| | | I'm afraid the differences in opportunities and standard of living between the intelligent and creative is going to continue widening, particularly given our system of taxation where high income workers pay less in taxes than lower income workers.
There's a false idea that good training at school or tech school can provide a lifetime of employment. Unless you're continually learning people quickly become irrelevant. A school's primary purpose is teaching people how to learn on their own and assess what they need to know, otherwise they're teaching lunkheads who will quickly become obsolete and unemployable.
When I graduated from UC Berkeley in 1978 I had taken only one Fortran programming class and a second more valuable class in implementing business applications for programming. At that point in time this was quite exotic information for a business manager to possess - so I rode a technology wave during my entire career.
For 9 months I worked as a purchasing agent at Chevron Shipping providing supplies for half the international fleet. My job took me less than 2 hours a day to complete, much to the embarrassment the longer term employee who worked long hours to supply the other half or the fleet. My boss's boss offered him the chance to swap our ships, which would have only embarrassed him more.
So my boss's boss gave me an annual project normally done by someone else to determine the relative cost of each port where we bought supplies - Ras Tanura, Cape Town, Rotterdam, Pascagoula, Canaport, Singapore and the Philippines. This involved looking up paper invoices in filing cabinets and traditionally took the Fleet Steward four months and he always found Cape Town South Africa was the least expensive port.
Since these paper invoices had also been input onto computer tape by people in accounting, I asked if I could get an account on one of the company's mainframe computers to try to automate this process. Over loud objections from my boss I worked with a guy from Computer Services with an MA in database programming and his boss who were both delighted to be highlighted solving a business problem. They wrote the database hooks which looked up invoices by code while I wrote a fairly simple statistical program in Fortran which automated the process - the 1979 version of artificial intelligence. After 3 weeks we were both finished and our program completed 4 months of work in less than five minutes.
The program showed Cape Town was actually one of the more costly supply ports, which was not hard to imagine as the supplies had to be ferried by a 45 minute helicopter flight to the tanker deck as they passed the Horn of Africa - but this was contradictory to the results normally provided.
I quickly taught my boss's boss how to use the program and he in short order discovered these results were valid and later an investigation found the Fleet Steward had been taking kickbacks from our Chandler Agency in Cape Town and bad things happened to the Steward, the CSD department got asked to work on more projects and long before all of this unpleasantness occurred I was promoted three levels to a seriously more responsible job managing Chevron's real estate.
When it became available, like many of the ambitious people I learned how to use VisiCalc on a PC we'd bought. By the time I had left Chevron and was negotiating the sale of Savings and Loans, I had replaced VisiCalc with a better tool Lotus-123, and by the time I as running my own business it was Microsoft Excel.
Is the lesson of this story students should all take computer programming courses or learn how to use a spreadsheet program? No. These are merely tools, like a hoe or shovel used for farming. Teaching a person how to use a hoe and a shovel doesn't teach them how to farm. Learning how to use computers as a tool doesn't teach you how to run a business.
A school's primary purpose is teaching people how to learn on their own and assess what they need to know, otherwise they're teaching lunkheads who will quickly become obsolete and unemployable. |
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