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Gen Y Tech Savvy, But Not Interested in a Career
jcatcw writes "Young people aren't choosing computer science majors because they take technology for granted — it's something to use not something to make a career. "By and large, this generation is very fluent with technology and with a networked world," according to James Ware, executive producer at The Work Design Collaborative LLC, a Berkeley, Calif., consortium exploring workplace values and the future of the workforce. That future may be in managing technology, which requires skills today's college students don't have: writing, critical thinking, hard work and just plain showing up. One of their primary concerns is a flexible schedule and healthy work/life balance."
How many people here have had similar discussions with friends, neighbours (English), FOAFs etc:
"My little Jimmy wants to work in computers when he's older. He loves his. Always on it"
A little digging turns out that his "computer" is actually a PlayStation or Xbox or some other games console. How someone who spends all day, everyday on a games console thinks that is working in computers simply defies logic. I don't know what they think happens in the real world.
stuff goes here
Like hell they were.
"How do we once again become a nation of learners, in which attitudes towards intellectual pursuit and quality of work have excellence as their core?"
[These words echo] two qualities common to educational reformers since World War II: nostalgia and amnesia. They look back through a haze to some imagined golden era of American education when we were "a nation of learners," forgetting that a century ago the high school graduation rate was about 3 percent, and it didn't exceed 50 percent until mid-century...
The educator Ralph Tyler, one of the most prolific writers and innovators the field has known--he directed the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University for a number of years--looked back in 1974, when he was seventy-two, at what schools had been like in his youth: "What I remember . . . are the strictness of discipline, the catechismic type of recitation, the dullness of the textbooks, and the complete absence of any obvious connection between our classwork and the activities we carried on outside of school. . . . The view held by most teachers and parents was that . . . [the school's] tasks should be sufficiently distasteful to the pupils to require strong discipline to undertake them and carry them through."
What Happened to America's Public Schools? [November 1997]