It were tough in my day...

I've spent some time of late contemplating what life will be like for our four week old son as the hopefully many happy years ahead roll on. What sort of world will present itself to him in 10, 20 or 30 years time - and what sort of things will best help him prepare for that unpredictable future?

Given how fast the world is changing, it's pretty difficult to even establish what norms to expect next week, let alone thirty years forward. The stereotypical view has always been that the older generation has always had it tougher than their children. I love that old Monty Python sketch where the four Yorkshiremen sit around competing about how "in my day it were bloody tough", which paints that mindset perfectly:

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread knife.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.
ALL:
They won't!

It almost goes without saying that the coal miners of south Wales in the '60s will tell their office working, latte drinking offspring that the world is a far better place for them than the underground pit work that they earned their crust from. Certainly from a physical perspective average working conditions have moved up a notch or two, along with the quality of coffee available. Nonetheless, as I contemplate our wee man's future I get the sense that in many ways growing up and getting on is actually getting harder.

Life is getting more and more competitive, yet at the same time more unpredictable. The sheer quantity of choice, advice and commentary on solving this great conundrum is almost overwhelming. It is estimated that a week's worth of the NY Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century. We have a lot to take in and to process.

Children starting school today will be retiring around 2070 or beyond. The US department of labour estimates that today's schoolchildren will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38. The required social upheaval to contemplate even one job change in a lifetime would have been beyond the capacity of many previous generations, let alone 10-14 halfway through a working life. The labour department also estimates that the top 10 "in demand" jobs in 2009 did not exist in 2003.

They are trying to prepare students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't been invented in order to solve problems that we don't even know are problems yet. What sort of educational preparation can you do when you don't know what sort of questions will be on the exam?

Britain used to be a manufacturing country. Miners would toil down pit. Butchers, bakers and candlestick makers were common throughout the land. Times, however, have changed. A piece in The Times magazine this weekend looks at the statistics of the growth or decline in professions in Britain between 1966 and 2008. Big gains have been seen in the numbers employed in the legal, medical and teaching professions, while unsurprisingly there are big falls in the numbers of miners and pitworkers, bricklayers, tile setters, masons and shopworkers. A record 465,000 people are expected to compete for places at university this year, and the biggest increases in new jobs are unsurprisingly in jobs that have always needed degrees, such as doctors or lawyers.

In the next 30 years more people will be gaining formal qualifications through education and training than since the beginning of history. Education and training are now amongst the world's biggest businesses, accounting for more than 6% of global GDP. There is an increasing demand for educational qualifications of every sort. Yet it would seem the ability of the education to adapt itself to a world that is changing faster than ever is questionable. Currently there are 15 million people registered as unemployed in the EU. Yet there are estimated to be millions of jobs unfilled because of a lack of qualified applicants. In a survey of the skills gap that in the European economy, TIME magazine concluded that: "The best encapsulation of the old world labour plight comes not from Marx but from the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 'Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink'."

Most countries have a dual strategy in approaching education. The first part is to increase the amount of education that goes on. This seems to make sense - now and in the future, more and more people will live by what they know; and what they need to know is changing all the time. The second strategy is to raise standards. This seems pretty wise too, but this part is far more difficult in practice than in theory. The essential problem is that most governments and organisations think that the best way to prepare for the future is to do better what we did in the past - just to do more of it and to a higher standard.

The truth is that as the real world changes so quickly on the "outside" I would view the best skills that a child can be taught are adaptability, creativity and passion - which is less about the actual subject matter, and much more about the how the subject matter (whatever it is) is appreciated.

As I think about the sort of education I want for my children I often recall an old work colleague of mine coming in on a Monday morning slightly more glum than usual. He had spent the weekend looking for schools for his son. He reeled off a list of, on paper, fantastic private schools that he had visited with his wife. Each headmaster in turn had provided details of the exam A grades, and various statistical performance measures that demonstrated their superiority. Instead of being impressed he and his wife were appalled at the academic pressure that would be applied to his son before his 11th birthday. Only one headmaster struck a chord.

He simply said that when leaving their school and moving on in the world his goal with each child was for them to be excited, passionate and confident about life. His view was that all kids have tremendous talents but they tend to be squandered pretty ruthlessly, by a straight-jacketed approach to education. As a child moves into adulthood a confident and passionate sense about life is surely a better recipe for being successful in a rapidly changing world, than having an in depth understanding of Pythagoras' theorum. Both might come in handy though, particularly if you are trying to figure out the length of the long bit of a triangle.