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To determine whether our schools are adequately preparing our children for the future, first we must look at the current purpose of education generally.

A curious clash here, between ideal and actuality. We claim to want our children to learn critical thinking and maybe a little knowledge about the world around them: but at the same time we don't seem to be comfortable with critical thinking where it does not reinforce existing truths. We try to mainstream our children into the university bastions of original research (to the point where the higher-paying trades often go begging for lack of skilled labour), but we also desperately want for them the financial security of filling an existing salaried societal niche.

Thus, perhaps much more accurately, parents and administrators alike continually pressure curricular structures into molding children into productive members of a marketplace-driven society, and more specifically a consumption-driven workforce. Success, here, is measured first in grades, then scholarships to college and university higher education, and finally in salaried jobs. While education in North America does also have a trades stream, blue collar work is generally seen as being less inherently valuable, and certainly less prestigious, than even an uncompleted university-level degree. Interestingly, the marketplace increasingly demands a two- or three-year degree even for positions that don't actually require either the knowledge or learning skills that go along with such a degree.

The resulting backward pressure on academic institutions forces wider student acceptance, with ever-decreasing chances that the student will actually work in the field in which they are educated, or indeed in any field where critical thinking is considered an asset rather than a negative. Further, as the pressures increase to make the student traditionally employable at all, translatable skills such as critical or creative thinking become increasingly abrogated in favour of investing the student with resume-style skillsets.

As more students are flowed through the system, class sizes continually increase, resulting in less individual teacher-student time. In parallel, test structures change to allow mass grading with less teacher individual feedback: giving rise to such means of testing as the multiple choice test. With less and less personal interaction, the student's primary motivation increasingly becomes grades and grades alone.

If, in fact, the future that our current curricular structures are preparing students for is one in which grades are intended to morph easily into paycheques as the sole motivation: then I would say that our schools are doing a superlative job - but it is not a future I personally care for.

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