Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 5, 1993 TAG: 9303050228
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Medium
`MEGA PLANNING' KEY TO FUTURE SCHOOLING, TASK FORCE SAYS
When Pulaski County students now in the fifth grade graduate from high school, the nation's workplace will require the most educated work force of any economic system in history.By graduation day in 2000, the seniors will have been exposed in that one year to more information than their grandparents had in a lifetime. The body of knowledge will have doubled four times since 1988, according to futurist Marvin J. Cetron.
It may come as a surprise that, according to Cetron, only about 15 percent of jobs will require a college education by then. But nearly all of them will require job-specific training of some kind after high school.
Service jobs are projected to form 90 percent of the economy. Fewer than 6 percent of workers will find places on the assembly line.
As Alvin Toffler puts it, regarding the term he created for reaction to the increasing rate of change, "Future shock occurs when the world you were educated to believe in no longer exists."
All this was among the information presented in a report Thursday by the Futures Task Force, formed from educators, business leaders and others more than a year ago to conduct a study on how such trends will affect the county's educational system in the coming century.
By then, the 22-member group predicts, students will be using computers as they now use paper notebooks. The computer, in fact, will become an electronic workbook.
To compete for jobs, students must have a new kind of literacy the group calls "teleliteracy." This amounts to both telecommunication skills for accessing, processing and storing information as well as networking with others, and technological competence.
Something else that will be necessary in tomorrow's educational system is called "mega planning" - a holistic approach to planning and decision-making among groups that once functioned alone.
No one person or community has experiences covering all the changes that are happening, which makes collective learning or learning communities necessary.
The task force made three mega planning recommendations to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of educational services in the county, and thereby ultimately improve its quality of life.
One recommendation is to establish a planning committee drawn from all agencies that deliver services to families served by schools.
Another would set up partnership programs with business, higher education, local government and parents.
A third would create a task force drawn from all agencies involved in developing county budgets.
Among the guidelines recommended by the task force are:
To develop a shared vision of a preferred future for students with school staff and the community;
Identify what students will need to be able to do when they leave school and tailor courses accordingly;
Maintain a commitment to bring technology into schools, using networks that let students access the most current information; and
Study the structure of schools and classroom practices.
The structures to be studied would include the length of the school day, grouping of students and course offerings. Alternate ways of learning to reach the desired outcomes for what students must know could require different roles, rules and responsibilities in county schools.
The task force said that Pulaski County graduates will be competing with others in the nation and the world for jobs. They can do so "as the cheapest labor in the world or the most skilled work force," the group reported.
If those attending the session on transforming county schools for the next century learned nothing else, they learned that the only constant to be expected in the years ahead is change.