Text III. Education as an economic asset

    Why has education become such an economic asset in rich countries? Why are skills shortages mounting at a time of rapidly rising unemployment? The question can be answered in just two words: globalization and automation. Globalization means that many low-value-adding jobs are exported to poorer and cheaper countries. Automation means that jobs that stay in rich countries are increasingly done by machines rather than men. Having made its first impact in manufacturing, automation is now affecting the service industries, with some excellent results (cash point, for example).

    There is nothing new in the triumph of brain over brawn. The richer countries have long found that ever larger proportions of their populations are employed in jobs that require mental power rather than muscle power. For more than a century, relentless technical innovation and sustained economic expansion have been creating new and cleverer jobs and thus increasing the demand for better educated workers. At the same time, the rise in real incomes and the spreading of wealth has increased the demand for more sophisticated products and services. Prosperous people employ more people to look after their money and pander to their whims.

    The shift towards smarter jobs seems to have accelerated in the past decade, mainly because of a kick from information technology (IT). A decade ago some people worried that IT might, in effect, make the workforce stupid: the machines would do the thinking, the workers would simply watch and wonder. In fact, the opposite has happened. Information technology has not only increased the demand for scientists and engineers, who invent and upgrade the machines, and for managers and supervisors, who put them to work. It has also put a premium on competence for everybody. You need intelligent workers to get the most out of intelligent machines.

    For the past 90 years, most factories have employed a system of mass production – dubbed Taylorism, after the man who invented it, or Fordism, after the man who perfected it. This is based on two simple principles: the division of labour (separate complex tasks into their simplest components) and managerial omnipotence (allow the managers to make strategic decisions and expect the workers to do as they are told). This system has little use for popular education, since it reduces workers to little more than cogs in a great industrial machine.

    The problem with Fordist firms is that they are too simple to exploit sophisticated technologies, too uniform to generate variety and too inflexible to respond to rapidly changing demands.    

     

 Vocabulary notes

low- value- adding – рабочие места для низко квалифицированных рабочих (создающих низкую добавленную стоимость)

impact – воздействие, влияние

brawn [bro:n] – плоть, мускулы

relentless – неослабевающий

to pander to one’ s whims – потакать, угождать чьим-либо прихотям, причудам

omnipotence – всемогущество

cog – винтик (в машине)

(in)flexible – (не) гибкий

sophisticated – сложный, изощрённый

to appreciate – оценивать

Comprehension and Discussion Questions

1. What does globalization mean?

2. What does automation mean?

3. What were the economic reasons that demanded better educated workers?

4. What increased the demand for more sophisticated products and services?

5. How do you appreciate the usage of information technologies in the development of economy productivity?

6. What were the principles of a system of mass production employed by most factories in the past century?

7. Was the division of labour useful for popular education?

 

Practical Task:

Read through text IV, write out the left Substantive Attributes and translate the sentences into Russian.

 

 

⇐ Предыдущая54555657585960616263Следующая ⇒

Поделиться: