The Future of Education: “Why Are You Here?”

For years, I’ve made the observation that 65% of children in pre-school today will work in a job or career that does not yet exist. Given the rapid emergence of new careers around us today, it’s a statistic that is bearing fruit.

Given that, someone alerted me to the fact that the Dean and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Duke University delivered a convocation speech to the class of 2018 quoting my thinking on the rapid emergence of new careers.

It was in August 2014 — and he challenging the new undergrads in the room to ask themselves about the future of their own careers in the context of their future education.

Here’s an extract:

Why you are here?’

My first reason has to do with the oft-stated and certainly accurate view that many of the jobs your generation will hold haven’t even been conceived of yet.  The futurist Jim Carroll suggests the imminent emergence of novel professions with colorful names such as “knowledge farmer,” “location intelligence professional,” and “mash manager.” If we don’t even know what a ”mash manager” is yet, how can we prepare you to excel in that job?

Moreover, how can we not only prepare you for professions that don’t yet exist, but help you be the ones who invent those jobs in the first place?

The answer is to train you not just with specific knowledge and skills, but to give you practice in maintaining a flexible, creative, and open mind, a mind that will continue to absorb new ideas and adapt to new ways of thinking throughout your life.  And to accomplish this, we do everything we can to broaden your perspective, not narrow it, from the structure of our curriculum to the ways we have you live together and to all the experiences you’ll have in between.

There is just so much in these few paragraphs that I will leave it at that, but will leave you with a phrase I coined years ago that I think is so critical when it comes to knowledge and education: the most important skill of the future is what I have come to call “just-in-time knowledge.”