Are we educating teens for disappearing jobs?

Students graduating high school today will be part of a technological revolution that is vanquishing industries over night. Uber is replacing taxi drivers; Airbnb is decimating hotel reservations; Drones may soon deliver your packages. As President Obama noted in his State of the Union address this week: “Today, technology doesn’t just replace jobs on the assembly line, but any job where work can be automated.”

Have high schools responded to these seismic shifts? Are schools turning out kids capable of thriving in a take-no-prisoners economy where any job in which you just follow instructions will eventually be taken over by a computer?

A noted venture-capitalist-turned-education-reformer says no.

Co-author of the acclaimed “Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Age,” Ted Dintersmith says the economy has moved from manufacturing where an ability to follow instructions mattered to innovation where an ability to lead change is essential. Rather than changing to reflect this new reality, high schools have taken the same obsolete system and decided to follow it more intensely and test more intensely, he says.

To read more, go to the AJC Get Schooled blog on MyAJC.com

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