by William Grant
Executive Director, PRIDE/NY WEBCenter
A recent report said more IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) were issued in China last year than in the US and Great Britain combined. It’s a signal that intellectual and financial capital are flowing there, and one more indicator that the hand of the West may be slipping from the reins of world supremacy.
Scary, no matter your politics or race, for it means change.
What’s your contribution, if you’re an educator who can’t get students to stick the apostrophe in the right place in this sentence? (“What’s your contribution if you’re an educator who can’t . . . .”)
At New York WEB Center, our solution is to give them a job! We put the students to work as journalists, videographers, studio engineers, recording artists, producers and anything else we can think of.
In a changing world, ideas are still powerful and meaningful. There’s not a robot yet that can think as creatively as the most recalcitrant student in one of our classes.
Not every student has a vocation for college, though that is the tilt of our public school system. (Start a list of current world heavies who did not graduate college – begin with Bill Gates, Microsoft and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook.) We need entrepreneurs, people who can make things happen, develop vocations, turn an initiative into a product.
They get that at the WEB Center. They also get plenty of elbowing and encouragement about academics. Yet, our faith in ideas and innovation is how we compete, and it has to be reinforced with practice.
We want to encourage a student to explore his creativity to come up with a better mousetrap – or maybe even the next Facebook.
