> There seems to be a myth that was told growing up that the "USA leads the world in education!!!"
Where did you hear that rubbish?
I feel reasonably well-served by my K-12 schools, but never real stimulated.
I dropped out of college because I was not learning -anything-. That's not a general indictment of US higher ed... it was a unique time and place and I'm an atypical learner. But in general I felt that the college was not serving the students as good as it could, and I felt that in some small way the students could be better served with me working for the college.
> comparison to the education systems found in many other parts of the word
Any middle-class US child who does not fall into the gutter will probably get "some" middle-class job and life. It has been argued that the main function of US higher-ed is to keep the wild animals off the street until they grow-up enough to hold a serious job.
In Trinidad, they know they need GOOD education (not just math but also deportment) to have any hope of a middle-class lifestyle. School is not a parking lot, it is the path to the EXIT.
We don't have to educate seriously. They do.
> the IT sector
I see jobs that need 7 years experience in fields that started 5 years ago (idiot HR re-writes), or in fields I have never heard of. Can you automate an entire national trucking operation?
But there's also the 2-brain-cell jobs in Customer Support. Yes, some of this has gone to India, though some came back. Yes, they like applicants with certificates and experience; but some shops are in need of any warm body. True, some phone-support jobs pay so little that they can't expect good help like you.
I see whole retail streets empty this month. Compared to that catastrophe, IT is not doing so bad.
Perhaps because some of the over-expectations in IT got damped-out in that dot.com bust. And perhaps transferred into over-expectation in speculative derivatives backed by 'safe' mortgages. Which, instead of undercutting a fledgling industry, has undercut all economic activity.
> the rapid acceleration of technology which Ray Kurzweil has referred to as Moore's law???
Ray, like Toffler and McLuhan, is an attention-hound. Read that stuff for trends, but don't believe the path and pace they predict is sure to happen. They don't know; but given a choice between a dull and an exciting prediction, they know which to put in the book.
It has also been argued that the "pace of technology" has really been fairly constant for centuries; just that we discount the shock of change which has passed while being overwhelmed by the change we are going through.
And what is our yardstick? Is a nano-bot more revolutionary than a superhet? Nonobots won't really happen until they can be put-together from available parts. In 1905, you could not put-together a coil and a tube, in 1925 it could be done, in 1935 it was a cottage industry using stock parts. Today I can't buy a nano-machine, but I see where the techniques to do so are coming down from dreams to tabletop tools. Maybe in 2040 I'll buy a bottle of n'bots, a software library, add a few lines of code, drink the bottle, and have my name glow on my forehead. Well, not me, but all the kids will be doing it when they should be studying. And their little sister will think it is so old-hat and boring.
> how do I and others (if possible) "keep up" with the rapid growth
This is NOT a problem. Growth is not forced upon us. Growth happens BECAUSE it is easy. In 1750 it was hard for two thinkers to get together. Changes in agriculture and sanitation allowed the growth of dense cities, and ideas got cross-fertilized. Steel, wire. Transport and telephone. Look at a telephone network fact: if you double the number of phones, you have FOUR times the possible connections. The ten-fold growth in communication due to dense cities and telephones meant 100 times better chance that a partial idea would run into its missing piece. The internet has opened some new ways that ideas can get around. But what is really happening is that complexity has got easier. You put in the same "keep up" effort, and you get further.
Moore's Law does have legs. And has been true longer than legs have existed. Drop a bacteria in a drop of sugar-water. It sees "infinite" food, grows, splits. Its child sees infinite food and grows. Each generation grows at maximum rate..... until the colony hits the edge of the drop. That last generation faces shortage and famine. Reproduction switches from budding to gene-swaps, because that increases the chance of some child prospering somewhere else.
Steel used to be VERY expensive. The guys in Damascus needed a month to hammer a sword out of red dirt, say $20K/pound. Later puddled-iron processes got the cost down to $20/pound, so it could be used for hinges and tools. Growth of tools and population opened-up demand and thus development capital. Guys in Birmingham and Pittsburgh would do headstands to make iron a buck cheaper than the other guy, price-war. It went down quick to like $0.20/pound, which is pretty-much the floor for the amount of effort needed to make steel. And like bacteria, steelmakers had to change their ways, from price-war to price-fixing.
Moore, apparently on his own, observed that chip density was doubling, with a generation-rate near 18 months. Looking back, performance/cost of tubes and transistors did a similar thing, and maybe similar rate: in 1928 a loud-speaking radio was $400, in 1938 you could get one for $10.
Such a trend can not continue to infinity (in a universe as we know it). However it sure can fall down many-many decades of cost/density/population before hitting the edge of the drop. And a lot of smart people have under-estimated the changes which become "easy" when density increases by an order of magnitude in a few years. My old mind would boggle if I knew all that happens inside an iPhone... but thanks to increased cross-fertilization, "anybody" can find the tools to make a machine that complicated. Pop a linux live-CD in a $300 PC. Making a machine that compact is a bit tougher, but you can easily find shops to work on your design, and they can easily find sources of the smallest parts and shops who fabricate small gizmos.