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PARTISAN REVIEW
changed. But in one crucial respect, the old compact needs an amendment–
in the part that has to do wi th education.
The old compact assumed that government would educate children to
be qualified for work, and that businesses would go along. But to be qual–
ified for a factory job, all that was necessary was literacy,
if
that. Smith had
assumed from the start that most youths would barely be taught "to read,
write, and account," knowing that little had changed in two hundred years.
Smith knew this was a shame but also that education would be wasted on
most. One of his lines should be haunting us: "The man whose whole life
is spent in performing a few simple operations has no occasion to exercise
his invention, or exert his understanding....He naturally becomes...as stu–
pid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become."
In the new economy, however, this cannot go on. Businesses have an
inexhaustible need for cultivated people. Our best companies cannot grow
fully into global opportunities because they cannot hire the people they
need. This does not mean that businesses can become responsible for edu–
cation. They invest more and more in training, but they cannot make their
employees trainable. Businesses are more like specialized graduate schools
than elementary schools; they need people ready to learn-marketing,
design, production strategies, ready to learn high technologies or quality
systems. Companies cannot teach the basics. At the same time, there are a
number of things businesses can do:
1. The first thing businesses can do is to stop complaining about high–
er taxes targeted to education. These are fundamental investments, and it
makes no sense to look at higher taxes as a problem if these amount to an
investment in the intellectual capital businesses themselves need.
Governments spend upwards of a quarter of a trillion dollars nation–
wide on schools of all kinds. To mentor the young people who are in
danger of falling through the cracks, they will need to fund hundreds more
pre-school centers, hundreds of small boarding schools, hundreds of well–
ness facili ties, thousands of Outward Bound types of programs. They will
need to fund hundreds of experimental charter schools (even if this means
defying teachers unions), and a new educational on-line network. They
will need to subsidize university tuition and create Boys Towns and Girls
Towns for lost adolescents from the inner city. Finally, like the Israelis, they
will need to organize twelve months of universal mandatory national ser–
vice after high school graduation. Israel's Defense Forces have proven a
kind of finishing school for the recruits of the new economy.
2. Businesses must become demanding customers. Many businesses
have been helping local school boards to understand the kind of curricula
they should institute to prepare children for work. Motorola, to name one,
spends as much as five million dollars a year on cooperative programs with
