Will We Be Teaching Students To Be Workers Or Citizens In 2050?

And the reformers — they go round and round.

Decades from now, a new generation of reformers will discover, again, that schools that teach wealthy kids have a laserlike focus on making sure their pupils learn to think for themselves — to ask questions, to probe the veracity of sources, and to integrate into their cognitive processes a broad, deep cross-section of human knowledge, including history, natural and laboratory science, poetry, civics, art, music, and math. Not so, the reformers will discover, for almost everyone else.

In 2050, most public schools in the U.S. will be serving poor kids. (Currently, a little over half of the kids in public schools are poor, but as everyone knows, economic inequity is rising fast.) Reformers will discover, again, that our administrators have been providing those vulnerable children with rigorous instruction on how to “do school” — answer multiple-choice questions that measure isolated skills in a narrow range of subjects (mostly reading and math) that school leaders are sure will be on standardized tests.

Researchers will uncover the disquieting fact that although test scores show that students can read, their schools don’t require them to tackle full works of literature, speak in compound sentences, or express complex ideas in writing. Math will be presented as a series of recipes to somehow memorize, follow, and forget.

In 2050, language study, history, music, art, and laboratory science will be considered “frills” that cash-strapped schools can’t afford. As a result, it will be discovered, the low-income faction of the projected 3.25 million high school graduates that year will have spent 13 years earning As and B-pluses while expending the intellectual firepower of a filing clerk. Harkening back to the success of the “no excuses” schools of 2016, administrators will be meting out harsh penalties for those who can’t, don’t, or won’t perform as asked.

There will be shock. Expect outrage. Then pushback. Poor kids are learning, policymakers will protest. They’ve been generating plenty of data—keystrokes on ed-tech products, correct answers on fill-in-the-bubble tests— showing that students are doing just fine. It will be employers, some futuristic version of the stodgy old Chamber of Commerce (YouChamber?), dismayed that job applicants aren’t able to speak, write, or compute well, that will push hard for change. Reformers will slowly begin to realize that schools serving poor kids are doing the 2050 version of what many have always done: teaching their pupils not very much at all.

Under the cloak of liberating poor kids from such a pointless system of education, those reformers will push for classroom learning for low-income kids that is more “relevant” and aligned to “real-world situations.” They will demand an education for poor kids that is useful and helps them become ready for the careers they are likely to step into. (This being 2050, that is likely to be robot repairperson, teaching simple coding to preschoolers, and Franken-meat farming.)

Like so many passionate and well-meaning educational advocates before them, these reformers, especially those who have been successful in other walks of life, will be completely unaware of history and assume all their ideas are good ones. They will not realize they are aligning themselves with the social efficiency movement of the distant past. In the late 19th century, educational theorist John Bobbitt, author of the influential book The Curricula, suggested that for most public school students, a rich core curriculum of science, history, math, literature, writing, civics, music, and art was a waste of time.

“Educate the individual according to his capabilities,” Bobbitt wrote. “This requires that the material of the curriculum be sufficiently various to meet the needs of every class of individuals in the community and that the course of training and study be sufficiently flexible that the individual can be given just the things that he needs.”

In the future, as in the past, schools will begin to remake their course of study to narrowly develop the skills needed by robot repairpeople, baby coders, and fake-food farmers.

This being 2050, a whole new set of “personalized learning” tools will be developed to meet those needs and provide incremental data on a child’s movement through this education/preprofessional training. Then, the world will again shift on its axis. Just like in the early 19th century, some far-sighted people will point out that education is not supposed to be streamlined and efficient.

This newer set of academic activists will suggest that rather than prepare workers, schools need to prepare citizens who share a common sense of history and skills in reasoning and logic so they might become discerning consumers of information with the ability to think critically about the affairs of the day.