Angus King and Surviving a "Flat" World

Former Maine Governor Angus King delivered a keynote speech at the Maine Science Teachers Association annual conference in Gardiner on Friday that both troubled and rallied the audience.

Former Maine Governor King

Troubling were the statistics that King shared on the wage differential between so-called "First World" and "Third World" labor markets, a differential which entices corporations to outsource labor. You're probably thinking that you already know this, but King pointed out that we're not only talking about sneaker manufacturing here. He recounted how a late-night visit to an emergency room in a Maine hospital led to a real-time reading of his x-ray by a radiologist in Australia. Australia? Art, law, science, customer services, and teaching - in addition to manufacture - it's all being outsourced.

In short, following Friedman's "The World is Flat," King emphasized that our short- and long-term futures will be shaped by our ability to adapt quickly to rapid changes of our global economy and technological innovations. As Jared Diamond would no doubt agree, there is no guarantee that the United States will remain a global leader, just because this has been true over the past several decades. So how do we respond to this reality?

Workshop at Seashore Trolley Museum

Rallying was King's assertion that one key to a prosperous future is the ability to "learn learning" or learn how to learn. Learning-how-to-learn is in marked contrast to the memorization of assigned content or even than achieving a perfect score on a standardized test. Learning how to learn means understanding that "knowledge" is created and that each of us is an active participant in that process. As King argued, comfort with active creation of knowledge is all the more crucial in a digital age where more information is available to us than at any other time in human history.

Seashore Trolley Museum exhibit at MSTA

Along with Johan Erikson of St. Joseph's College, I ran a professional development workshop at the MSTA conference on behalf of Seashore Trolley Museum's STEM (Science-Technology-Education-Math) education program. Meanwhile, Phil Morse staffed an exhibitor's table that showcased the quality of the Museum's gallery exhibit, the transportation history lesson plans available on the Museum's website, and children's literature, such as Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, associated with our civil rights mobile bus exhibit.

The Museum's STEM program advocates for raising citizens who are comfortable with technological design skills, particularly those related to the transportation industry. Teaching design skills means advocating for the inquiry-based learning model that must preface the type of educational approach for which King advocated.