Probably the most significant change to occur during the industrial revolution was that workers began to be relegated to more specialized and perhaps more menial tasks in their work day. We like to think that the romanticized craftsman of the medieval age who was adept in a wide variety of techniques has been gradually replaced by an army of mindless factory or cubicle workers idly pulling levers and pushing papers. At first glance it seems that less and less knowledge should be required to educate the incessant coming generations of students to become functioning workers.
Yet his is a fairly destructive outlook and not true. Although scientific management and specialization have turned many workdays into a repetitive bore, it is not necessarily true that general education is not required for this work. But perhaps more importantly, general education is necessary as it is the only way of dealing with the rapidly shifting work environment of the modern economy.
Far away from the near entirety of human history, the past century has been marked by labor and structural changes in production so significant that often students can often leave vocational schools to see their chosen work disappearing to mechanization, outsourcing or general streamlining. Entirely new industries, risk management, information technology, new forms of public relations have all arisen so quickly that many of their now employees never had the proper opportunity to train in an official academic setting.
So although the division of labor in society is nearly total, the divisions are changes and shifting so often that workers need to gain in their education not one atomized skill to be constantly repeated in hopes that it will still exist in their middle-age, but generally and it could be said liberally.
The Liberal Arts present a fairly good model of skills that can truly make (almost) anyone useful. Ideally, skills in universally pertinent mathematics, science and language provide an expansive starting point for any profession. Mostly importantly, truly well-formulated liberal skills should not be learnt at the expense of anything else; they are necessary compliments for understanding clearly and speaking intelligently about any manner of topic.
An Anti-intellectual and Anti-educational Culture
Yet American culture, and increasingly the culture of the rest of the developed world, has become astoundingly anti-intellectual. This is not meant in the sense that Americans have maintained a penchant to deny evolution or climatology, although indeed that is a dangerous trend; but more generally, people in the developed world have come to loathe education and the economy it creates.
Before children are even sent off for their first day of school, they have already been heavily socialized to hate the very enterprise of learning. Popular culture from all corners, whether from television shows or music or the conservations of peers and even parents are wont to show an antipathy to learning, a hatred of work related to education and a spite for the teachers who facilitate this.
It is the very lament of thinkers from Marx to Pink Floyd that children are forced to conform to an economic machine which does not twist in the way they themselves wish it to. Frankly asserted, that is only the mewling of entitlement. Education has always been an opportunity, not a liability; a tool and not burden. If the developed world has truly abandoned this idea, it deserves to lose its position in the global economy.
Conformity is required because children are consistently myopic and don't immediately understand the full value of their education, and at times need to be compelled by grading systems and merit. And of course, even children who seem to have their mind made up about their future careers require a general education; the reason that a student who wants to become a writer or a basketball player must learn geometry is that he will nearly certainly not be either. All the more valuable are the Liberal Arts as with a basis of general knowledge, expanding such knowledge becomes a pleasure rather than chore.
A Culture of Learning
The United States, from the most affluent suburbs on the Potomic to the rural schoolhouses on the lower Mississippi has the resources to educate a dynamic and culturally astute workforce, but there are several changes, political and cultural in our way. The greatest asset to creating an intelligent workforce is simply a culture that esteems intellectual eclecticness above all other traits. Although there is no way that massive changes in cultural outlook can be achieved by mandate, this would entail that people realize the fact that wit and knowledge underlie and support essentially everything human about humanity and that the best way to stimulate growth in intelligence is by developing an acquisitiveness for learning. Education rightly understood is the most important basis in self-expression and individuality, hardly a product of conformity.
As it happens, education is something that I view as innately valuable, but no doubt that is due to the heavy relation everything in human society bears with it. Practically speaking as well, as society develops and economic needs change with great volatility with the concordant development of technology, we will need to educate workers not with a set of simple skills, but with the wit and malleability to be able to assert professional confidence in a grand variety of crafts with shifting demands but with constant general education. This can only properly consist in a population with a wide and depthy intellect.