Is Education’s Sole Purpose to Prepare Students for the Jobs of the Future? I Say No!

Is education’s sole purpose to prepare students for the jobs of the future? I am positive that many educators who read my headline immediately ask, “What a dumb question! Sure, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing.” But, is that really the case?

Educators have long accepted as a maxim that education should be about preparing students for the jobs of the future, jobs that don’t even exist yet. But is that possible? Can we actually, without a doubt, predict the kinds of jobs our students will have twenty or thirty years from now? If not, then are we not gambling with students’ lives by teaching skills to students declared by gurus and educational prophets funded by corporations to be necessary for our students’ survival?

We all know that the future can change suddenly and drastically. The fortunes of one industry can be sunk by a single invention. Examples? The record industry, video rental stores, etc. A whole family of industries can become obsolete with the changing times and literally, in the blink of the eye. Why then would we want to prepare students for jobs that don’t exist yet, especially when there is not a single human that I know capable of seeing into the future enough to tell us what our students need?

Take my own hometown community. Fiber optic manufacturers sprang up all around, promising to make our area the “Silicon Valley of the East.” To foster the promise of a future boom, our local fiber optic industry spent a great deal of time speaking and working with our schools, talking about the kinds of skills they needed kids to have in order get good jobs with their industry. There were joint workshops with their educational experts, exchanges literature and teaching ideas, and even visits to our schools to speak to our kids about the importance of obtaining the skills that their businesses sorely needed them to have. These evangelists of prosperity were everywhere, preaching and teaching the kinds of skills they wanted kids to have so that they could work in their factories when they graduated. Six years later, the bottom fell out of the fiber option industry. Companies closed and consolodated. Thousands were laid off. Plants were closed. Many of those employes of those companies were left stranded, with a knowledge specific to the cabling industry, that was now useless because the only industry around was in a downward spiral, with little hope of things ever returning back to the earlier boom days.

I am certainly not suggesting that we should not prepare students for the future. I am suggesting that to prepare students according to current industrial and corporate specifications is shortsighted and morally wrong.

Our job as educators should be much broader. Instead of providing graduates with industry specific skills, we need to prepare students who can leave our education system and do anything. They should be be able to act intelligently, learn as demanded, and be active citizens of the community. We should not be job trainers for the local factories. Those factories do not have the interests of our students at heart, nor should they. Their interest is in short term profits. Educators have to be visionaries and interested in the long-term. This means thinking about the educational big picture. We can work with our local industries and businesses to provide them citizens who they can then train for their jobs. To allow ourselves as an educational institution to become solely job training institutions is shortsighted, malpractice, and a disservice to our students.

Strategies for Teaching Students to Critically Validate Online Information

“With all these online searching aids at our disposal, we should be committing to teaching our children accurate and creative searching techniques that are applicable across every discipline.” Alan November, Who Owns the Learning: Preparing Students for Success in the Digital Age

Our students hold within the palms of their hands and with their laptops, access to all of the world’s information, updated continuously and free, yet like Alan November indicates, I am not sure we consistently teach our students “accurate and creative searching techniques” that they can use in all content areas and in multiple contexts, to validate information. As educators, we still too often leave students to their own devices when sorting through online search results. Also, we only critique their sources when we evaluate their end products, instead of helping them in-process. But in our 21st century classrooms we desperately need to employ specific activities and teaching strategies designed to foster our students' abilities to critically validate online information.

In his book, Who Owns the Learning: Preparing Students for Success in the Digital Age, Alan November advocates for turning students into researchers as a means to having them take ownership of their learning. For students to effectively take ownership of that learning though, we can ill-afford to turn them loose with Google and expect them to dazzle us with what they find out. Though many students use the Internet daily, they are still most often “web-illiterate” in that they do not know how to validate the information they find on the web. As educators, we owe it to them to teach how to examine the validity of what they find during their research activities.

