Those Mythological "Jobs Of Tomorrow"

&gt;My objection is that all this talk about STEM is just the latest way to keep our schools focused exclusively on vocational training, to prepare our children for those mythological &quot;jobs of tomorrow,&quot; jobs that may exist today, but are unlikely to exist two decades from now when our preschoolers are seeking to enter the job market... Anyone who claims to know the specific skills required for the jobs of tomorrow is just blowing smoke. They are wrong and they have always been wrong.<p>It seems that Teacher Tom is missing the point about early STEM education (this seems particularly worrying given that he is a teacher). The point is not to teach preschoolers how to use, for example, TensorFlow so that they can develop deep learning models (who are predict if this would have any relevance for the future?).<p>Instead, the point is to help kids to develop a background in math, physics, chemistry, etc. whose basic foundations haven&#x27;t changed in the fundamental way in the past 50 years. In particular, developing an understanding of math takes time, and seems likely to required for many jobs for tomorrow. Would Teacher Tom contest the point that math will be necessary for jobs of the future? Perhaps Teacher Tom&#x27;s object was just to write a provocative article to generate blog traffic, (fair enough) but the argument presented in the blog does not seem very well reasoned.

This is wrong on two levels.<p>First:<p>&gt; My objection is that all this talk about STEM is just the latest way to keep our schools focused exclusively on vocational training, to prepare our children for those mythological &quot;jobs of tomorrow,&quot; jobs that may exist today<p>My first grader is going to college in 11 years. 11 years ago was 2009. The jobs were more or less the same. She’ll be graduated in 15. 15 years ago was 2005. The jobs were the same.<p>Second: the article conflates STEM with vocational training. It’s not. It’s an alternative framework to the “liberal arts education.” Even if the “jobs of tomorrow” are different, a STEM education will prepare kids for it better than a liberal arts education. The idea that a &quot;liberal arts education&quot; is the &quot;all purpose flour&quot; of education is obsolete. It&#x27;s an artifact of the culture of western aristocrats.<p>&gt; No, the purpose of education in a democracy ought to be to prepare children for their role as citizens and that means that they learn to think for themselves, that they ask a lot of questions, that they question authority, that they stand up for what they believe in, and that they understand that their contribution to the world cannot be measured in money<p>A STEM education is better for that too! Citizens who cannot think about the world in numeric and statistical terms are not prepared to understand it, or the complex choices facing them.<p>&gt; I did not enter the teaching game to prepare young children for their role in the economy<p>Teachers are deeply confused about their role. They&#x27;re public employees who are hired to prepare kids for the work force because that is what taxpayers pay them to do. We don&#x27;t spend $1 trillion a year on public education to have teachers indoctrinate kids on their philosophical and political views. (Now that I have my own kids in school, I understand why my mom, moving to the US from an Asian country 30 years ago, was so befuddled by the education I was receiving.)

This article says &quot;2020&quot;, but I got about 2 sentences in and said... &quot;I&#x27;ve read this before&quot;. In 2018...<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;teachertomsblog.blogspot.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;12&#x2F;those-mythological-jobs-of-tomorrow.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;teachertomsblog.blogspot.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;12&#x2F;those-mythologic...</a><p>But wait, there is more! He <i>also</i> wrote it 3 years ago. Nearly word-for-word identical.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;teachertomsblog.blogspot.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;when-democracy-suffers.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;teachertomsblog.blogspot.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;when-democracy-s...</a><p>Self-plagarism is still plagarism.

&gt;<i>Anyone who claims to know the specific skills required for the jobs of tomorrow is just blowing smoke. They are wrong and they have always been wrong.</i><p>Well, historically they have been more right than wrong. For millennia jobs were more or less constant (farming, the trades, commerce, mercenary, etc) so it was even very easy to predict. And for the best part of the industrial era, &quot;more STEM&quot; would be both easy to predict and an easy win. As would be &quot;more office&#x2F;services jobs&quot; in the mid-20th century, and &quot;more IT jobs&quot; in the 80s and on. All of those existed as guesses and were correct. So where are those guesses that &quot;have always been wrong&quot;?<p>&gt;<i>Anyone who claims to know the specific skills required for the jobs of tomorrow is just blowing smoke.</i><p>That&#x27;s also a bad argument. Nobody claims &quot;specific skills&quot;.<p>A STEM education is not just some specific skills, it&#x27;s a very wide range of skills, that have been useful to the best job positions for centuries.<p>Don&#x27;t see that changing, unless widespread general AI (not the crap we have today, with task-oriented NN models) takes over most technical and scientific jobs renders poetry and painting and music playing the only jobs available to people. Which I don&#x27;t see it happening in the next 50 years or so, if ever.

&gt; they learn to think for themselves, that they ask a lot of questions, that they question authority, that they stand up for what they believe in<p>And math and science teach you how to frame those questions. They enable you to evaluate the evidence that those authorities may be using. They show how to present new evidence or new models to update the existing knowledge.<p>In short, math and science addresses the issue of if two people have differing views, how can they state those views clearly (mathematics) and evaluate the correctness of those views in an objective manner (science).<p>The issue with our society isn’t that people aren’t questioning authority, it is that a lot of people are questioning, not in a quest for truth, but to be able to impose their view of the world on everybody else and become the authority. Without science and mathematics, all this questioning just devolves to demagoguery and questions of power and control. There are many groups that claim to “question” authority, but woe be to any member that question the group’s beliefs.<p>Science and mathematics allow people from different backgrounds with different beliefs to all speak a common language and have a common way of stating hypothesis and evaluating evidence so that we can learn more about our world. Engineering and technology allow us to use that knowledge to make other humans lives better.

