In a speech to the nation’s governors on Tuesday, President Obama urged states to increase funding for education. Telling governors, “I know something about trying to deal with tight budgets”, the President outlined two areas of education that “demand our immediate attention” – getting more teachers in the classroom and increasing opportunities to access higher education.
Echoing themes from his State of the Union speech, President Obama called on governors to pressure Congress to pass legislation to support teacher jobs, an initiative he announced in September 2011. Citing 250,000 education jobs lost, the President recounted the important role teachers play in the lives of children.
Additionally, President Obama called for greater opportunities and access to colleges/universities, community college, and other postsecondary educational opportunities. With only 21 states requiring students to stay in school until they graduate or turn 18, President Obama called on the remaining 29 states to raise their expectations that all students should finish high school.
CEC is pleased that the President’s remarks focused on the importance of investing in education. Earlier this month the President’s budget proposal for FY 2013 did include an increase in education funding by seeking support for programs like Race to the Top and level funding cornerstone programs such as IDEA. At a time when states and school districts are confronting a grim fiscal outlook, CEC would have hoped for a greater investment in programs that have proven effective over the years, such as IDEA.
Read President Obama’s remarks here.
Good call by the President and his wise-men but where we are looking at the wrong way for investment in education to create a meaningful future in the West. For that is what education should be all about. It depends ultimately for a nation if higher intelligence or higher innovative thinking is the driving force of Humanity. The two are totally different.
For there is a great misconception in the minds of many business and education Gurus, through lack of understanding what innovation really is, that innovation is somehow linked to higher intelligence. This misdemeanor is thrown at all and sundry. Unfortunately intelligence in itself does not lead to major global breakthroughs as the history of S&T shows. Indeed some people may be highly intelligent in solving problems but can never come up with an idea that revolutionizes the future. For solving existing problems is not the same as creating a totally new concept or idea. This thinking comes from people who in the main were not excellent scholastic students according to history but were different in their thinking and had the ability to link things together to produce something new and really outstanding.
What we have not learnt in the West yet is that it is not the so-called highly intelligent people that we have to find but the creative individuals who are the primary asset in creating the successful tools of the future, whether they be better education systems or revolutionary technologies. The two again are very different indeed. That is why the World Innovation Foundation has been saying for the past decade and a half to western governments that the West has to create the ORE-STEM complex so that these special individuals can have a place to flourish and work. In this respect it is estimated that there are between 500,000 and 1million of these ‘special’ average-intelligent people in the West who have the capacity to change ‘Our’ economic fortunes.
But, no-one is listening and especially in western governments where the intelligent people reign there supreme also. The reason of course is because these people are perceived as being highly intelligent also, but where they lack the main ingredient to why a country will be economically dynamic in the future; that little known seed in the certain individuals that transforms nations through totally new revolutionary thinking. Not to bore people but Newton and Einstein are clear examples of poor to medium quality scholastic students. In fact in the case of Newton his contemporaries stated at the time that nothing would ever come of Newton after he lost his ‘grouts’ and was awarded the lowest BA degree at Cambridge. No, it is those illusive individuals that we have to concentrate on in finding within our western society, who are not seen as highly intelligent people, but engage and provide vast wealth through their innovative thinking, not highly intelligent thinking. The two are totally different animals. For this is the ‘golden’ secret of creating a future dynamic environment for the West and where through such thinking, the West would recapture its pre-eminence in wealth creation.
Unfortunately western politicians have lost their way because they are possibly too intelligent and therefore we look in part at the decline that we now see. For an example here, bankers are supposed to be one of the most intelligent species within humanity and where they usually come with the highest degrees passes possible and top-of-the-class honours from such establishments as Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, Cambridge and Oxford et al. Therefore the question has to be asked, how did they and their highly intelligent government counterparts get is so horribly wrong globally and locally? The reason is that intelligence does not guarantee for a better world and where the opposite has been the case with the West reeling from trillions of accumulated debt that the people in the west now owe.
We have therefore to stop concentrating on the misconception that high intelligence is the best driver of humanity but where others have the real answers to our dire problems. Therefore the sooner we get such vast concepts as the ORE-STEM under way, the sooner the West will stop the inevitable decline of our nations and its people. For in another 30>40 years if we do not start thinking differently, the West will be totally reeling from a state of our economic affairs which will mirror many of the dire problems associated with some of the emerging economies now. This future situation to counter-balance the economic forces building in the East will not emerge from high intelligence as history has shown us, but from special and unique individuals who are not seen as highly intelligent at all. But what they possess is of far, far more important that just mere high intelligence, for they hold the golden key of our economic redemption!
Dr David Hill
Chief Executive
World Innovation Foundation
Posted by: Dr David Hill | 02/29/2012 at 04:52 PM