (often excessively long) that is provided to students, in the manner of companies reporting to their shareholders. The external evaluations and educational audits that have begun to be applied in certain places should therefore be welcomed.

In addition, business practices can be stimulated in school, as is done with great success in the case of commercial initiatives led by student groups (such as Junior Achievement). In turn, businesses themselves must become transformed into permanent centers of education. Happily, more and more companies are becoming involved in the education of their personnel. At present this process is known as "training", to distinguish it from formal education, but it is soon clear that the educational process is in fact the same. In effect, many companies have links to universities, some have links with high schools and technical institutes, (but very few have any form of connection with the primary levels). Why therefore is the world of business still so dissociated from the world of education? It should be possible for them to interact and complement each other more effectively. Is there in fact any difference between learning and working? Can one learn without working, or work without learning?

source :
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