Ponderings on The World is Flat

I was at a conference in Boston during the summer called 'Building learning Communities' and nearly all of the speakers that I heard mentioned a book by Thomas Friedman called The World is Flat. I managed to pick up a copy for myself in the airport coming home and started to read it the other day. It really is fascinating. The book attempts to analyse what is happening in the world of trade/globalization in this new 21st century and some of the conclusions that Friedman comes to are really quite scary and have been challenging my thinking about education. For example, in school, exactly what are we preparing our kids for? I think especially of a friend of mine who is teaching in a school in India and who told me about the different work ethic there is in schools there. The Young people take their schooling very seriously - especially Maths and Science. It made me wonder about those souls who trudge into my room every day - mostly without interest and the main outlet for their creativity being the excuse that they use to inform me that they have not completed a homework.

I think that our kids in NI, the UK, the Western World need to wake up to the fact that if they dont start to use their brains to be innovative and inventive that all the good jobs are going to be taken by the people in other countries and they will be left with the shelf-stacking jobs! It is time for our kids to wake up and start to work harder and take their (FREE!) education seriously so that they can compete with and perform alongside the students from India, China etc . . .