Retooling the knowledge factory
Even in a world where rapidly growing rivals in Eastern Europe, China, India and elsewhere can fill manufacturing jobs more cheaply, Germany's industrial leaders say the business of making things still has a future in their country. But there is a catch. The educational system that produced thinkers like Albert Einstein and Max Planck, as well as the highly skilled work force that turned Germany into an economic dynamo after World War II, has to change, they say, to keep ahead of the lower-cost competition. If Germany is going to focus more on products that require brains and not brawn, then German education has to keep up, too. In short, business leaders say, more students have to get through the higher education system - and faster. They need to take with them a better sense that learning will be a part of whatever jobs they have - for a lifetime. Early on, German schools will have to prepare more children - especially the mmigrants who will help populate a low-birth-rate Germany - for success at the secondary level and beyond. Above all, Germany's economy will place a premium on students - future workers - who can quickly convert theory into practice and follow the example of Germans like Werner von Siemens, who proved his mettle as a scientist and a capitalist. "We're never going to be able to add more value without better education," said Heinrich Höfer, an education specialist with BDI, the main industry lobby group in the country. "Germans can still turn screwdrivers in the future, but only if they are using automated, computerized machines that we have designed here." One event helped to instigate the greater focus in business and government on training the future work force: the 2001 PISA study. The study, called the Program for International Student Assessment, was a major effort by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based in Paris, to intensively track how well individual countries were able to educate their primary and high school students at a basic level in reading, mathematics and natural sciences. Germany not only placed far behind several Asian and other European countries in the study; it fell well under the OECD average in all three categories. The shock rippled through politics and the media - even though it merely confirmed what many in business had argued for some time - and fired a sense of national urgency to improve education. "These years are a window of opportunity," said Wolf-Rainer Lowack, who was chosen by Hambrecht to lead the effort. "And it's a window that, when it's closed, cannot be reopened." That said, many German business leaders add that the key will be modifications and improvements to an educational system that, over all, has more strengths than weaknesses. "There is nowhere in the world where we can do it better than in Germany," Leibinger said.
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