America, once the bastion of education and technology, is letting its future slip away as it watches Asia and Europe roll with the changes, a internationally known education reformer told more than 500 Bangor School Department employees Tuesday morning.

The presentation by Willard Daggett was part of the Bangor school system’s 1990 Teacher Academy being held this week.

Daggett’s presentation, one of three scheduled this week in the Bangor area, was a sobering look at where America stands in education and the uncertain future it faces if changes are not made.

The director of occupational education instruction for New York, Daggett has spoken in all 50 states about the future of work and education in America.

This country has a great system of education if we were still in the 1950s, he said, but times have changed and American education has not kept up.

Forty years ago, 73 percent of all jobs were in production and manufacturing, with 63 percent of the jobs being unskilled positions. In 1989, production represented 18 percent of all jobs and a staggering 70 percent of those jobs required skilled workers.

And technology is expected to advance four times as fast in the next decade as it has in the past four decades.

“I wonder if our kids are ready for that,” he said. “I wonder what we’re doing about that.”

New technology is replacing fast-food restaurant employees with an automated system that can deliver a hamburger cooked and prepared to the customer’s specifications in 13 seconds. And fiber optics can transmit 5 million words around the globe in five seconds.

Every aspect of American life is changing rapidly, while only smaller steps are being made in education. While education reform has been promoted in the last two decades, these changes have only served to further the heritage of American education and not its future.

For example, when Citibank Corp. went looking for employees to run its automatic teller machines last year, it found no one in America who was qualified. Instead, the company hired 1,800 Europeans with no more than a high school education. And they are being paid four times the salary of cashiers, who were replaced by the ATMs.

Despite these changes, American education has not bothered to figure out what it will need to meet the country’s changing needs, he said. Trigonometry, for instance, is still on the mathematics pedestal, when Daggett says it will not be needed in the future. Instead, schools need to teach more problem solving, logic, statistics and applied sciences.