How will we train Americans for the jobs of the future?

Please don't say schools.

I'm a teacher and this belief, that schools are for job training, is ruining schools and students and destroying the institution of education.

Schools are not for job training. On the job is where you get training, or from a technical or vocational college.

Schools are for teaching people how to think. Not indoctrination, but practice in the fine art of using a human brain effectively, coming to understand fully what that means: to use a brain effectively.

Schools are for socialization, to share with people our collective history and culture and to teach people what it means to be human; how to maximize human flourishing.

Again, I'm not talking about indoctrination. I'm talking about accessing and sharing the best thoughts and thinking that humans have been able to accomplish, in every different discipline.

Schools are supposed to excite students about learning, not get them a job.

I just read another essay by a college student asking the question: why do we need to take all these extra courses that do not apply to my job/major. The student argued we should just cut them -- I'm here for a business degree so just teach me business-type stuff.

Education is a common or public good, not a free market commodity, which is what we have turned it into.

And, I can tell you, right now, nobody is going into journalism, because there are no jobs in journalism. Nobody is going into education, and schools across the country are inserting teachers without emergency qualifications, into the classrooms.

Nobody is going into a discipline that does not guarantee a lucrative job, and these are few and far between, and this is because we have allowed this belief that school is for job-training to take root and spread like kudzu.

And, what's worse, schools, teachers, and administrators also believe this garbage, that school is for job-training.

Schools play a far more significant role in society than just training the next generation of workers.

The empowerment that education offers is not the power of a profession or job or future earnings. The empowerment of education comes from teaching people how to learn on their own, getting them excited about the values of learning, making learning relevant to the individual, teaching them how they learn best, and then setting them free to maximize learning in whatever ways are most beneficial to them.

Every school in this country has on their mission statement, almost always near the top, this principle: lifelong learning.

This is what schools are for. This is not some pie-in-the-sky principle, not just some fancy sounding moniker: it's the truth.

In order for any human being to live a fulfilled life, regardless of their career, occupation, or profession, in order for a human being to have the opportunity to flourish in life -- they will need to know how to learn -- independently -- and this is the important part -- to flourish, we need schools to teach people how to learn on their own.

This is what society needs from schools. Please do NOT continue this myth that schools are for job-training.

It ruins the students. They only pay attention to what appears to them to be relevant to their future career or potential profession. It ruins teachers by telling them our job is not to inspire learning, but teach some silly skills that some future employer might want from our little automaton students.

It's ruining the proud and storied institution of education as well. Education should know better, but it's been taken over by a bunch of technocrats, people who like counting things, things like the number of graduates who get jobs in their field, which has become to primary marker of a successful education.

Obviously, it is not.

What is a successful marker of an education is if those educational experiences helped that individual navigate the increasingly complicated and convoluted paths any human life will take, that education will help them to think critically, to think creatively, to solve any number of big and little problems that pop up in everybody's life, and, hopefully, that education will teach people something about what it means to be a good human, what principles and beliefs are useful for an individual as well as a well-functioning society.

This is what education is for.

Mr. Yang, if it is not obvious, I want to make clear -- I have mad respect for you as a person, and your value system. Please do not read this as combative or disrespectful.

I believe you have a platform, a voice, to help make this change -- we must stop thinking about schooling as job-training.

It might already be too late. It may be that the institutions of education are too far gone down this path of seeing education as a commodity, schools as factories for churning new labor automatons. This belief has moved swiftly infecting education and changing beliefs and policies and the whole experience of being a student or teacher, the whole meaning behind each.

But, please consider the possibility that a real education has little to nothing to do with free markets, labor, or the economy at all, and everything to do with maximizing the potential for as many humans as possible to flourish together on this planet.

Respectfully,

CA