How to Robot-Proof Yourself

“The next generation will face global, economic, and social challenges that we cannot even imagine. What are the skills our children will need in this uncertain future? Above all else, they will need to be creative, collaborative, adaptable critical thinkers.” Challenge Success, Stanford University

The world is changing fast, and the pace of acceleration is dizzying. Some experts predict that up to 40% of today’s jobs will not exist by 2030. In the future, rote professional tasks will be performed better, faster and less expensively by robots. As a result, it is critical that we cultivate skills in young people that enable them to function and thrive in the 21st century. And these skills have to be acquired early, while in high-school and college. By the time our kids are in the workforce it’s already too late. Moreover, college admissions staff know this and are looking for candidates who have demonstrated that they are developing these critical high-level skills. So the sooner they start the better.

Kids need to acquire skills that cannot easily be performed by a machine

There is no human that can recall history facts, perform complex mathematical equations or read an x-ray faster or more accurately than a machine. But at least in the foreseeable future machines will still not be able to identify and solve novel problems, iterate and ideate in a large and diverse group of individuals or adapt and target messaging between audiences. In order to thrive, our kids need to develop complex skills that are difficult to automate.

So what exactly are these skills? Start reading about this issue, and you’ll notice some common themes. The first skill is critical thinking. In other words: the thoughtful analysis and evaluation of an issue done in advance of forming a judgment. Another is creative problem solving. To be successful in the 21st century a person should be an innovative thinker who can bring a novel and fresh perspective to problems in any context. Third, excellent oral and written communication are absolutely essential to success in the modern world. There will always be a need in every industry for people who can bridge technical, creative and business worlds, and communication is at the core of this. Finally, collaboration, or the ability to work constructively with members of a group performing similar or different tasks in furtherance of a common objective.

It’s not possible to know exactly what technical skills our kids will need for the jobs of 2030 and beyond. But if teens know how to learn, have flexible mindsets and are trained how to approach problems they will be far ahead of their peers and far more likely to achieve personal and professional success. And, hopefully, they will be robot-proof.

Kids are not acquiring these skills at school

There is growing consensus among educators that today’s schools are failing to deliver complex skills to students. Rote memorization - which is precisely what your state exams and college boards and APs test - doesn’t lead to long-term learning or development of any of the robot-proof 21st century skills. These tests are not designed to test lateral thinking, complex problem solving or creativity. Rather, they are designed to measure the ability to execute a very specific type of problem quickly and consistently and/or recall of facts from a broad but shallow curriculum. And standardized tests tend to be poor predictors of college success.

Schools everywhere recognize this and administrators and teachers today use many of the same buzzwords to distance themselves from this test-based model. These often include: critical thinking, resilience, project-based learning, passion, engagement, innovation. However, there’s little evidence that these concepts are translating into real results in the classroom, mostly because the core curricula have barely changed in a century. And with testing as the primary driver, there is no time in the classroom for anything else. The American system is still fundamentally focused on standardized tests, including at most of the “best” schools in the country (“best” being measured, of course, by standardized test performance). Educators are trying very very hard to change all of this, but are hemmed in by state bureaucracies and deeply entrenched cultural and political ideas about the value of testing as a measure of quality.

There’s another really important element to this that goes deeper than the development of skills: mental health. Kids today are more dysfunctionally stressed than at any point in American history. Studies suggest that as many as 30% of high school and college students today experience clinical levels of anxiety and depression. Look at your own child. Is he overworked? Does she feel that the pressure to perform has crowded out all of things she once pursued for pleasure? Does he feel that there is purpose in what he is learning? Is she engaged? Or are they just going through the motions to get into college?

How can you help your child acquire these crucial skills?

In recent in years, the trend has been to try to fill this skills gap through a myriad of extracurriculars and community service projects. And indeed, colleges look to those very things for evidence that a prospective student has acquired some of those crucial higher-level skills. Unfortunately, many time-starved students resort to pursuing transparently empty endeavors such as starting school clubs that only meet quarterly or initiating community-service projects right before admissions season. Some well-meaning parents spend fortunes on expensive “leadership” programs and low admissions bar academic camps to burnish their kids resumes. But those activities are too adult-driven and structured to require the energy or creativity needed to result in any meaningful benefit. And how many 21st century skills do they require or develop? None. So what does one do?