Having been born in the early 90s I sure wish my elementary school teachers encouraged an interest in computers and used them for more than KidPix, AskJeeves and word processing. They treated computers like a fad then and failed us, let&#x27;s not make the same mistake again.

This sort of vague condemnation of STEM and praising of liberal arts never seems helpful. All math is bad? We shouldn&#x27;t teach any? Are all liberal arts classes are equally good?<p>You need to discuss some sort of real curriculum. Or at least what changes you&#x27;d make to a current one.

I don&#x27;t think anyone is arguing that we remove liberal arts from the K-12 curriculum. There should be more to education than just vocational training, especially at the younger grade levels. If we want to have a functional democracy we need educated voters, and they should have a broad base of knowledge including the liberal arts.<p>At the college level I think the colleges themselves are to blame for all the animosity towards the liberal arts, they&#x27;ve priced themselves completely out of the market. Not too long ago it wasn&#x27;t a big deal to spend four years getting a liberal arts degree and then going on to an MBA, Law or sales or even a STEM field to make a living afterwards. That&#x27;s exactly what the author&#x27;s wife of this article did by the sounds of it. Now that path might mean tens of thousands of dollars of debt just for the BA, so the pressure is on to make that investment worth while and for many it&#x27;s not.

I agree that 10 year olds probably don&#x27;t need to learn javascript and the camps teaching that are probably not a great choice for parents. But the authors views on STEM are awfully pessimistic. There are a lot of creative aspects to what I do, and I don&#x27;t want people thinking that it&#x27;s drudgery working in STEM.

Having been on a school board I can tell you that it’s the Gadgrind administrators <i>and</i> parents who are pushing that. I would love to have the kids receive an exciting and inspiring introduction to maths and the sciences (and for that matter language and civics) but many of the teachers (not a majority, but significant minority) aren’t into it and the loudest parents certainly aren’t either. Instead the kids get rote prep aimed at where the puck is now.

And likely coming from an upper middle class background with a social safety net

I really don&#x27;t understand why people are so hung up on the dichotomy of STEM versus the liberal arts education.STEM is an orphan without philosophy and history, and really ugly without the arts.<p>Growing up, kids need to be exposed to a variety of fields so that they art grounded&#x2F;aware of the basics and can pick up further study when needed.<p>Yes maths and science are important, but so is philosophy, economics, history, arts, sports. They all help you understand the world around you. They help you understand yourself. Like Heinlein said, specialization is for insects. And school is really not the time to do that.<p>What is wrong is the way they are taught in almost every school. Kids are born curious and parents&#x2F;schools have become very good at sucking that curiosity out of them to &quot;make them a better citizen&#x2F;workforce&quot;.

&quot;being self-motivated, being sociable, and working well with others&quot; doesnt require formal education.

&gt; It&#x27;s a scam as old as public education, an idea that emerged from the Industrial Revolution because back then the &quot;jobs of tomorrow&quot; were stations along an assembly-line<p>Is he suggesting here that public education is a scam? It doesn&#x27;t seem so in the later paragraphs, and that&#x27;s an extreme view to hold. Also the idea I don&#x27;t think actually emerged as a way to fulfil national labour requirements. Condorcet, I think an early French pioneer in public education systems, seemed primarily concerned with equality, not creating labour supply.

His main point is valid, education is important for becoming a well-rounded civilian.<p>However<p>&gt; Anyone who claims to know the specific skills required for the jobs of tomorrow is just blowing smoke<p>I do! Math!<p>Machine learning:<p>Lin alg<p>Calc<p>Stat&#x2F;prob<p>Programming: understanding math gives a leg up in understanding many of the ideas underlying.<p>The meta-skill that math teaches is also timeless: when you learn concept D, you need to have a very good mastery over concepts A, B and C.<p>In my psychology lectures there never was such a “concept dependency hell”.<p>So yea math.<p>Also writing and articulating yourself. A rhetoric class is also timeless (if given properly).<p>So yea... I could go on. I won’t but I will predict this:<p>If you learn how to sell<p>Learn how to play along<p>And learn math<p>Then those skills will immensely help you for some of the new jobs in the future.

It should be mentioned that the world&#x27;s biggest problems are not really STEM oriented, but more about the humanities: political, cultural, legal, economic, etc. I don&#x27;t think anyone is arguing directly against STEM education (as suggested by many of the defensive comments). Point is that pretending we have or will have shortage of qualified techies is a bit of a scam, often pitched to gain political&#x2F;financial support for tech industry.

Projectors are the future of education:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;americanaffairsjournal.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;rotten-stem-how-technology-corrupts-education&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;americanaffairsjournal.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;rotten-stem-how-t...</a>

Spoken (I guess written) like an out of touch, over privileged idealist. Sure, forget about being able to get a job and make money down the line, that’s not that important. &#x2F;s

Schools and colleges should prepare students to earn a living. Once they can do that, they can educate themselves by reading and taking courses for the rest of their lives.

&quot;My objection is that all this talk about STEM is just the latest way to keep our schools focused exclusively on vocational training...&quot;<p>That&#x27;s only a problem when you have a monopoly supplier.

This guy actually educates children?

Japan has removed all humanist subjects from thier universities.<p>I would refer to these STEM subjects in this order instead, because thats how they depend: math, physics, chemistry and biology. MPCB does not sound as good though.<p>As for jobs they do not exist; only work exists, and you need to spend energy to do it.<p>One last thing, we need to have more female teachers in these subjects, since they are not trying to keep secrets.<p>Men keep secrets to get what they want, which mostly is women.