No One True Way

For the last ten years I’ve been watching somewhere between alarm and disquiet, as conservatives went all in on: “No college! Trades!”

I’m not going to argue with you on college. I feel some great changes are coming that way, anyway, in the next ten years or so, though remember that for about ten years you’ll still need that piece of paper, though perhaps increasingly less. And ten years can mean 12 or 15 or 20. These things aren’t exact.

I think the loss of need for a college degree will only come when companies are allowed to test their own employees, and I don’t honestly know what is in the way of that, but I’d guess a forest of petty fogging rules and anti-discrimination lawsuits.

My guess is before college degrees are completely useless too, it will have to be understood that no, they don’t even guarantee the student can in fact read, much less learn.

But these things take time. Yes, at some point we’ll it “Then suddenly.” But on the way to “then suddenly” there will be a lot of “first slowly.”

And a lot of professions will always require college or its equivalent: medicine, engineering. Possibly law.

Here is the thing though, yes, the trades and manual work I impervious to challenges from AI. Yes, they really are needed. But if you push everyone into them, they’ll become as bloated as college once was. And also, some people simply aren’t designed for manual labor.

Look, I love the skilled trades in theory. But I don’t have the combination of hands and mind that would make me good at one of them. I like heavy labor, but more the kind like farming, which requires strength and endurance.

Oh, in another time when Journalism was a skilled trade you trained into out of high school, by being put on flower shows and obituaries, and the like, I’d probably have done okay at it.

Am I saying you shouldn’t put your kids into trade school? Well, no. Absolutely, if the kid has the type of talents and inclination for it, it is a way to make a living.

However, don’t go thinking it’s the One True Way. For most of them, in the end, it’s still working for someone else, and furthermore I expect in the great innovation wave (if we can avoid giving power to the leftists for ten or twenty years, at least) of the next century or so, most of those professions will be automated or otherwise rendered obsolete.

In fact that is the most important thing for your children — for everyone’s children — in the next few years: They must be prepared for a world in which innovation changes everyone’s lives and work at a rapid clip. Which means that they need to be fast and nimble on their feet.

It is the most important thing, not just for them, but for the nation.

Look, both tech and the current innovation climate means we need a lot of… small entrepeneurs. I’m going to lay down my dust right now that we’re going back or at least going towards — I don’t know how much of it was a pipe dream back then — that beloved standby of late 19th century and early 20th century science fiction: the genius in his garage, making something that turns the world on its head.

The combination of information on the internet — all of humanity’s knowledge at our fingertips — and increasingly affordable and accessible automation is making this possible as never before, or at least not in the last 100 years.

I know a lot of you are homeschooling kids and I approve of this. And if you’re doing that, you’re uniquely placed to give your kid the most important last finishing touch: Encourage them to start a business when they’re about sixteen.

What the business is doesn’t matter much. It should be something that interests the kid at that time, but it doesn’t mean it’s their lifetime vocation. Whether that’s 2-D printing, beading, computer repair, it really doesn’t matter at all. Whatever is within your means to stake out (I have a dream. We’ll see how this year goes. But I’d like to start $500 grants for kids to start businesses.)

It doesn’t matter if the business never makes more than allowance-money. And it doesn’t matter if it fails.

It matters that it be taken seriously, and the kid should be encouraged to do so, and to learn to establish his business as a legal entity, to keep accounts, to calculate prices, to figure out how to promote, to create business plans.

That and the experience of working steadily towards a goal is what the kid will take from having run a business. That and understanding that “the one thing” isn’t a thing. that you’re not FATED to do this or that. That the future is not written in stone. That you can fail and fail and fail and still come out ahead, as long as you get up once more than you were knocked down. Understanding themselves and the variety of their raw talents, and the limits of what one can do with sheer talent and work, the play of luck into even the most carefully planned business, etc. All of this will be invaluable to the kid so when they’re launched into the world they won’t be afraid to be entrepreneurs and innovators. If they end up getting a chance at that. And we need entrepreneurs and innovators by the score.

And what if they end up wanting to go to college? Well, let them, and help them in the measure of possible. Having learned how to run a business won’t hurt them in that.

However, don’t shy away from civics, history and politics. If the kids end up in college, they’re going to be submerged in a lot of crazy ideas. Make sure they know those are crazy, even if they have to parrot them for a while to get a grade.

Don’t send your kids down the “one true way.” I actually only know half a dozen people who are working in the field they studied for. And some of us you have to apply a lot of latitude. I’m sure my professors would be shocked if they knew what I’m doing now. (Given ages, most of them are dead. Which is probably for the best.)

Prepare them instead to pick paths, and to make the most of what they can do at any given time.

And for their sake, and the sake of this nation as we head to our third century? Teach them to be self-starting, self-bossing innovators, and unafraid.

It’s the best you can do.