Questions with...
Thompson Professor and Academic Dean Richard Murnane
Thompson Professor and Academic Dean Richard Murnane
(Photo by Andrew Brilliant/Brilliant Pictures, Inc.)
Q:What is the biggest challenge facing education today?
A: The American economy has changed, and continues to change, rapidly. Because I'm an economist, I'm most aware of these changes. I'd say the biggest challenge is preparing young people with the skills and attitudes and knowledge that they'll need to adapt and, indeed, thrive. The jobs that provided work for high school graduates 30 years ago--primarily blue-collar jobs for males and back-office clerical jobs for females--are rapidly disappearing, mostly as a result of computerization and outsourcing. There are new jobs, but these new jobs require new and more demanding skills.
Q: How do schools need to respond to these changes?
A: While there have been many changes in the workplace, the biggest one is the omnipresence of computers. Employment in the years ahead is going to involve doing the work that computers are not good at doing.
[There are two] kinds of tasks that don't lend themselves to computerization. One is what [MIT Professor of urban economics] Frank Levy and I call "expert thinking," which is identifying and solving new problems. And the second is what we call "complex communication," which conveys not just information but a particular interpretation of information. Those are the kinds of tasks that computers are not good at, and they're also the kinds of tasks that are of extraordinary importance in the high-wage jobs in this country.
As I see it, the challenge for our schools is to have all students become more effective at this nonroutine problem-solving and complex communication. I'm not suggesting that we add these as new subjects to the curriculum, by any means. Rather, they should be at the core of the pedagogy that you use to teach the subjects that are already in the curriculum, the basic subjects of literacy, math, science, or social studies.
Q: Have schools responded to the advent of computers too narrowly?
A: Very much so. I think schools have tended to see teaching computer skills as a subject that is separated from instruction in the core subjects--and that's not what you want to do. The key challenge for schools is to use computers to help people in their problem-solving and complex communication. Computer teaching needs to be a part of instruction in the core subjects. I think people often would agree on that in the rhetoric, but when you go and look at practice, it's far from [the reality].
Q: As an economist, your emphasis is on preparing people to succeed in a rapidly changing economy. But shouldn't our schools also be worrying about preparing people to be good citizens in a pluralistic democracy?
A: That's absolutely right, and the country faces a host of problems and there are enormous challenges. How do you participate constructively in finding a solution to those pressing problems? Well, it requires the same skills I spoke of earlier: communications, expert thinking, and the ability to understand new problems and think about them in creative ways. These rapid changes in the economy have brought the kind of skills you need for good citizenship and the kind of skills you need to earn a good living much closer together.
Q: If you walked into a classroom 30 years from now, what would be the major difference?
A: I don't know the answer to that. And more than that, if anyone felt he or she was sure of the answer to that, I'd hold on to my wallet. I say this from the perspective of an economist who has done a lot of looking at labor market projections. Take a look at things that determined quality of life in 1960 and compare it to today. An awful lot of the things that have changed our lives, for better or for worse, were not a part of life 40 years ago. And there's every reason to believe that sort of change will continue.
Q:Why have you chosen to work at the Ed School as opposed to a business school or an economics department?
A: There are several reasons. First, I've had a deep interest in education for a long time. Both my parents are public-school educators. When I started doing economics, I found myself drawn to the economics of education. All the books I've written are about the economics of education. The attractiveness of the Harvard Graduate School of Education is several parts. One is to be able to make the case to students who are not going to be economists, but are going to be professional educators, that the tools of economics are helpful in solving different educational problems. This is something I very much enjoy doing and think is valuable.
Second, having colleagues who know about aspects of education that are important to the work I want to do, but that are different from economics, is very valuable to me. For example, a key piece of my last book examines how humans accomplish tasks, and how that is different from the way computers accomplish tasks. Well, those are ideas at the forefront of cognitive science. And people at the Ed School--[Bigelow Professor] Kurt Fischer, [Professor] David Perkins, [Hobbs Professor] Howard Gardner, [Shattuck Professor] Catherine Snow--were invaluable in helping me understand those ideas.
And third, Harvard is a wonderful place for an economist. The Harvard Labor Economics group is deeply interested in education. I learn a lot from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is in Cambridge. It's great to have access to the very best economic thought, and also an opportunity to learn from the people whose expertise is in other fields that are central to my doing useful research on the economics of education.
Q: What's more important, teaching a student to do math, or teaching a student how to use a calculator?
A: That depends upon what you mean by teaching a student to do math. Any task you can describe, you can write down as a series of computations. Computers can do those much, much better than any humans can. The challenge is in new problems-- being able to structure the problem so you can figure out what arithmetic or mathematics needs to be done. That's the creative part. And if that's what you mean by doing math, then it's the math that's important.
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2005 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
For More Information
More information about Richard Murnane is available in the Faculty Profiles.
