Discovering Ideas

Purposes of the Course

I've asked you to think about what your learning goals are for this course--what the purposes of the course are for you individually. Some of what you had to say about that might be similar to the purposes I'm going to talk about here. Some might be different. The following discussion of the purposes of the course is not intended to limit your own goals, just to help you think about them by starting a discussion of what we might achieve in such a course. In the end, I can not impose goals on you, and I won't try. The only goals you can achieve are the ones you set for yourself. But you might be able to set your own goals better if you understand more about the context of your learning and the challenges you are likely to meet in the future.

We already discussed the fact that most college students are seeking to get a good job--or a better one. If your goal is not just to get work, but to keep it and succeed in it, what does that take?  What does it take in order to succeed in rewarding, satisfying work, other than specialized knowledge in a particular field?

As a matter of fact, that question has been studied a great deal and we can find fairly reliable answers to it. Frank Levy and Richard Murnane are economists at MIT and Harvard respectively.  In their 2004 book The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market, they analyzed the changes in the workplace.  Today people do different kinds of jobs than they did twenty years ago, and the work they do on those jobs is different too.  While many factors have affected these changes, the major factor has been the wider use of the digital computer.  To summarize, the kinds of jobs that can be done by a computer have either disappeared or radically changed.  The kinds of jobs that cannot be computerized have grown in both number and value.  And with their growing sophistication, computers can do more things than they used to.  In the language of economics, computers can substitute for some forms of human labor by replacing the human worker and accomplishing the same task.  But computers complement other forms of human labor by extending the range or accuracy of the human worker, whose contribution is still essential to the accomplishment of the task. Companies used to hire bookkeepers, for example, whose work consisted mainly of doing calculations.  Computers have almost completely substituted for people in that kind of work.  Computers, Levy and Murnane argue, can substitute for human workers in any task that can be described by a set of rules: a task that can be fully described by rules is a strong candidate for computer substitution.  By contrast, computers can recognize patterns only in fairly restricted situations—those that don’t present complex perceptual problems and have only modest requirements for background knowledge.  Jobs that require complex pattern recognition remain a largely human domain

There are two categories of “higher order tasks” that rely heavily on the sort of complex pattern recognition and rich understanding of contextual elements that are beyond the reach of computers:   The first are tasks that involve solving new problems—problems that cannot be solved by applying well-understood rules.  The second are tasks that require explanation, negotiation, persuasion, and other forms of intense human interaction. Levy and Murnane call these two sets of tasks expert thinking and complex communication. 

Levy and Murnane document the trend toward this kind of work in terms of both the mix of jobs in the economy and the kinds of work that people do on their jobs.  They analyzed the jobs listed in the U. S. Department of Labor’s Dictionary of Occupational Titles (which lists thousands of kinds of work covering nearly everything you could get paid for) in terms of their skill content and traced the changes in employment in those jobs from 1960 to 1999.  They found that, not surprisingly, jobs involving manual labor had decreased both in raw numbers and as a proportion of all jobs.  But they also found that work consisting mainly of routine "mental" work—such as maintaining expense reports, evaluating mortgage applications, and recording and filing new insurance information—had declined dramatically.  In the same period, jobs requiring expert thinking or complex communication had increased substantially.  Furthermore, the nature of many jobs had changed.  Accountants, who used to spend a bulk of their time doing fairly routine calculations, now spend the bulk of their time communicating with clients and doing financial planning.  But because the computer adds value to the accountant’s work, both the number and the salaries of accountants have increased, even though what used to be their chief work is largely done by computers.  Technology has changed and will continue to change the nature of work.  Levy and Murnane conclude that   the major consequence of computerization will not be mass unemployment, but a continued decline in the demand for moderately skilled and less skilled labor.  Job opportunities will grow, but job growth will be greatest in the higher skilled occupations in which computers complement expert thinking and complex communication to produce new products and services.  (p. 152)

The purpose of this course is to prepare you to better exercise the kinds of skills that will almost certainly determine your ability to succeed at doing important and highly rewarded work, now and in the future.  Specifically, you will be engaged in complex communication, addressing and audience of critical readers and using the communication skills that allow you to make your case persuasively and effectively.  You will be engaged in expert thinking: discovering, through reading and discussion, problems and attempting to analyze them. 

In other words, the purpose of this course is to develop precisely those skills that we all need in order to succeed in college and then to do important work and to take on increasing responsibility in life.

I'd like to hear your thoughts and ideas on the purposes of the course.

Work Cited

Levy, Frank, and Richard J. Murnane.  The New Division of Labor: How computers Are Creating the Next Job Market.  New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004.

Discovering Ideas
Palomar College
jtagg@palomar.edu
This page was last edited: 01/05/09