LOG OPEN - 12.9.2008, 2:00pm

 

Jim, I do not want you to use that word "workforce" -you must change your vocabulary and say "creative force." And, "...this generation of children is the light speed generation.... They think, act and communicate in a parallel universe at the speed of light... This generation will take us to Mars; however, they need help."

Kane was the principal forecaster of the US Air Force's "Project Forecast" during the 1960's under General Bernard Schriever. Kane is now the President of the Schriever Institute and at 90 years young, he is a marvel.

  

As President of the Schriever Institute, Dr. Kane spends his days writing, thinking, emailing and occasionally speaking about the imperative of the Mars Mission. Without a doubt, he is the shepherd of the living legacy of General Bernard Schriever (1910-2005). Schriever gave the famous "space speech" on February 15, 1957 foreshadowing the launch of Sputnik October of that year and later Schriever became the space and technology leader of the US Air Force. 

 

 

According to Dr. Kane, the US is at a strategic inflection point which was developmentally understood by his forecast team in the 1960's. Essentially, once the US "stops innovating within a strategic mission envelope, stops looking forward while solving today's problems, stops recruiting global talent, stops cooperating, stops classical education married to scientific and technological progress, stops concurrently investing in technologies developed by academia and the market.... the US position in advanced technology research and commercialization becomes distributed around the world-wealth along with it."

Dr. Kane, in his usual spirit of cooperation and encouragement, turned to me and asked, "Jim, how can your career technology education excel the development of human capital necessary for the Mars Mission and US global economic sustainability?"

I told Dr. Kane that like General Schriever's "concurrency," CTE is evolving to a model which fosters creativity for the future while building capacity for our immediate needs. Concurrency management is a technique of solving today's problems while looking to the future-specifically it involves multiple parallel, competing and collaborating teams developing advanced solutions simultaneously. I then shared the story of the Los Altos Academy of Engineering, a CTE program, under the La Puente Valley Regional Occupational Program in Los Angeles which has created a 1,000 mpg Fuel Cell car for a Shell energy competition and a new entry for the DARPA Urban Challenge (an autonomous Scion robot). Team photo courtesy of Los Altos Academy of Engineering PR man Ed.