If we want to begin today teaching our students to critically validate what they find on the web, what can we do immediately in our schools and classrooms to make this happen? Using Alan November's suggestions, here's some starting points.

• “Train students to understand when, why, and how to use online content.” This means teaching students to know when turning to online sources will yield the information they want, and when going offline for information is more effective. For example, students might find a considerable amount of current information about the Boston Bombings on the Internet. However, if they want to find out what their local municipality is doing to address these kinds of dangers, there might not be much information available on the web. Instead, they might set up an interview with the town police chief or mayor to get information specific to their town or city. The reasons for using online content in the first place is to obtain the most current information available on a topic because the web’s information is quickly updated. Also, the web offers access to sources not readily available elsewhere.
• Teach students as November suggests to “Assess Online Information Sources.” This involves three things:
• Teach them to examine the purpose of the online information. The hidden message behind online content is not always apparent. Teaching our students to look for those hidden messages is important. Once they are able to critically examine why the content exists, they are also in a position to validate it. For example, too often content is provided by business, industry, and ideologically oriented sites to shore up their agendas. That does not make the information wrong or invalid, but it should caution students to further check facts. Why information exists on the web is an important consideration when trying to validate it.
• Teach students to examine the author. Being able to search the web and elsewhere for other work published by the author is a key literacy skill for our students. Because anyone can publish anything checking out the author is important. The web makes it easy for students to verify the credentials of content creators. Once again though, they will need to verify in multiple ways those stated credentials and that other stated publications are valid too. Knowing the author of web content is a key way to determine web content's validity and our students need to know ways to do just that.
• Teach students to examine the context of the online information. As Alan November points out, there are indicators of web content’s reliability by where that content is placed. For example, content on a personal web site is often not as reliable as content on a major university’s site, or the site of  a well-known, highly regarded publication. Still, students need to always be cautious. Even the most reliable web places can be wrong. Remaining skeptical until information can be verified in multiple ways with multiple sources is an attitude we should foster in all our students.

As we move toward getting our students to do more and more authentic, 21st century learning activities, it is vital that we focus more on the process of validating web information in our teaching. As November indicates, our students might use the web and Google every single day, but they do not often know how to validate all the information coming at them. As 21st century educators, we must teach students how to critically validate all the online information they encounter.

Teaching Scientific Thinking Across the Curriculum in 21st Century Classrooms

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.” Carl Sagan

Judging from headlines and media chatter about our students’ performances on international science assessments for the past several years, the United States has been doomed economically for at least a decade. A New York Times headline in December 2012 most recently prognosticated our economic demise with, “US Students Still Lag Globally in Math and Science, Tests Show.” In that article, the Times declares economic doom by stating, “As those with superior math and science skills increasingly thrive in a global economy, the lag among American students could be a cause for concern.” According to the Times, we are doomed economically because our international science test scores tell us that is the case.

Back  in 2007 another New York Times article forecast economic doom at the hand of Asian countries with better science scores. In “Study Compares States’ Math and Science Scores with Other Countries,’” the Times stated, “Our Asian economic competitors are winning the race to prepare students in math and science.” That article, which compared state science scores to the scores of other nations, even declared Massachusetts, with the highest state science scores in the land to be doomed economically at the hand of Asian nations. That same year, the Washington Post joined the chorus with, “U.S. Teens Trail Peers Around the World on Math-Science Test.”  The Post again declared economic doom because of 2006 math-science scores on the Program for International Student Assessment. Former Governor of Colorado, stated at the time, “How are our children going to be able to compete with the children of the world?” Once again, economic doom is declared.

