Passage Four
Despite a cooling of the economy, high technology companies are still crying out for skilled workers. The Information Technology Association of America projects that more than 800 000 technology jobs will go unfilled next year. The lack of qualified workers poses a huge threat to the U. S. economy.
The most commonly cited reason for this state of affairs is that the country’s agrarian-age education system, separated from the needs of the business world, fails to prepare students in the primary and secondary grades for twenty-first-century work. Yet an inadequate and outmoded education system is only part of the problem. A less tangible but equally powerful cause is an antique classification system that divides the workforce into two camps: white-collar knowledge workers and blue-collar manual laborers.
Blue-collar workers emerged in the United States during the Industrial Age as work migrated from farms to factories. White-collar office workers became a significant class in the twentieth century, outnumbering their blue-collar brethren by mid-century. But the white or blue paradigm has clearly outlived its utility. Corporations increasingly require a new layer of knowledge worker: a highly skilled multi-disciplinarian who combines the mind of the white-collar worker with the hands of the blue-collar employee. Armed with a solid grounding in mathematics and science (physics, chemistry and biology), these "gold-collar" workers--so named for their contributions to their companies and to the economy, as well as for their personal earning ability—apply that knowledge to technology. Of course, the gold-collar worker already exists in a wide range of jobs across a wide range of businesses: think of the maintenance technician who tests and repairs aircraft systems at American Airlines; the network administrator who manages systems and network operations at P＆G; the advanced-manufacturing technician at Intel.
But until American business recognizes these people as a new class of worker, one whose collar is neither blue nor white, demands that schools do a better job of preparing employees for the twenty-first-century workforce will be futile. Certainly, polytechnic high schools, colleges, and universities have made heroic efforts to teach workers new skills. But because many people see these initiatives as primarily training blue-collar workers, adequate funds are not invested in such programs, leaving them short of state-of-the-art tools and experienced teachers. And because gold-collar workers need to constantly update their skills to stay current with emerging technology, learning must be a continuous process, one that is funded by companies as well as by taxpayers. |
To increase the number of gold-collar workers, ______.
A．the schools should assume the major responsibilities
B．experienced teachers should not be short of current tools
C．the society should consider them as new layer of working classes
D．the taxpayer should pay more money to afford the continuous training
