Education is always an ongoing process, as each new skill should lead to the exploration of other new skills. Too often, teachers and students hold a myopic view that one specific skill in one specific field will hold the key to wonderful employment opportunities and unending prosperity. This idea is silly. An unquenchable curiosity and a will to learn a variety of competencies are infinitely more valuable than whatever major may be listed on a diploma.
Schools, particularly universities, should be places that expect intense mastery of several basic skills, but then actively offer opportunities for using those skills in other venues. Yes, we must drill proper composition techniques, but if writing is only a key component of freshman English courses, it won’t do much good. Yes, some level of computer systems mastery is vital today, but if that knowledge isn’t employed beyond introductory technology courses, it doesn’t really matter. Yes, all students need exposure to the fundamental principles of economics, but if the relationships among complex economic decisions are relegated only to ECON 101, those concepts will be forgotten as quickly as they were received. We must encourage writers to write all the time, in a wide variety of contexts. We must encourage students to program, design, and edit web materials all the time, for different purposes. We must encourage students to consider the consequences of human economic actions all the time, in a multitude of situations.
But the skills must go beyond the classroom. Students must embrace the notion that learning never stops, and adaptation is the most effective way to modern success. The author of the article describes a number of jobs for which he had to use previous skills in order to learn new ones on the fly. I’ve had similar experiences. I had never written a 200-page dissertation until I just sat at my desk and did it. I had no idea what search engine optimization was when I joined a web marketing firm and picked it up. I had never recruited college athletes before, but then I got on the phone and did it. I had never even heard the complex terminology of literary theory until I decided to go grad school and learn it. I had virtually no previous knowledge of English literature in the Middle Ages until I volunteered to teach a course on it. I had never even considered making academic videos on my laptop, and now I work on them all the time. I had never built a blog before until I decided to build this one. And the list goes on.
The point is that the author and I were willing to learn new skills because we had basic ones mastered, and we both embraced the idea of simply becoming smarter, in any way possible.
Enough of my soapbox. Read the article and share it—it will be worth your while.