The primary purpose of education is to empower graduates for jobs. Hence, the higher the education level, the more the employability should have been the natural outcome. Ironically, the reality is the opposite in less-developed countries. According to media reports, the unemployment rate among educated youths is the highest in Bangladesh. Over the last five years, graduate unemployment has doubled. A similar situation is observed in India and many other less-developed countries. For example, according to media reports, over 80 per cent of engineering graduates in India are failing to get engineering jobs-creating a syndrome of jobless graduates and worthless degrees. Of course, such a reality raises the question of the quality of education. There are also issues of inclusiveness. How to make education accessible to all is a development challenge. Notably, how to address the individual need, irrespective of physical limitation, should also get priority. Of course, we need to leverage technology to address the challenge of improving education quality, access, and inclusiveness. We should also look into the effect of technology on human role in work.
To begin with, let us envision and ponder on a situation. Does education in digital space sharpen innate abilities, empathy, and passion for perfection? If we replace pencil with keyboard in our classrooms, will graduates suffer from flexibility and precision movement of their fingers? If they do, will they lose the eligibility in specific jobs requiring high-precision finger movement like surgery? Will fingers' flexibility affect workers' productivity in handling flexible materials like fabrics in apparel production? How will shifting education to digital space affect multi-limb coordination, far vision, attention span, and other vital innate abilities?
Employment eligibility depends on three primary attributes: (i) innate abilities, (ii) codified knowledge and skill, and (iii) experienced earned from tacit capability. It's worth noting that human beings are blessed with 52 innate abilities in four categories: (i) Cognitive, (ii) Physical, (iii) Psychomotor, and (iv) Sensory. Although formal education does not pay much attention to sharpen them, they are highly important. For example, according to the O*Net dissection of 923 occupations, the importance of innate ability affecting eligibility and productivity is exceptionally high.
Education should focus on sharpening innate abilities, increasing codified knowledge and skill stock, and accentuating tacit capability earning to increase employability. However, the importance of these capabilities is not identical in all jobs. Furthermore, technology has been transforming their importance due to automation.
In a broad sense, jobs may be classified into three broad categories: Replication, Management, and R&D. Replication refers to routine manufacturing, farming, and service jobs. Practitioners are expected to keep repeating specified tasks following a sequence. Over the years, technology development has focused on reducing the role of codified knowledge and skill in replication jobs. Due to job division and automation of codified knowledge and skills, replication jobs increasingly demand only innate abilities. For this reason, low-skilled workers of Bangladesh and many other less developed countries got qualified for manufacturing jobs. Hence, to improve factory workers' productivity, the focus should be on sharpening innate abilities. However, how will we sharpen innate abilities if we keep relying on digital space for delivering educational services? How will we improve eyesight and attention span through online lectures provided by human teachers or robots (bots, avatars)?
At the middle management level, professionals mostly rely on codified knowledge and skills. Hence, jobs for middle managers ask for specific academic qualifications. However, codified knowledge and skills acquired from those qualifications are highly amenable to software-centric automation. Hence, in advanced countries, there has been negative job growth at the middle layer. As the software can do many middle management activities like preparing payroll or monitoring the progress better than professionals, software increasingly takes over such jobs. Hence, the improvement of codified knowledge and skill stock among graduates will not likely proportionately increase their employability. Ironically, to address the quality issue, education in the digital space aims to increase the codified capability of learners.
In addition to innate abilities and codified knowledge and skills earned through qualifications, tacit capability obtained through experience is vital for jobs. Due to this, experienced people keep making them more valuable in jobs. Data and knowledge gathered through experience add value to work. Hence, salary keeps growing with experience. However, the digitalisation of data and extraction of knowledge and its application through software have been eroding the market value of experience. Hence, corporate America has been after juniarisation. To save wages, they have been replacing their senior employees with juniors and supplementing them with codified experience of their predecessors. Therefore, the challenge of education has been accelerating tacit capability so that automation cannot keep up with the new insights gathered through experience. Does education in digital space accentuate this vital capability?
In advanced countries, R&D jobs have been expanding as their economies mostly rely on idea flow. For the urgency of driving economic growth out of ideas, R&D demand will also likely be growing in less developed countries. However, what kind of abilities play a vital role in R&D jobs? For sure, R&D professionals need to acquire existing codified knowledge and skills. For this purpose, knowledge achiving and sharing through digital space will be very helpful. More importantly, they need high-end innate abilities like empathy, passion for perfection, imagination, motivation, deep attention span, idea generation, selective attention, originality, and many more. How can we sharpen them by shifting our education over digital space? So far, research data about online learning efficacy indicate that educational services delivered through online platforms have been blunting these vital R&D abilities.
There is no denying that education in the digital space can increase the productivity of acquiring codified knowledge and skills. Notably, digital space and actors may play a helpful role in training for sharing a set of rules for performing a job. However, so far, research output indicates that education through digital means has little positive role in sharpening innate abilities and increasing the capability of learning through experience. Instead, research outputs have been telling the opposite reality-the blunting of natural skills.
Of course, digital space has the potential to increase access and offer assistance to learners suffering from physical and cognitive limitations. Besides, the replacement of teachers with digital content and characters may offer a less costly option. Sometimes, digital alternatives may also improve the productivity of acquiring codified knowledge and skills. Hence, there may be a temptation of gradual shift of education to digital platforms, whether we call them digital public infrastructure or something else. Of course, that may reduce digital divide, taking it to zero. Will it improve the employability of graduates? However, despite some merits in sharing codified knowledge, education through digital means runs the risk of blunting imagination, empathy, motivation, attention span, passion for perfection, and other innate abilities that are vital for the factory floor, management, and R&D jobs. Hence, the complete migration of education to digital space runs the risk of producing worthless degree holders-turning the next digitally educated generation disabled. The challenge is how to take advantage of digital space without suffering from structural flaw.
M Rokonuzzaman, Ph.D is academic and researcher on technology, innovation, and policy. [email protected]
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