With available information in all fields doubling every five years and the access to that information available globally, the best jobs will not go to the person who knows the most facts. Computers will always have the edge on that and when your children enter the workforce in the 21st century, if a computer can do the job, it will.
The best jobs will go to applicants who have the skillsets to analyze information as it becomes available, the flexibility to adapt when what were believed to be facts are revised, and to collaborate with other experts on a global playing field requiring tolerance, willingness to consider alternative perspectives, and articulately communicate one's ideas successfully.
The factory model of education still in place was designed for producing assembly line workers to do assigned tasks correctly. These workers did not need to analyze, create, or question. Automation and computerization are exceeding human ability for doing repetitive tasks and calculations, but the educational model has not changed. In response to more information, students are given bigger books and more to memorize. To provide more time for this additional rote memorization, creative opportunities- the arts, debate, and general P.E. are sacrificed to the alter of more predigested facts to be passively memorized without opportunities for students to discover the connections between isolated facts and build networks of concepts nor opportunities to apply what they learn in other contexts.
This assembly line, test prep system doesn't prepare today's children to what the best job employers are already seeking—the ability to transfer knowledge to new contexts and apply that knowledge along with critical analysis of new information, judgment, creative problem solving, and the ability to evaluate and select which new data and tools can be applied in new ways to solve new problems and create new outcomes.
Without these higher order, cognitive skillsets, today's students will only be prepared for assembly line work, slightly more technological, or service industries. They won't be able to compete on the global employment market with students currently developing the executive functions to succeed at the best, most creative, and personally rewarding jobs. This is not to say that the other types of jobs are not important or that the people who do them are less deserving of respect and appreciation. What is important is that today's students have the education they need to choose the career path that will give them the most satisfaction.
What Are the Skillsets and How Do Your Children Get Them?
What my field of neurology has called "Executive Functions" for over 100 years are these highest cognitive processes. These are skillsets beyond those computers can do because they require flexible, interpretive, creative, and multidimensional thinking—suitable for current and future challenges and opportunities. The executive functions include judgment, prioritizing, planning ahead, interpretation, critical analysis, deduction, induction, pattern recognition and expansion, self-monitoring, self-correcting, abstraction, concept development, flexibility, tolerance, risk assessment, resisting immediate gratification to plan and achieve long-term goals, and creative problem solving.
The control center that directs the brain's executive function is in the prefrontal cortex. Cognitive processing of information that takes place in areas in the prefrontal cortex is also what allows humans to exercise conscious control over our emotions and thoughts. These executive functions are exactly what employers for the top jobs of our children's future will be seeking, because these are what computers can't do.
Where The Human Brain Has the Greatest Advantage The prime real estate of the prefrontal cortex comprises the highest percentage of brain volume in humans, compared to all other animals, which is roughly 20% of our brains. The executive function control centers in the PFC give us the potential to consider and voluntarily control our thinking, emotional responses, and behavior. It is the reflective "higher brain" compared to the reactive "lower brain".
Animals, compared to humans, are more dependent on their reactive brains to survive in their unpredictable environments that require automatic responses not delayed by complex analysis. As man developed more control of his environment, the luxury of a bigger reflective brain evolved to its current proportions.
The prefrontal cortex is the last part of the brain to mature (the neuroplasticity process of pruning of unused cells to better provide for the metabolic needs of neurons and strengthen the connections in the circuits that are most used). This pruning and strengthening that is highly defining of the type of adults we become continues into the twenties, with the most rapid changes in the age range of 8-16. Until the executive function stimulation comes from schoolwork, parents can intervene and promote the activation and strengthening of these developing brain circuits during these years of most rapid change. The stimulation of these networks during the ages of their rapid development can strongly influence the social-emotional control and the highest thinking skillsets that will determine today's children's opportunities in the global job market they'll enter.
Preparing Your Children for the Challenges and Opportunities of the 21st Century
Help your child develop personal responsibility: Because executive functions, such as organization, prioritizing, resisting immediate gratification, and goal planning are not being developed in the over-stuffed curriculum of predigeted facts that are the focus of current instruction, many students enter college inadequately prepared to succeed in or get the most from those years. We are seeing an increased drop out rate among college students and more students who require five or more years to obtain their college degrees.
During the primary and secondary school years, students often rely on their teachers and parents to keep them on track. Through high school, most teachers take attendance, call on students, hold students accountable for homework, and give assessments with enough frequency for students and parents to know how they are doing. In large college classes students can be anonymous. Once in college, tthere is no more hand-holding, parent-teacher conferences, often no attendance taken, and frequently only a midterm and final exam to show students what they didn't know - usually when it is too late.
With the still immature prefrontal cortex, many college students, who have not had opportunities to develop their executive function circuits, lack the judgment and long-term goal development neural networks to resist the immediate gratification of hiding behind their laptops, surfing the web or checking Facebook instead of staying focused, taking notes, participating in discussions, or asking questions in class...if they go to class at all.
If children aren't prepared early to resist the immediate gratifications that abound during their college years, they miss out on what may be the first opportunity they have to really develop higher-level thinking. If their precollege years in school were overloaded with rote memorization, college could be the opportunity to develop the higher thinking skills—if there is some groundwork laid. The temptations are high and the PFC still immature—a setup for kids to miss out on the knowledge and skillsets that will be sought after for the best jobs.