Finally, in 2009, it was CNN who made another economic doom declaration in, “U.S. Students Behind in Math, Science, Analysis Says.” In this article, the news network declares, “American children aren’t necessarily getting smarter or dumber, but that might not be good enough to compete globally…” In other words, we’re doomed economically because of our science test scores. Every time a new set of international test scores are released, this pattern is repeated, and the same theme is reiterated: The US is doomed economically because we did not get the highest scores in the world in math and science. But should our concern really be with whether or not we’re ranked first in the world in math and science tests? Shouldn’t we be less concerned about whether our students have the number 1 science scores in the world and more concerned about whether our students are actually learning science and how to think scientifically?  Perhaps what we really need is a framework of fundamental assumptions to guide the teaching of science as a“way of thinking” across subject areas.

Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, argues that science is the means for discovering what is true based on facts.  It is with this process of discovery and inquiry with which our students need the most help. What they need are help understanding  fundamental principles of science that guide true scientific thinking. Based on Sagan’s ideas, here are four assumptions about the the nature of scientific thinking that should inform all our teaching across content areas.

• Science involves being willing to accept facts even when they contradict your current views. As Carl Sagan points out, “Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions.” Too often, science is used to simply confirm currently held worldviews. In the process, facts that don’t fit are either tossed out or made irrelevant. But science isn’t about confirming our beliefs about the world; it’s about discovering the world we don’t know, and that means accepting sometimes things that contradict our worldviews. I call this being comfortable with contradiction. Teaching our students to be comfortable with contradiction is one of the keys to scientific thinking.
• Science involves holding our theories, hypotheses, and beliefs about the world as tentative. Beliefs can change, when facts change. What is true today is subject to change when facts change. The job of science is to constantly examine facts, and adjust views when the facts warrant it. It is what Sagan describes as carrying “alternative hypotheses in our heads and seeing which best fits the facts.” Teaching students to embrace the “tentativeness of what-they-know” is an important part of scientific thinking too.
• Science involves questioning “arguments from authority.” Carl Sagan states this much more clearly than I can: “Authorities must prove their arguments like everyone else.” Teaching our students that “no one gets a pass” on proof in their argument is vital to scientific thinking.
• Science involves engaging fully what Sagan calls its “error-correcting machinery.” Our students need to understand the processes of error-correcting, such as peer review and critical questioning. They need to understand that our beliefs and our conclusions should be subject to these processes so that any errors made at arriving at those conclusions are made evident. For science to work, this “error-correcting machinery” must be utilized. Like an error purification system, the ideas that can’t stand up to peer review or criticism are at least looked upon with skepticism, if not rejected. Teaching students about science’s built-in-error correction system is important to 21st century scientific thinking too.
• Finally, as Sagan points out, “Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge.” Our students, in the process of engaging in scientific thinking, need to understand its limitations as well. They need to know that there are questions to which science may not be able to answer. Absolute beliefs, even in the infallibity of science, result in a kind of fundamentalism not too different that found in religion. Teaching students scientific thinking’s limitations and pitfalls is an important part of scientific thinking.

While the predictions for American economic doom based on science test scores is probably going to continue, what is of greater concern is whether our students are actually learning how to think scientifically. Our students need to be engaged in scientific thinking, not just in science either. They need to engage in science across the curriculum. In order to do that, all of our teaching needs to be informed by basic guiding assumptions about science like these five. Otherwise, our students will be ill-equipped to engage in scientific thinking.

Equipping Students with a Baloney-Detection Kit in the Information Age

According to Michael Shermer, "Skepticism is the rigorous application of science and reason to test the validity of any and all claims." He also points out that skeptics aren't "closeminded or cynical;" they are "curious and cautious," and their beliefs are open to revision when the facts change.

In an information-rich world where we are bombarded with all manner of fantastic claims and ideas, one would do well to adopt some degree of skepticism. For our students, being able to evaluate extraordinary claims, and be skeptical, is a vital skill in the 21st century. 

