Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 6, 1993 TAG: 9303060209
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Long
SCHOOL CHIEF: REPORT `TARGET,' NOT `ROAD MAP'
Twenty-two business, industrial, local government and educational leaders spent a year drawing up their report on the future of education in Pulaski County made public Thursday night.Now what?
School Superintendent William Asbury said the report's findings will be used "to put a template over everything we do," from budgets to planning. He said the idea was "not to use it as a road map, but a target to set our sights on.
"We're all a little intimidated by it, but we're not afraid of it. We're ready for it," he told about 100 people who came to Pulaski County High School to hear the report. "The demands are great, but I think our people are great, too."
Futures Task Force Chairman Hiawatha Nicely formally presented a copy of the report to School Board Chairman Ron Chaffin.
"We were inundated with a lot of information and research data, and tried to put that into a mold that would lead us into the future," Nicely said. "It does say that we must change the manner in which we teach our children. We teach today as we did a couple of hundred years ago."
Joy Colbert, director of research, development and technology for the school system, said assimilating all the information needed for the report "is like trying to take a drink of water out of a fire hydrant," but there was no question that education methods needed to change.
"It will change, because the world has changed. It's just a question of whether we are going to try and manage that change," she said. "Literally, the world is becoming a global village. . . . We can move our bodies anywhere in the world in a matter of hours and we can transfer our thoughts anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds."
To demonstrate that Pulaski County is affected by globalization, Colbert displayed the cover of the Aug. 10, 1992, issue of Business Week magazine showing a main story title, "The Global Economy: Who Gets Hurt."
The cover photo was of Dreama B. Fields and her family of Pulaski. Fields was one of those who lost her job when the AT&T plant at Fairlawn closed in 1990 and moved its jobs to Mexico and Texas.
"It's comparable to the time when we moved from an agrarian society to an industrial society," Colbert said. Next stop is the information society.
Politicians talk about bringing jobs back to their localities, but they can't, Colbert said, because those jobs no longer exist. But new jobs based on new technologies will replace them, she said.
That means schools must find ways to educate students for jobs that can't even be foreseen yet, she said.
With knowledge doubling every three years, schools can't just disseminate information, she said. They must teach skills that graduates can continue to use as their jobs change and re-training is required during their working years.
A Brookings Institution study showed student performance is most affected now by what learning tools - which can range from computers to video games - students have at home. If public education does not fill that gap, Colbert said, a new educational inequity will develop between those young people whose families can afford such gadgets and those that cannot.
Colbert said she would like to ask - "some might say sentence" - the audience to watch some MTV with a stopwatch. She said it would find that images stay on the screen less than five seconds.
Kids spent hours watching this, as they do with computers and video games, she said. "You ever watch those? They really move fast."
The result of all this, she said, is that "the medium itself is changing the way you think." And this must be taken into account by education.
"We don't have the structures in place for this right now. We're really breaking new ground," she said. "And we can't afford to have any sacred cows, such as the structure of the school day or of the school year."
Educators cannot do the job alone, she said. Business and community leaders have a stake in all this, too, because the quality of education will dictate the quality of future county workers.
Asbury compared the educational structure to the nation's highways a century ago. They handled the traffic of their time well and helped develop the country, but they could not have handled today's traffic.
"Our educational system has served us well," he said. "It's gotten us to where we are today." But it must now meet new demands.
"We can no longer do business the way we always have. Jobs that we have counted on no longer exist," Asbury said. "The jobs that people are losing today will be replaced with new jobs, new careers, some of which we haven't even imagined."
Today's educators are themselves products of the existing educational system, he said.
"We're having to learn new techniques, new strategies, ourselves. I'm scared to death of the computer. But I'm finding I can't function without it," he said. "Not many generations have stood where we are today, in society and here in Pulaski County. . . . The things that we do today will literally affect generations to come."
Even a year of study cannot reveal everything about the future, Colbert said, recalling that the report had to be postponed because of last week's snow. "I'm just glad they didn't ask the Futures Task Force to predict the weather!"