In the past, education was all about training our students to be good factory workers by giving them the skills to listen, obey instructions and repeat the same task over and over again. In today's world these jobs have either been automated by machines or outsourced to other nations where labor is much cheaper. In schools though we are still training the same skills into our students and those that listen, obey and can manage to do the same repetitive tasks over and over without going insane are rewarded with high GPAs, letters of recommendation and positions of leadership in ASB and clubs. In the New York TImes' article "How to Get Hired at Google," the senior vice president of Google, Laszlo Bock makes it clear that his company, at least, is no longer looking for the skills that a high GPA and being president of the chess club demonstrates. Instead he is looking for 5 specific hiring attributes:
The article and Bock mention many times that a good GPA and college won't hurt and they are still something to strive for but a degree is not a ticket to automatic success. There are many skills that aren't taught directly in school that are becoming much more highly valued to make you successful wherever you go or whatever you do.
- Learning Ability - The ability to pull together disparate bits of information. This can be taught to students by teaching them to ask questions and how to answer those questions themselves. The opposite of teaching this is lecturing and worksheets that teach students that everything worth knowing or doing will by explicitly told to them.
- Leadership - Knowing when to step in and take charge and when to step back and let someone else take the reins. I think the best way to train students to have this ability is to have them work on carefully constructed collaborative projects where each students has roles to fulfill. Over the course of the class each student needs to have a chance in each role. Group projects that are not well planned can have the opposite effect, hardwiring those students who naturally take charge students to be 'alpha' leaders and others to become docile followers at best and passive lumps at worst.
- Ownership- I feel that Dan Pink's TedTalk on motivation speaks well to what we need to do to develop a sense of ownership in our students (and what we are doing that crushes it). Classes need to be student driven.
- Humility - Both the ability to let someone else be in charge and intellectual humility to believe that others have something worthwhile to share. On humility Bock spoke of "the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved." Our students need to experience failure so they can learn about failure, and how to recover gracefully from it.
- Expertise - This is what Bock says is the least important attribute. It is nice to have an employee who already has all the skills needed to complete their role but with as rapidly as the workplace is now changing I think employers are no longer concerned with training high-quality people that have the ability to learn.
The article and Bock mention many times that a good GPA and college won't hurt and they are still something to strive for but a degree is not a ticket to automatic success. There are many skills that aren't taught directly in school that are becoming much more highly valued to make you successful wherever you go or whatever you do.