“Just like there was an industrial age that dictated what kind of jobs there were, we now live in an information age,” Cantwell, a Democrat, said. “The technology in the U.S. will only last so long if you don’t continue to invent and get the next generation of technology.”

Cantwell and a panel of 12 area educators and business and community leaders crammed onto a stage and batted around ideas for more than two hours.

The discussion tended toward alarming statistics — Cantwell noted that of the 300,000 computer scientists hired yearly, just 70,000 are American-educated.

Hiring so many foreigners isn’t bad, Cantwell said, but the recent debate about immigration has slowed the flow of educated outsiders to the United States.

“The U.S. said, ‘Give me the best and the brightest,’  ” she said. “I want to continue that, but I want to do a much, much better job of training the U.S. work force.”

The conversation also veered toward big ideas — math instruction, job retention programs and online learning.

Cantwell has some experience in the nascent period of the information age; in the late 1990s, she worked as an executive for RealNetworks in Seattle.

Rep. Deb Wallace, D-Vancouver, said that 2.4 percent of students at four-year universities take Internet-based courses, and that 8 percent of community college students participate in this burgeoning new movement called e-learning.

Victor Sullivan, a junior at Washington State University Vancouver, got a curious smile out of Cantwell when he asked her what she thought of businesses developing model online classrooms.

She hadn’t thought of asking information technology companies to come up with classroom models, she said.

Cantwell criticized the education system, saying it must change for progress to occur.

“Some people have said it’s not even in the industrial age, it’s in the agrarian age,” she said.

Math teachers Marta Gray of Vancouver Public Schools and Dan Dempsey of Clover Park School District, near Tacoma, encouraged Cantwell to examine the National Math Report of March 13.

“We need scientific, researched, peer-reviewed, actually proven effective programs,” Gray said. 

Washington state is in the midst of a dispute over which mathematics standards to adopt.

Panelists Tim Probst and Lisa Nisenfeld of the Washington Work Force Association talked about skills workers need.

“The global pace is really picking up and our nation is really distracted right now,” Probst said. “We put out 1.2 million college graduates right now. In 1999, China put out half that many. In 2005, they put out twice that many. And China is just one example.”

Nisenfeld, executive director of the Southwest Washington Work Force Association, said workers at the highest levels require skills as much as recent graduates.

“These programs are going to be really important as we retain those people so that we don’t have a large cadre of working poor,” Nisenfeld said.

Cantwell argued for a “G.I. Bill for life, not just for 10 years.” She said people who have lost their jobs should receive money to be retrained.

She said that she supports “lifelong learning accounts.”

“I know we can do it,” Cantwell said. “We have to make an investment in job training.”

Isolde Raftery can be reached at 360-735-4546 or isolde.raftery@columbian.com.