The Challenge of Educating for the Future

Madison Schools Superintendent Art Rainwater:

This fall we will welcome over 2,000 kindergarten children to their first day of school. What an exciting and scary day for them. They will come from many cultures, they will be many colors and they will each begin their thirteen year journey with different skills, attitudes and backgrounds.

Our community must ensure, through our schools, that despite their different starting points they leave in 2019 with two important things in common. They must have the knowledge and skills to have a family supporting career and actively participate in our society. Therein lays the challenge.

Those eager five year olds will still be in the workforce 53 years from now. Who knows what skills, both academic and personal, will be needed then. There are jobs today that we never dreamed of 40 years ago and there are jobs that we thought were forever that have been lost to time. The pace of that change seems to speed up.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at June 7, 2006 9:36 AM
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