In January, I posted "8 Must-Have Skills for Spotting Misinformation for 21st Century Students" in which I pointed out a starter list of "baloney-detection skills" based on Loren Collins' book Bullspotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation. In a more recent post, entitled "What Is Skepticism, Anyway?" author Michael Shermer reviewed a "Baloney-Detection Kit" produced by Skeptic magazine.This kit captures some additional important "baloney-detection skills" our 21st century students need. Below, I have taken the liberty to adapt this "Baloney-Detection Skills Kit"  for educational use and teaching.

When students encounter any claim made by someone either in or out of cyberspace, here's a list of questions they might ask:

• Does the source of the claim often make similar claims? According to Sherrmer, "Pseudo-scientists have a habit of going well beyond the facts." They also tend make numerous fantastic claims. It is important to recognize when an individual makes a habit of making radical claims, because that is perhaps a good sign their claims are bogus or suspect.
• Have the claims been verified by other sources? Pseudo-scientists and others often make statements that are unverified or only verified by those within their own belief circle. It is important to teach our students how to "check on those who are checking the claims" being made.
• Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only confirmatory evidence been sought? In other words, have efforts only been made to seek out evidence that confirms the claim, not dis-confirm?  Our students need to be able to recognize when a claimant is caught up in confirmation bias. They need to understand that science emphasizes checking and rechecking the evidence. Verification and replication are vital. Being able to recognize when someone is trying to falsify a claim is the key to detecting misinformation.
• Has the person making the claim given a different explanation for what is happening, or are they simply denying the existing explanation? Those engaged in misinformation often resort to criticizing the claim they oppose and the arguments, but not affirm what they believe. Students need to be able to recognize when someone is only attacking at explanation but not offering any alternative. This is a sign that a person's claims are possibly suspect.
• Does the person's personal beliefs and biases drive their conclusions or vice versa? It is important for our students to understand how biases and personal beliefs slant interpretations of data. Also, students need to understand the importance of engaging in a "peer-review" process in order to detect those biases and beliefs, and to determine how those have affected the claims being made.

When it comes to teaching our students to be skeptical, I like the aphorism Shermer offers. It is an excellent guide for ourselves and our students in an age of misinformation. He writes:

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

In the 21st century, there is absolutely nothing wrong with teaching our students to demand extraordinary evidence when they are faced with fantastic claims. Critical evaluation of information is a 21st century survival tool our students can't live without.

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8 Must-Have Skills for Spotting Misinformation for 21st Century Students

A 21st century skill that all students need badly is the ability to spot misinformation. As educators, we desperately need to do as Loren Collins states in her book, Bullspotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation. We need to "arm our students with baloney-detecting tools to prevent false and unsupported beliefs so that such beliefs can be better contained." In other words, 21st century educators need to equip our students with "baloney-detection" skills.

What do these baloney-detection skills look like? Here's a starter list based on those described by Collins.

1. Be skeptical when people toss around the phrase "it's just common sense." Many individuals use this phrase as if it were sacred and unquestionable. The truth is, many things once accepted as common sense turned out to be flat wrong. Just ask those who said the world was flat. Using this phrase should never protect information from a skeptical examination. We need to teach students to be skeptical, always, when someone employs this phrase in an argument.

2. Be able to employ the scientific method to test information. In an age of misinformation, our students must have the ability to test hypotheses and conclusions they encounter. They need to be able to pose a question, research that question, construct a hypothesis, test that hypothesis, analyze the results, and finally draw conclusions. Their final conclusions should then always be subject to further validation. All of our students need to be able to employ these steps to test information because of the amount of misinformation posing as science all around them in cyberspace.

3. Be able to identify ideological and agenda-driven websites and information. In the age of misinformation, the ease with which individuals can publish information online has created a whole new world where anyone, no matter what their beef, can publish. It is vital that our students maintain a level of skepticism and explore the ideologies and agendas those publishing web sites might have. All information needs to be examined with a skeptical eye toward what that person's beef might be.

