by Joseph Robertson

Created on: October 27, 2008   Last Updated: September 18, 2010

Adaptability and intellectual curiosity are key to building a top-quality 21st century workforce, as economic patterns have spread across borders and the evolution of specific industries is now a global process. Technological literacy, the ability to use, seek out, learn and re-learn, with relative independence, the technological tools now basic for top-level work output, is essential to the prolonged development of American society and to the sustainability of its lofty economic aspirations.

John McCain, in a town-hall meeting, told potential voters that when it comes to using computers "I'm an illiterate that has to rely on my wife... I can barely get the news clips that have my name on them". Was this a play at being charmingly luddite and folksy? Does the senator think the average person has so little contact with the world of email and the internet? Whichever the case, the truth of things from the standpoint of the United States in 2008, is that functional illiteracy in the use of communications technologies, like personal computers and the internet, could be catastrophic for our nation's economic future. The best-trained workers become a liability for the overall market, if they cannot retrain easily, because the market itself becomes sclerotic, slowed, stiff, and its need to protect against the erosion of what feeds that inflexible dynamic, eventually erodes its ability to compete with more industrious centers of study, trade and manufacturing. What's more, if emerging markets, like India, are supplying our own major corporations with highly skilled computer-literate workers, at lower cost, then we find our options as a nation limited to dropping wages for lower-skilled jobs and narrower opportunity for the most advanced, state-of-the-art jobs.

Somewhere in between those two extremes, in any healthy economy, there must be a vast ocean of viable middle-class talent and ingenuity. In the information age, this ingenuity comes with technological literacy, as the first step toward permitting a 100%-generalized adaptive capacity, wherein one specialization does not rule out interacting with, or even adopting, another. In the 21st century, our nation's ability to compete, economically, scientifically, militarily and as the principal geo-political leader, will depend almost entirely on our ability to fill the need for a highly skilled, highly adaptive, technologically aware workforce, able to ably perform one skill, but learn and move into other fields as needed.

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>