Chapter 4: Education and the Economy: An Examination Into the Effectiveness of Education in China, the United States, and South Korea

There has never been a more educated generation with such confusing prospects. You need a college degree to be marketable, but it won’t guarantee a job. Education is our most valuable asset. The public demands more accountability of teachers, while design, implementation, and assessment is moved further from the classroom. Professional educators are leaving the field as salaries stagnate or decrease (Allegretto & Mishel, 2016). If we are going to guarantee a quality education for the next generation, we need to be sure of our commitment to it. And that requires a decision about what it has to accomplish. Education is a progressive field; information is added and updated as it is discovered and disseminated; think of the changes in biology classes after Watson and Crick published their paper about DNA, or in physics after Einstein published his paper on relativity. If educators continued teaching the way they had before, their students would not be prepared for the fields they hoped to enter.