Our economy has changed, rapidly and irreversibly. Schools need to reflect that reality in how we approach education.
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As the summer nears, and the Aspen Ideas Festival approaches (some of us get really geeked out, really early on. Sorry), I’ve been thinking about education from a big-picture standpoint.
What is it, exactly, that our schools are meant to do? What are they supposed to achieve?
This seems like such a straightforward question, and I think it very often used to be followed with a straightforward answer.
Schools exist to provide young people with the skills they need to be productive, successful members of society.
There are other purposes from our past. If we are being honest, schools are a kind of child care for working parents. There’s no shame in admitting as much. The very first public school in England, The Ragged School, was begun by Thomas Barnardo, precisely because too many children were running “ragged” around London’s East End, unsupervised and falling prey to disease and crime.
But I wonder if our schools’ focus doesn’t need a shift.
Our society has been in the midst of gigantic transformation, and I’m not sure we fully appreciate all the factors upended in the process.
Far more students come from fluctuating families, many of which may not include a biological parent.
Far more students are homeless.
Far more students go “home” to an unstructured, unpredictable environment.
Far more students fall to the same technological distractions we adults struggle to keep under control.
And unfortunately, the primary message we’ve been sending is a student’s worth depends on his/her test scores and academic behavior/performance.
This is simply untenable.
Look, I’m someone who has absolutely no problem with measured standards. I’ve written an entire series in defense of standardized testing, just to prove it.
But when that – test scores – becomes the primary goal of our schools, and indeed our entire education system, then we have clearly missed the realities many of our students live in.
I had the chance to talk with an Uber drive on Sunday. He’s a refugee from Cuba, who has been living in Miami for twenty + years now.
We talked about how technology has transformed industry, how much of the political angst fueling both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders comes from people who have been most hurt by job losses and fewer opportunities due to this seismic shift in the employment landscape.
But we also acknowledged what a tremendous opportunity technology is, and how it can improve working conditions.
I remembered a good friend who, after having her first child, transitioned from working in the corporate world at an office, to working in the corporate world from home.
Technology made that change possible.
And I think that is the trend. If we look back in twenty years, we may be wondering why anyone designed work to be any other way. Office buildings will perhaps be transformed into schools, or residential units. Or maybe they will host group rentals, for those times when face-to-face communication is imperative.
In such a world, the most important skills, as my astute Uber driver pointed out, will be personal skills.
Leadership. Personal responsibility. Innovative, divergent thinking.
And while some schools do a decent job of incorporating these skill sets into their curriculum, far too many do not recognize the reality we are experiencing.
“Traditional” jobs may or may not be available by the time today’s kindergartners graduate from high school.
We owe them the honor of at least acknowledging this and attempting to use our commendable compulsory education system to prepare them for that reality.
Photo: Flickr/US Department of Education