Education today should prepare for shocking careers of tomorrow
The top 25 jobs of the future don’t even exist yet. Of course we want education to prepare people for the future workplace. The problem is that history has proven that the top jobs of one decade were non-existent jobs just a few decades earlier. This makes sense; it’s the newest skills that are in the highest demand because the older sector of the workforce cannot provide the skills based on experience.
In each generation, college recruiters give us a good sense of how divergent the coming generation is from previous generations. And today, kids are earning scholarships to play on video game teams. Gaming companies leverage their huge cash reserves to create a new type of professional athlete, and in response, colleges are able to recruit gamers like they recruit athletes.
So how can homeschoolers use these trends? You can’t prepare kids for specific jobs, but you can prepare them to choose jobs where they’ll find success.
Help your kids learn to be passionate about what they do. It’s always been the case that we are happiest doing something we are passionate about. To figure out where a kid’s passions are, get a good sense of what fulfillment means to that kid. Each of us has personality proclivities and with sixteen types of personalities, there are at least sixteen possibilities for the circumstances that create fulfillment. These proclivities are true for even young kids and it’s essential for you to help your kids find that in themselves.
Education today should not be focused on becoming well-rounded—that’s what we used to do; well-roundedness was intended to make people more valuable for factory work. Today, we value people over machines, and we educate people to do what they are most capable of doing, rather than what a machine most needs help doing.
Help your kids to learn to specialize. John-Paul Ferguson, professor at Stanford University provides a wide-sweeping summary of data that shows that people who specialize earn more money later in their career. But he also shows that very early specialization, while not necessarily correlating to higher pay early in one’s career, does correlate as a signal of future success.
Pleasure and specialization are related both in your work and your personal life. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published research about specializing in his book Flow. From that we know that when we are most engaged we are happiest, and expertise promotes engagement.
The diamond industry discovered that the link between specialized knowledge and pleasure is true for more than just our work. The Atlantic magazine shows that the history of diamond pricing is actually the history of educating the consumer about diamonds. Some consumers find pleasure in purchasing diamonds based on color, but there are a wide range of other expertise to teach consumers, like diamond shapes, that will also create a pleasurable diamond buying experience.
It’s not surprising that consumer research can inform education strategies. The point of education is to make us feel good about ourselves, and, ironically, that is also the point of consumerism.
These past blog posts have been really good. I have enjoyed the view points, and the many things to learn. I think a good post can also be judged by how often the reader returns to read and think about things, and I have returned the past several days to read your words. Wonderful job!
I might add that specializing on purpose is more important than generic specialization. I have a very specialized role and was initially very engaged, but over time, the novelty of the specialization wore off. Now I am on a journey where I am learning what specialization I am actually willing and able to monetize over the long haul.
Sounds challenging if not impossible to me… we don’t know what the top jobs will be… but specialize – it’s good for you! But I totally agree with the importance of following your Passion, in fact I have seen some great examples of people who, through following their passion, developed amazing marketable skills very desirable in other areas such as analytical skills developed in geography to marketing, bird watching to data mining…
If all we are, are conduits to passion for our kids, we’ve done our job.
I love this post. With all our technological advancements and changing landscape I wonder if our future will be more dystopian than we are prepared for. This makes unschooling even more relevant.
“Education today should not be focused on becoming well-rounded—that’s what we used to do; well-roundedness was intended to make people more valuable for factory work.”
An interesting statement on this blog post ( https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2014/05/08/schools-as-factories-metaphors-that-stick/ ) regarding the metaphor of schools as factories – “The metaphor serves the interests of BOTH contemporary advocates and critics of standardized curriculum and instruction.” Maybe that statement holds true for many other metaphors as well – both sides can use it to argue their position.
Additionally, I believe everybody learns differently and at a different rate. So I’m with Lisa Nielsen. If school isn’t working out, there’s even more reasons to homeschool with a curriculum that’s just “well-rounded” enough to satisfy individual needs. I envision “well-roundedness” as a spectrum to be tailored differently on different subjects of interest and need.
In fact, at all times the task of schools was not to give certain information, but to teach people to collect and analyze information. Obviously, that the information which is given in schools and colleges become obsolete after a few years out of college / school. So the only hope that students will get the skills of self development during this time.