EXPeditions - The living library of knowlegde17 Juni 2025

Peter Mandler - Dismantling the myth of educating for future jobs

Education should aim to assist children in becoming happy, confident, flexible and trainable.

About Peter Mandler

"I am Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge.

I’m a historian of modern Britain and of the modern world. Over the last 20 years, I’ve aligned my work representing historians as academics and teachers with my research in education: I’ve become immersed in the recent history of education. My main interest is asking why people have gotten more and more education over the last generation or two."

Key Points

• The world is changing rapidly. While education cannot prepare students specifically for future tasks, it should provide them with the tools they need to cope. • Since future challenges are difficult to predict, education should aim to assist children in becoming happy, confident, flexible and trainable. • Studying a discipline deeply is beneficial to children. This is true despite the fact they may not seek employment in the discipline later in life.

Education is encrusted in all sorts of myths. One such established myth is that we are educating for the future. There’s a factoid currently in circulation which claims, for the generation now in school, something like 50% of their future jobs have not yet been invented. I’m sorry to say that this has again made headlines. Indeed, it was referenced at the World Economic Forum, the gathering of elite business leaders in Davos.

There’s a very bright Canadian blogger who did a little digging and discovered that this particular factoid has been in circulation since the late 1950s; usually spread by leadership groups interested in conveying a future of rapid change while espousing their leadership capabilities.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(100)

The resurgence of civic duties | Simon Reid-Henry

Civic duties are essentially the ways in which citizens agree to abide by the rules and to contribute to the life of a national society. About Simon Reid-Henry "I am a research professor at the Peace ...

16 Mars 14min

What is "prejudice" ? | Jessie Munton

I think prejudice is best conceptualized as a phenomenon that can be supported by a whole range of mental states that will include beliefs, habits, emotions, and also attentional dispositions. About J...

12 Mars 16min

Global Public Investment | Simon Reid-Henry

The world today is overburdened with challenges that supersede the boundaries of nation states, and therefore of national governments, to address on their own. About Simon Reid-Henry "I am a research ...

9 Mars 18min

On ignorance and forgetting | Jessie Munton

I'm interested in the beliefs that we're not forming, the evidence that we're not attending to or using, the belief states that perhaps we form. What I think of as negative epistemology is the project...

5 Mars 19min

The empire of democracy | Simon Reid-Henry

"How do we understand, as it were, our era of democracy, which I argue began really as recently as the 1970s from previous eras, and what is it that is fundamentally at the core of the democracy we li...

2 Mars 19min

The life of the mind | Jessie Munton

On the one hand, we have that sense of really close identification with our minds. On the other hand, we're often surprised at the ways in which they operate. About Jessie Munton "I'm an Associate P...

26 Feb 19min

Volcanoes and the origins of life | Tamsin Mather

We don't really understand how life got going on this planet. There are various candidates for where the first molecules of life might have evolved, and some of those candidates are deeply volcanic. A...

23 Feb 18min

The origin myth of the modern West | Naoíse Mac Sweeney

We in the modern West still look back to ancient Greece as our imagined origin. We're still obsessed with ancient Greece. About Naoise Mac Sweeney "I'm Professor of Greek Archaeology at the Universit...

19 Feb 14min