There is an ongoing debate on “what is education for?” in the US. Some would say we don’t need “well rounded” citizens as the “liberal arts” college education says it attempts to provide to US society. They would rather consider education to be almost entirely a matter of preparation to fulfill “job” requirements.
Presumably we actually need both, for many reasons. One of which is that “critical thinking” is not a “specific single task” oriented kind of learning, as job prep might be. Another is that the job prep of today may well not be applicable to the jobs of tomorrow. OTOH, there’s an apparent shortage of capable workers being turned out by the US educational system.
“A child born today in the USA has a 50:50 chance of reaching 104. Some will live much longer.”
No doubt, the complexities of the above will drive and motivate what the US creates as “education” in the coming years. Here’s one of those articles on the “great workplace challenge, attempting to foresee what is needed.
Steve LeVine posted this to Axios on 4.25/18:
What’s going on: In researching the future of work, the Pearson-Oxford team began with a question — if a child were starting school today, what skills would he or she ideally learn in order to be ready for a possibly century-long career (the list they came up with is below)?
Among their conclusions:
- Future students need to accumulate deep knowledge, as well as skills. This diverges from a common assumption that it’s sufficient to know how to look up detail on the Internet. “You need the knowledge so you can build on it to know the next thing,” Kumar said.
- STEM skills will be ultra-useful, but must be twinned with people skills like psychology or anthropology. “Being a great coder will get you a job in 2018. But to sustain you till 2030, you need more skills,” he said.
- It’s impossible for a child to learn all the necessary higher-order skills even with an eight-year graduate university education. Instead, people will return to college again and again to refresh their mind.