Two Lessons to Prepare Your Children for the World of Tomorrow
Photo Credits: Nick Otto.
As an educator and as a mother, here is what I know: the standard school curriculum is not preparing our children for the world of tomorrow. Why do I think this?
Climate change is radically transforming our environment and our daily lives.
New jobs will swiftly arise from technologies still to be invented.
Growing partnerships between humans and machines/algorithms require new skills.
Lifespans are increasing, likely leading to longer careers and multigenerational teams.
Socioemotional skills are going to be crucial to keep humans at the center of our new technologies and applications.
The pace of change will continue to accelerate, meaning that lifelong learning is essential.
As teachers, innovators, business leaders, and parents, we all have important roles to play in preparing young people—and ourselves!—for the future. So, what should we be teaching our kids? I have two answers—an easy one and a hard one.
Lesson 1: Teach your kids to code
The easy one is: teach your kids to code, especially your girls.
As the world becomes ever more dependent on technology, it is crucial that we have as much diversity, creativity, and representation as possible in the teams that are developing these technologies, in the regulators who oversee them, and in the citizens whose daily lives include these technologies (invited or otherwise).
Lesson 2: Teach your kids to love learning!
The students of Ransom Everglades showing Dr. Tiffany Vora their farmbot after a talk. Photo Credits: Nick Otto.
The second, more difficult answer is: teach your kids to love learning!
To appreciate grappling with knotty ideas and unwieldy problems. To embrace the ongoing need for new skills and new mindsets. To never be satisfied with what they understand today (or think they understand!), and to relish the anticipation of what they will begin to understand tomorrow.
💡 To seek out people who think differently, live differently, dream differently, and to have the courage to enrich their own lives with some of those differences.
Dr. Martin Luther King once said, "Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate."
The coming years and decades will be chock full of challenges, some trivial and some worthy indeed. To meet these challenges, we need to recognize that learning does not just happen in a room or on a screen. True education happens all day, every day, whenever we follow our imaginations to a solution. Let’s teach our children to be the designers, builders, agitators, and dreamers of tomorrow. And let’s show them how it’s done, by embracing a learner’s mindset in all parts of our lives.
