At last nights School Board meeting Board members Tony Prado, Lucy Rangel ad Dave Wilde all commented on this video that Assist. Superintendent Director of Educational Services Katy Hadley showed at a recent workshop they attended.

The video did float around facebook a while back. Check it out:

***************
So what do you think?
It seems a pretty daunting task to prepare students for jobs that don't even exist yet with technology that will be outdated by the time they graduate from high school.
But what about the idea that instead of preparing students for jobs.... (Ok let's really get outside the box here) public education needs to shift its goal to preparing students to become.... thinkers, problem solvers, and entrepreneurs. To provide them with skills to think on their feet and to meet the demands of whatever is thrown their way. What about preparing students to have the confidence to question the status quo? To imagine that success is not always defined by the amount of money you make or what corporation your work for but by what you contribute to your community or even something as seemingly small as making a child smile.

I was recently listening to an author from India being interviewed about the great progress happening in India. He spoke about how every single successful person he knew in India, who had risen up out of the chaste (or class) of their parents... every single one worked for themselves. They created their own job. This got me thinking, in the US we hear all about job creation, and many expect our governments to seemingly wave a magic wand, or maybe a dollar, and *poof* create hundreds of thousands of jobs. But what about the idea that folks need to start preparing to climb out of that box, to think about filling the needs of their community, and creating their own jobs. Doesnt' work for every single person, but think about even the effect of a small shift. Hummmm.

Look around our world. Egypt. Tunisia. Los Angeles. And sometimes even yes, our own Communities of Fillmore, Piru and all of Ventura County. Public Education needs to shift its goals, challenge students to build their confidence in ways that they can find their passion, their contribution, their voice and take it out into their community in a positive way. It’s beyond jobs. It comes down to do we want kids trained to get an A, B or a C (I think our current system even trains some kids to get D’s and F’s…) or do we want them to be confident enough to fail… and keep going…. and get up again and keep going.

What would they do if they knew they would not fail?

What would they do if there were TRULY no stupid questions?

Maybe they just might solve the world’s problems that we don’t even know exist yet.
Just maybe.