We think the answer lies in youth-led community innovation: local community projects that solve a specific problem and that are initiated, directed and executed by students themselves.

Every single one of the key 21st century skills listed above comes into play when one is involved in youth-directed community-based action. Although a large, global or national project may sound more dazzling, it is very very difficult for kids to identify and execute on large-scale projects without significant adult oversight and involvement. In contrast, local problems are manageable and convenient enough to be realistically tackled by young people. The right locally-focussed projects are relevant, tangible and, most importantly, authentically student-driven. In addition, there is lots of evidence that kids who feel a deep connection to and investment in their community have better academic and mental health outcomes. Researchers and educators agree that project-based community engagement correlates to higher levels of academic engagement. These initiatives also do a better job than today’s classroom-based learning at preparing students for challenges they will face in college and the world.

How does it work? We prompt teens to identify a problem in their community. Study the problem. Think about the stakeholders. Research what other communities are doing to approach and resolve similar issues. And then develop a plan - create a tech solution, build a community process, or execute a local strategy with community buy-in. All this requires creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration and all the essential 21st century skills these young people need to develop.

But how can you help your child get started? Most teens need a clear path and plan before they can identify a local solvable problem, conceive of a practical solution and execute on it. We searched every program and course available and could not find anything that would help kids accomplish this. So with the help of experts and industry leaders, we built our own.

Blue Blaze can’t tell your child what to do, but through our programs we help build the scaffolding and blueprint for community-based innovation that participants can take home and implement. These experiences are robust and genuine and organic, not manufactured or socially engineered by parents.

Colleges want an authentic story about how you have made an impact on your community.

Authentic, youth-led community projects are also powerfully impressive to college admissions officers. Too often, kids today pursue extracurriculars for resume value rather than inherent virtue. Their stories are transparently manufactured, and college admissions officers know it. In contrast to the empty credentialing exercises that clutter so many student resumes, youth-led community projects become vehicles for genuine personal and intellectual growth. And they make the kids who pursue them far more attractive in today’s ultra-competitive college admissions process.

Admissions officers review thousands of applications that include perfect marks and “tick the box” extracurriculars. It is virtually impossible for colleges to distinguish one applicant from the next, which is why they have started looking for kids that can point to “impact” projects that demonstrate that the candidate has done something positive that made a real impact on his community. There’s a reason for this: colleges want to fill their classes with students that will contribute something meaningful to their campuses too. In a letter to prospective applicants dated February, 2019 the Yale College Admissions Office noted that “Yale is especially interested in candidates who have had a profound, positive and lasting impact on others and who will enrich their communities in college and beyond.” This messaging could not be more clear: if you don’t stand out, you’re not getting in. And the best way to accomplish this is through authentic, self-driven community projects which are genuinely the product of a teen’s efforts and not the result of adult engineered projects designed to tick mythical resume boxes.

A consortium of educators and admissions officers led by the Harvard Department of Education recently published a report touting some of the other benefits of youth-led community projects. According to the group “(c)ommunity engagement...can help young people develop key emotional and ethical capabilities, including problem-solving skills and group awareness.” It’s easy to see why candidates that embody these characteristics make good additions to college communities. And happily, because of their engagement in complex, robust and youth-led projects these young people are also more likely to possess precisely the 21st century skills that all of our children will need to be robot-proof.

“We also encourage young people [applying to college] to consider… community engagement, including working in groups on community problems, whether the problem is a local park that needs attention, bullying in their schools or communities or some form of environmental degradation.” Recommendation from Harvard-led coalition of college admissions.

Unfortunately, there is currently a profound distance between what young people are taking away from the classroom and what they need to be successful in the college admissions process and beyond. We want our children to get into a great university so they can continue to learn, mature and develop. But fundamentally, we want them to acquire the skills they need to get jobs and survive and thrive in the future. And until there is a transformational shift in the way that school is taught, we’re going to need organizations like Blue Blaze to help us fill in the gaps.