What good education is

There is a 'demand' that education provides real world experience. This is not a new idea, but has its limitations when it comes to college education. Traditionally, real world experience is vocational education, which is tailored towards specific job skills - automotive, technical, support staff. How much knowledge and skills does anyone need to bring to the job? On average a company wants applicants to have a good attitude plus proficiency in writing, reading, math. The latter meaning competency with numbers, decimals, fractions, percentages as well as statistics and probability. The company will teach them the specifics, what they need to know for a job.

If colleges teach real world skills, why not go to the real world directly and skip college. Which begs the question what colleges could teach people that the real world would expect everyone to be able to do beyond basic reading, writing and math? What skills, abilities, essential knowledge, mastering unfamiliar ideas and concepts are people to have for '21st Century' jobs? Well, higher education learning includes

• learning to learn
• gathering knowledge
• developing creativity
• solving problems
• thinking logically, i.e., critically

Critical thinking is to education reform what survival of the fittest is to evolutionary theory.

Education is the only industry where every student is being tested. Education reform often assumes that all students are evenly capable, which is behind the idea of proficiency. No reaching proficiency is a deficiency in instruction rather than ability. A real threat to higher education is the outside expectation of it being an industry with a measurable product.

Next: International and national education programs