Barry Bachenheimer ponders future jobs for our students in his latest entry on his "A Plethora of Technology." He's also putting together a conference scheduled for tomorrow that features Scott McLeod (Dangerously Irrelevant) giving the mini-keynote address "The jobs you're preparing students for don't exist anymore."

I'm getting so confused these days I can hardly tell when something's tongue-in-cheek, though a personal virtual-presence agent is no doubt over the top. Still, the exercise is a useful (and fun) one.

We may well be prepping kids for jobs that will no longer exist in a few years. We step into la-la land, however, when we to train them for imagined jobs that might never exist. I fear we are underestimating where high tech is going while overestimating how much human help will be needed once we get there.

(We now have machines to solve sudoko problems created by machines designed to create sodoko problems. And people use them.)

***

I teach low-level 9th grade science classes. Most of my students hard-working kids who remain naive enough to believe that they will be doctors and engineers and game designers and NBA stars. A few will be. Most won't.

Even if every child in America was blessed with an IQ of 150, the drive of Thomas Edison, and the wisdom of Abe Lincoln himself, most would not be the engineers and the doctors and the game designers and the NBA stars.

Let's stop pretending.

I'd like to turn the question of future jobs on its head--what skills do children need to learn to survive an age when their "skills" are no longer marketable?

Here's my back-of-an-envelope list, scribbled down quickly:

1) Every child should know how to grow and grind wheat.
2) Every child should know where to find potable water within human-powered distance.
3) Every child should know how to knead bread.
4) Every child should know how to start a fire to bake the bread she has kneaded.
5) Every child should know how to build the oven to hold the heat of the fire he has started.
6) Every child should know how to build a wooden table and chairs to sit when she eats her bread.
7) Every child needs the social skills to have loving relationships to have someone to break bread with.
8) Every child should know how to sing and to play an acoustic instrument, to share sounds with good company.
9) Every child should know how to share stories.
10) Every child should know how to spin yarn, and how to knit his yarn into blankets, to keep him warm when he sleeps with his love, bellies full of bread.
11) Every child should know how a home is built, so each can share their skills when a home needs building.

(Families used to provide most of these, but most adults in this part of the world
have not mastered even half of the list.)

In our rush to create children designed to compete with foreigners to serve the good graces of international corporations, we have forgotten to teach them how to take care of themselves.

All photos by Jessica Pierce of things made by Jessica Pierce--hundreds more things can be seen here. Not all school safe, or at least not safe for teachers.