We Must Get It Right

The Marietta High School National Honor Society recently inducted 37 new members into its ranks. Forty students will be recognized for Academic Excellence at a banquet this spring. Several students are recognized as National Merit Finalists. Truly an honor and testament to the quality of our students as well as our educators and our system.
It is nice to toot the horn and recognize academic excellence. Good to know we have so many who are working up to their potential. But why is that important?
From a YouTube video titled Did You Know comes the following information: if you are a great student with a bright future deserving of the classification “one in a million” there are 1,300 more just like you in China.
During the first five minutes of the National Honor Society induction there were 67 babies born in the United States. None born in the auditorium that I could tell. In China, during that same 5 minutes, 274 babies were born. And in India, during that same 5 minutes, indeed every 5 minutes, 395 babies are born.
Consider this; China will soon be the largest English speaking country in the world. If you count the top 25% of academic achievers in India, that number of students is larger than the total of all students in the U.S.
Overwhelmed yet? Today’s students soon will be. Our schools are preparing students today for jobs that do not yet exist. Jobs that will require technology that does not yet exist. And the top ten jobs with the most demand for employees in the next few years - - do not exist today.
The average worker in the future is projected to have 10 to 14 jobs by age 38. One out of every 8 couples who married in 2005 met on the internet. Times have changed. The pace quickens.
The internet social website MySpace has well over 200 million users. If they were all in one geographic location they would constitute the 8th largest country in the world.
The first commercial text message was sent in 1992. Today, there are more text messages sent every day than there are people on the planet. There were over 3,000 books published……today. Technical information doubles every two years. By 2010 it is predicted to double every 72 hours.
One can observe the increasing pace of development by observing that after the invention of the radio it took 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Television came along and took only 13 years to be in 50 million households.
The internet, many years later, required 4 years to achieve the 50 million user penetration. And Steve Jobs’ Apple Computer innovation, the iPod was in the hands of 50 million users in only 3 years.
Finally, if you need further proof of the changing times and the challenges our students will face in their careers, think about this. Who among us has not executed a Google search? Today there were 2.7 billion Google searches. One wonders who was answering all those questions before the advent of Google.
It is absolutely imperative that we prepare our students for the world that awaits them with the very best technology, the latest teaching and learning techniques and the most creative thinking concepts available. We owe our students and taxpayers no less than to have the highest expectations of our system and its performance that we can obtain given our resources. And we must seek to expand our talents and resources at every opportunity. You can be sure that the rest of the world is striving toward the same end.