“Back to school” is a term used by parents oh-so-dearly to remind their kids that misery is soon upon them. It is also known in unofficial business lingo, as “Ka-ching!” season, but that’s for another article.

What’s dreadful and abysmal about those two words and that one preposition (I know, linguistics and stuff) is the fact that parents often use it to prep their kids for what they hate the most about their own lives: Routine. It’s an indirect form of any parent’s revenge on the system that created their nine-to-five reality.

Therefore, allow me to set the record straight on what should really offend you in 2019. No, not jokes on feminism or people’s personal stuff, or that post about deforestation.

What should really offend you, aside from you doing nothing about the things that you feel strongly about, is that the world is moving fast, uber-fast, and that our educational system and curricula are still stuck in the 40s of the last century.

Nowadays, job creation is entirely different. There are new jobs today that were literally unheard of just five years ago. The term “Social Media Specialist” would be explained years ago as a person who specializes in what food to serve to socialize best when around a TV set in a group gathering. But as you are reading this, there are two twelve-year-old kids in their bedroom somewhere plotting their own application that will soon become “a unicorn” and soon after, an entire industry.

We live in the age of fast-track consumerism and distorted attention. It is accelerating much faster than the rate at which we’re exhausting our natural resources. We’re not breeding a generation capable of adapting, and accommodating the excessive speed of advancement happening around them. 

It is a known fact that in 2019, programming is a spoken language: Your phone speaks it, your computer speaks it, yet most kids don’t. At an age where our refrigerators have AI tech built-in, it frightens me to know that the next generation is not being prepared at school to speak the language of the new millennia. 

Yet, what gives me a tiny ray of hope is seeing that some kids nowadays, are using the highway of information to their advantage to pick up skills that their schools are simply too old to even comprehend. While, most glued-to-the-screen-kids today bear a strong similarity to the people in isolated pods in Wall-E, there are an elite few who simply rose above consuming and opted to consume to the advantage of their skill-set growth.

We cannot raise kids that are only encouraged to become only one of three things: a lawyer, an engineer or a doctor. This isn’t to say that these professions are becoming obsolete, but we can’t isolate the idea of a successful career choice simply based on these most encouraged professions.

Those days are far gone, those days are in memoriam of a very chronologically near but technologically far era. Yet, what we can shape kids into, is developing critical thinking skills and research methodologies to become problem solvers, because as this economy progresses, one day they would have to solve one big problem related to their own existence and continuity. 

It’s important to teach history to learn the mistakes of the past, but we are not teaching kids about the future, we’re keeping them solemnly engaged in expired stories rather than opening their eyes to the possibilities of their dreams in the future. We teach them grammar, but with the aim of mastering the language in order for them to pitch a good sales deck. We teach them the sciences, but not how to apply them or make use of them on an everyday basis. 

We have a lot of changes to make for the new generation in our school systems, so we can give them a fighting chance against a monster that creates their relevance in a second but soon after makes them obsolete in a millisecond. 

So, let’s revisit what we are teaching. Let us, the adults in charge, get back to school, and change it for the better.

George Tarabay is a marketing expert/filmmaker/comedian/Podcaster. Follow him on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, SoundCloud @GeorgeTarabay. Photo by Allie Smith on Unsplash.