There’s a lot of talk in the education world right now around how to best prepare students for an unknown future. This makes sense to me. The world is changing — socially and economically — at an unprecedented rate, and so it seems quite conceivable that when today’s First Graders enter the job market they will encounter careers, ideas, prospects, and challenges that we cannot imagine. As educators we should be concerned for the future of our students, and do everything in our power to prepare students for life beyond graduation. At the same time, I think that the current conversation is misguided in important ways.
It’s not new
FIRST, I don’t think this is actually a new problem. The pace of change may be unprecedented, but change itself is not. Disruption in social and economic norms has occurred countless times in human history. Young people living through those periods of significant change faced the challenges head on and not only survived, but also made the world better.
Imagine being a young scholar in the mid-to-late 4th century in the Roman Empire (like, say, Augustine). Just as you complete your formal studies and begin a career, Goths overrun the Roman Empire and initiate its collapse. Or imagine leaving University in the mid-fifteenth century AD just as the movable type printing press began to transform the way we share information. In both of these cases there were drastic changes in society and economics that were undoubtedly difficult for young graduates to navigate. This is not to say that we wish for students to face these sorts of difficulties, or that we shouldn’t do all that we can to help prepare them for future challenges, but it is to say that this is not a new problem. It may be that a better understanding of the past is just what we need to ease our anxiety — and that of our students — by giving us some perspective on our present.
Not just for a job
SECOND, most of the discussions that I hear in the world of education are focused on job preparation. Again, the discourse moves something like this: Many of our youngest students will, in the future, hold jobs that don’t exist today — jobs that we cannot even imagine — because the changes that will take place between now and then are so drastic. Putting aside whether or not this is true for a moment (I’m not saying it isn’t, I’m saying I don’t know if it is), I find this to be too narrow of a conception of education.
Education is not merely about job preparation. It’s one aspect of a proper education, but not the whole enterprise. Education ought to be concerned with forming whole people not just qualified employees. In other words, education ought to prepare a student for all of life, not just a career. We want our students at Redeemer Classical School to be more than good doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, plumbers, etc. We want them to be good husbands and wives, mothers, and fathers, neighbors, citizens, and friends, too. That is, we want them to be good people. Period. Full stop.
The education that we seek to provide at Redeemer is not just concerned with their job prospects when they are twenty-two years old. Rather it is concerned with the type of people they will be at twenty-two, at forty-two, and at ninety-two, wherever they are, whatever they’re doing. Looking to change our curriculum in order to prepare students for a future job market is simply too myopic.
Generalization is the best preparation
FINALLY, I find many of the solutions proposed to the challenges of an unknown future to be unsatisfying. The most commonly proposed solutions require us to double down on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), and to push students towards specialization in an area of interest earlier and earlier. This seems problematic to me for a couple of reasons. First, we’ve already stated that technology will change drastically in the next 20 years. So much so that the subject matter we’re teaching in those specialized STEM courses will, most likely, be obsolete. For example, the coding languages that we’re teaching students today probably won’t be in use a couple decades down the road. As such, it doesn’t seem like a wise investment in time, money, or our students to push coding younger and younger.
This brings me to my second reason for finding this push for increased specialization problematic: I don’t think it’s actually good preparation for an uncertain future. Instead, generalization provides better preparation for the unknown. Creative problem solving and innovation occur by drawing upon prior knowledge and associating ideas across disciplines and content areas in novel ways. A broad foundation of knowledge upon which our students can build provides the best chance for future success, because it means more connecting points for knowledge, a wider conception of applicability, and thus greater adaptability.
Conclusion
This is not to say that we have anything against teaching STEM in schools. The STEM fields are a vital part of the Liberal Arts and, as such, integral to a comprehensive education. Science, technology, engineering, and math are crucial to the broad foundation just mentioned. But so too are reading, spelling, grammar, literature, history, music, art, physical education, and so on. Increasing the level of specialization in STEM, and doing so younger and younger, requires cutting back on other areas of study. This inevitably leads to a narrowing of the foundational knowledge students receive, which inhibits their ability to create, innovate and adapt — necessary skills for wisely navigating the unknown.
Some will say that increasing the time spent in STEM does not have to displace the rest of the Liberal Arts; it’s not an either/or, but a both/and. To that I would simply say: there’s only so much time in a day. As educators and school leaders, we’re tasked with making difficult decisions about how to spend our allotted instructional time and limited resources. At Redeemer, we believe that in order to truly prepare our students, we need to give them as broad a foundation, across all of the Liberal Arts, as possible. I love that a classical Christian curriculum allows us to do just that.