Is our children learning

Published on 4/27/2007 in Profound Thoughts. Comments

Yesterday was Take Our Children To Work Day. Well, every day is take our children to work day here at Marketing Begins At Home World HQ.

Web Worker Daily got me thinking about this in a post from Wednesday.

(W)e have no idea what the working world will look like in five, ten, or twenty years when our children enter it. Could my parents have told me that pro-blogging offered a fun and satisfying way to fund my web surfing? Did any previous generations imagine all the crazy ways we might be able to make money online?

Full post here.

In my own case, my job title – Social Media Consultant – didn’t even exist five years ago. So the question remains, is anything we’re doing with the next generation of workers preparing them for a world of work we can’t even imagine?

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  • Trying to teach kids the latest tech in school is a losing game, I think, and I get distressed whenever a tech executive/guru complains that if only our classrooms were more wired (with their products, usually) we'd be better off.

    Critical thinking and historical perspective on how we've gotten where we are are timeless things. Someone who knows how to observe, think, ask question, and form hypotheses and test them is going to be well equipped for most things that come her way. Someone who knows how to dig into data (of any kind) with some depth, rather than cruise to Wikipedia and take notes, is going to be a bigger asset in any organization than the peer who's wired to the max but not a great thinker.

    What is most striking to me about education is that the way people were taught in the past often seems better than what's going on now. One of the best thinkers I know (my partner) got a classic education (liberal arts and hard science together) before going off into graduate work, and easily moved from being a scientist to a software product manager. He knows how to think.

    Technology can, if anything, distract from that.
  • On the one hand, there are mad Interweb skillz to hone -- which kids (or potentially anybody) will do on their own if they have the inkling. On the other hand, there are the timeless, "deep" skills . . .

    Listening
    Treating others humanely
    Stopping to think
    Being willing to imagine wildly
    Asking questions, finding out more, and then asking more and better questions.

    Et cetera. When I'm at my best, my own focus with my kids is on these long-duration skills. I figure they'll learn their tech (etc.) chops on the fly, based on whatever the current need is.

    I hardly need to tell you that working from home is a *huge* benefit in exposing your children to your own ways of using deep, long-run human skills.
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