4. Be aware of their own confirmation bias and the role it has in being misinformed. We know if we are heavily biased toward confirming our own beliefs, we hinder the ability to dispel ourselves of beliefs that might be false. We, and our students, need to be aware of our tendencies to seek out information that confirms what we believe rather than looking at all the data. With these principles in mind, our students need to be able to detect their own confirmation biases and those of others as they deal with the information torrent.

5. Be aware of those who use anomalies to make their arguments. Individuals who use this tactic, gather up a collection of anomalies and attempt to use the weight of those to argue against a consensus view. This tactic is being heavily used by those spreading misinformation about climate change, and it was also used by those who argued against the ill-effects of smoking. Our students need to be able to recognize when someone is engaged in anomaly hunting as a misinformation tactic and recognize it as a misinformation tactic.

6. Be ware of the use of the logical fallacy of "proof by verbosity." Just because an argument is lengthy and complex does not necessarily mean it is true. Students need to be able to recognize when someone is engaged in this logical fallacy.

7. Be able to notice when someone engages in denialism. Those who engage in this tactic, just deny or reject a widely accepted truth, and they usually offer no solid alternative instead. Those who engage in denialism aren't really interested in determining the truth; they are simply interested in rejecting one. Our students need to recognize denialism as a tactic that tries to deflect away from what has been accepted by consensus.

8. Notice when someone employs fake experts. This is commonly used on the web. Those arguing against climate change or for intelligent design curriculum heavily use this one. In the climate change debate, often those making the arguments are not even qualified as climate scientists. Likewise, organizations like the Discovery Institute employ non-biologists in their arguments against evolutionary theory. Students need the skill of checking the credentials and credibility of the information sources they encounter.


In the 21st century, we as educators have a moral imperative to make sure our students are equipped with proper "baloney-detection tools" so that they can avoid being mislead and misguided in a flood of information.

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Learning Real-World Civics: White House Contacts One of Our Students

One of the best ways to teach students to become engaged as a citizen of our country, is to have them try to communicate with those in political office. One of our students did just that. A few months back, a student at our school wrote a letter to the Obama Administration, and in that letter she invited the President to visit our school. This week, she and my school secretary were surprised when we received a phone call from the White House. But allow me to let that student tell what happened:

When President Obama visited our state, the Catawba County Democratic Party Chair said that she would deliver some letters from those of us that wanted to write them. I jumped at the opportunity to have contact with the President of the United States of America. I got my letter in on time. Basically, I told President Obama that he has my support and my family’s support and that the Young Democrats of Catawba County are here for him. After signing my name to the letter, I had another thought. So, I wrote on the back: “P.S. You should visit my school.”

A few weeks later, I received a manila envelope in the mail with the return address of The White House. Inside this mysterious envelope was a letter from Michael McSwain, the Associate Director for Scheduling Correspondence from the Office of Scheduling and Advance, explaining that President Obama has a very busy schedule and cannot come to my school at this time. It said that he values each and every invitation he receives to see the country first hand, but it was with sincere regret that “the President is unable to visit your school at this time.” Also in the manila envelope was a picture of the President, the First Lady, and their two children. It just so happens to be autographed by none other than Barrack and Michelle Obama. Even if it is the electronic autograph, it is the thought that counts.

I hadn’t given it much thought recently until English class on January 25, 2012. Mrs. - - - -,  our school secretary, came into my class out of breath saying something about there being a phone call for me. It was who was on the line that had everyone in shock. It was the White House. More specifically, the President’s scheduling coordinator. He told me that President Obama read my letter and appreciated it. He also told me that it was with sincere regret that he could not visit in the near future. While I was a little disappointed that he would not be coming, I was overcome with joy that the President of the United States of America READ my letter. Not only did he read it, he APPRECIATED it. It is things like these that make the world seem less large. It is things like these that make people feel less small.


All this talk about teaching our students to be 21st century citizens means getting them to engage and understand our government. While our student did not receive a phone call from the President himself,  it is things like these that make our students believe they are heard and valued by those who lead our country.