Consultant advises schools, businesses to get moving or get left behind

There's no more "them" and "us" when it comes to education and business communities - or even local and global communities.

We're all in it together.

And everyone had better figure out speed learning or run the risk of information gained yesterday becoming obsolete this afternoon - never mind tomorrow. Outdated information means irrelevant education today and plunging income in the future.

That's the word from Ed Barlow, a fast-paced "futurist" and president of Creating the Future Inc.

He addressed some 500 educators, business and community leaders gathered at Flathead High School Friday morning to examine education's role in preparing the Flathead for a 21st-century economy, from kindergarten through the second year of community college.

Many participants then remained for a brainstorming session in the afternoon, coming up with practical ways to implement change in the Flathead.

Everyone there, at some level, had an interest in the curriculum changes now under way as leaders from Flathead Valley Community College, Flathead High School and the under-construction Glacier High School collaborate on deciding what an education needs to accomplish today.

Barlow's session was the first major public outreach since School District 5 leaders began their preparations for the day coming soon when Kalispell has two high schools and a middle school.

Insisting that half the information in today's textbooks already is outdated, Barlow pushed for faster curriculum content updates.

But much more than that, he pushed for teachers to focus much less on content than on how to learn - and learn fast.

"We need to move from a system of education to a system of learning," he said.

Creating the future is a continuous process of reinventing. Young people and adults unafraid of change already glean layers of information from a plethora of sources, he said, with the Internet at the center.

"We as adults today are educating children for a world we do not have and may never experience," Barlow said, and changing with that unknown world is everybody's business.

"We have no room for anybody on any payroll who is not willing to eat a certain amount of change for breakfast, lunch and dinner," he said.

By definition, he said, leaders think beyond their experience and plan beyond their tenure.

Educators, too, must be learners and pathfinders exploring what is to come, not just passing along what already is known.

It's going to mean work, added research, and doing it in the same amount of time and possibly with the same - or even less - money than is available now.

But the price of not doing that work, Barlow said, is too great to bear.

"The biggest competition your students will face is ignorance and apathy," he said. "Every kid should know how to set up their mental desktop," by searching out and selecting information sources available at the click of a mouse.

Educators and business people need the same.

"Those who know what's out there will win."

As an example, he cited the need for students to know how China's control of fossil fuels affects their personal economic opportunities in the petroleum industry.

In his own daily info-searches, he is discovering the growing population, business and technology impact from overseas - with China and India at the top of the pack.

Within a decade, he said, those two countries will have more people who hold doctorates and other advanced degrees than does the United States. Their emphasis on math and science is key.

"I think we ought to declare math and science a national emergency," he said.

He offered many specifics, including:

Teach languages that will impact children's futures, languages like Mandarin Chinese, Arabic and Spanish.

Train them in nanotechnology. Intel Corp., he said, is scrambling now lest it become a dinosaur with its chip technology; fingernails and single molecules are the new information storehouses.

Google can be a learner's best friend. The Internet search engine opens worlds of information many adults don't even know exist, but worlds that savvy students already visit regularly. On-line learning is becoming common.

"We're going to be off-course in education a lot," he warned, "unless we tie it to those sources of information continuously."

Even if Flathead Valley students are trained in industries that never come to the Flathead, they eventually will win by landing well-paying jobs in other areas. Colleges "need to figure out a way to make it easier for adults to come back to school," he said.

Earning four-year, or even two-year, degrees may no longer be the paragon of academic virtue.

What he called knowledge technology - the terms vocational technology and educational technology need to be snuffed from modern vocabulary, he said - is becoming the most useful means of learning for emerging careers. Soon, Barlow predicted, two-year and four-year college graduates will earn equal entry-level salaries.

In fact, people laid off from traditional work - the people who used to collect unemployment until rehired into their same old positions - almost certainly will find those jobs evaporating and forcing a need to move to a new line of work. Only 30 percent of adults who lose their jobs ever get back to their former pay level.

"Every dislocated worker in the Flathead is an asset for training," he said.

And stay up to speed with technology, he warned businesses.

"If young people don't see there's a destination in this, they're not going to commit" to your business, he said.

The same goes for education.

Schools need to show a purpose and progression of the curriculum and career learning clusters.

What kind of job will courses lead to, a student asks. But the question does not come out of a grand desire for a career, Barlow cautioned. It comes from a desire to support a specific lifestyle.

Career paths are fluid through lifelong learning paths that shift with future opportunities and interests of the worker. So it follows, he said, that how to learn is more indelible than what is learned.

"Eighty-five to 90 percent of what you learn in one career pathway," he said, "is transferable to another career. "It's the context in which you do the learning."

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com