Should We Really Be Focusing on College?

How would you feel if a teacher told your kids that they didn’t have to go to school to make a living or be happy? Or that they could make plenty of money without going to college?  As a teacher and fervent proponent of education, this certainly makes me squirm a little bit.  As someone who has spent many thousands of my own dollars learning through traditional coursework, and getting quite a bit out of it, it is certainly difficult to begin to see that things may be changing.  If they haven’t figured it out already, and many have, students can in fact find most of what they need to learn on the internet and much of it for free.  If school isn’t going to become obsolete, we need to start changing course with these new conditions.  This is both petrifying and exhilarating at the same time.

What will a job look like?

Careers will take on a whole new meaning for children growing up today.  Many of the jobs that students used to look forward to, don’t exist anymore.  They have either been automated or are unnecessary.  While I think most people can understand this in theory, I think it is harder to really understand what this means for the careers of the children we are teaching today? This means the children we have in our current high school classrooms will have the ability to create their own careers.  Careers that we don’t even know exist yet.  Ken Robinson argues this well in a lecture adapted here in animation . It is hard to imagine this when there are still many familiar jobs around us.  Especially for those of us who live in smaller cities or rural towns, there appear to be fewer visible examples of these less familiar jobs.   If one can identify a problem to solve, the internet offers global reach in terms of accessing those for whom the solution is needed.  But, they will also need to be extra creative because with this reach also comes immense competition.  Ideas are just as valuable as physical objects as well.

How can we help kids succeed in this new landscape?

So we need to be encouraging creative thinking, problem solving and maker structures in K-12 schools as much as possible.  Many times we might be inclined to laugh at a crazy idea a child comes up with or a possible invention.  To be honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge that most of us wouldn’t know how to encourage a student with an idea because we have not grown up in this age.   We need to be encouraging kid’s crazy ideas; encouraging them to take risks and if we don’t know what the next steps are then we need to help them find what the next steps are.  The purpose of school and our role as teachers is changing and our mindset needs to change with it.  Valuing a variety of types of learning is more important now.  It isn’t just about college.  It isn’t just about credits.  It’s about solving real problems, providing real services and having a real impact on the communities in which these kids live.

What skills should we focus on?

If children have the right skills, they will be  empowered to create new, more lucrative careers than are available to them in their immediate vicinity.  They will need to be self-directed, creative, and collaborative.  In addition to potentially being more lucrative, the opportunity to turn a passion into a career is another positive outcome. Check out some examples of young entrepreneurs  and what they have come up with.  And what do most of these young entrepreneurs have in common? They had help.  Usually parents or some other adult supported these creative minds.  So we need to change our mindsets for them.  We need to believe that they are capable and that there ideas are worthwhile.  We need to ask questions rather than push their ideas aside as frivolous and unimportant.  We need to create structures and opportunities for them to explore these ideas. And we have to learn how to help them do this.  We need to model more self-directed learning.

How do WE need to change?

We need to be constantly learning, not just taking our required, for credit, classes. Traditional options are still viable but they do not address the speed at which the world is changing.  Take a 15 week technology class and everything will have changed by the end of the course.  We have to be learning and implementing new ideas every day.  We need to be listening to podcasts, searching for online courses, performing action research in our classrooms, learning about new structures for instruction, all which help transform environments that digital natives can access and engage with. Because we were not taught to learn in a self-directed way and we may not have had the internet, this may be unfamiliar to us and many times it doesn’t come easily. We did not grow up needing these skills as much as they do (actually we did but nobody knew we would need these skills).  Check out the alternative inservice tab for more places to educate yourself.  If you rely on a lot of structure in your learning, check out my post on becoming more self-directed. We need to do better than our parents and teachers did. We need to predict the skills that our kids will need before we know for sure. Because we don’t know what skills may become valuable and because the economy is changing at such a rapid pace, it is all the more important that we choose skills that will stand the test of time.

Teaching kids to be creative problem solvers and self-directed learners will allow them to adapt and be flexible with the changes that come to their futures, no matter what they are.  As far as our mindset goes, we need to let go… a lot.  We need to start trusting that students will become intrinsically motivated to learn if we allow them to.  Remember, it might be messy at times.  You have a lot of management and instructional skills that you can draw on in times of need but let it get a little bit messy, not unproductive, but messy.  What are you doing to get where your students need you to be? What barriers are stopping you? Comment and share!