I also came through college during the dot-com ramp-up. There were tons of new jobs with specifications that never existed before: “Systems administrator,” “network engineer,” “desktop support technician.” Heck, I made a decent career out of those jobs.

Know who taught us how to do them? Nobody. We figured out our own best practices and wrote the documentation that the next wave of techs would be trained on. Not for nothing, guess the most common educational background for admins and techs back then? Humanities. English and history, primarily

If we really want to prepare students to engage with the changed landscape of day-after-tomorrow, teaching them rote what’s and how’s about today is a losing proposition. A) they’re already learning today’s tech through trial-and-error, and B) it’s going to evaporate before they graduate.

If we want to prepare them for work and life in a future we can’t yet foresee, we need to get them comfortable with engaging complex questions for which there aren’t pat, universal “correct” answers.