The Future of Education in the USA - if any

Henry, welcome to our course, and, yes, Happy New Year! I look forward to working with you. Here are some thoughts about outsourcing.

Last fall, I heard the VP of Johnson Controls at a conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He said, "We locate production where we can find a quality workforce, which has hard skills and a work ethic."

He did not say his company located production because of taxes, wages, benefits, infrastructure like roads, or finances. He said his company locates production because of the workforce, its quality as measured in terms of "hard skills" and an equally "hard" work ethic.

As Peter F. Drucker argued, "Plan the people first, and the people will plan the business." In the Knowledge Economy, people, not physical plant, drive enterprises. To have a winning business you must have winning people.

Sadly, as Peter Drucker points out in his last book, 2004, the U.S. now requires business to spend 25% of its budget for management on affirmative action compliance. Other countries do not impose the cost of "social engineering" on its businesses; this reduces their operational costs.

Moreover, they do not hire on the basis of "diversity" or some other quota. Instead, they hire people who have hard skills and an equally hard work ethic.

In short, nobody talks about the poor quality of the American workforce today. We like to think low wages drive economic decisions. Hard skills and an equally hard work ethic drive economic decisions today; nobody is willing to explore this in detail.

In other words, if you want to stop outsourcing, look at yourself. Are you worth what you think you are in the marketplace? How do we restore standards to education, yes, this is a matter of education, that demand hard skills and a hard work ethic?

The time for letting psycho-babble run our K-12 school systems and "social promotion" at all levels for tuition is coming to an end. Outsourcing in fact is a mirror on American education, top to bottom.

You may not be popular if you pursue this topic; it is begging for somebody to research it "good and hard."