Thomas Friedman’s column on Wednesday reinforced a conversation that broke out at the dinner table Tuesday night. This despite Friedman having not been at my house on Tuesday, which is evidence of either a coincidence or the fact that Friedman has perfected a time machine and jumped into the future to steal this blog post. Damn him!

Regardless, his point was that education is a major factor in the current economic crisis. Unemployment is ridiculously high and likely to climb before it goes down. But the people that are unemployed are unlikely to be prepared for the types of jobs that will emerge post-recession. Americans no longer compete internationally on do-jobs. Basically, if you can be trained to do your job and handed tasks for you to complete, the chances are good that someone overseas is willing to take on those tasks for a fraction of what you’ll do it for. Granted, there are some jobs that require you to be physically there, and that reduces the chance those positions will be outsourced. But the jobs in that category are shrinking, and unlikely to grow. The jobs that are “untouchable” (to borrow Friedman’s term) are those that benefit from creativity, imagination, and innovation. People who can solve novel problems, combine technologies and techniques in innovative ways, or people who can think outside the box are the ones that stand the best chance of being outsource-proof.

This brings us to dinner, where my sons were lamenting about school in the way that kids do. Kids, and even adults, are prone to asking why they need to learn the things they are taught. “What am I ever going to use this for?” is a common refrain. But the key point is that school is not about learning stuff. The “stuff” does provide an informational base on which which to build, but in this age of having a wealth of information at your fingertips, any particular stuff is not important. What is important is learning to learn. The pace of progress proceeds exponentially. That means that most of the “stuff” kids learn in school will be obsolete before they get to middle age. Their only hope of survival and success is to adopt a strategy of continual learning to stay abreast of developments in their chosen field. And further, it’s not enough to just stay current, but to synthesize those new bits into innovative things that contribute to the progress parade.

This is where schools need to go to succeed. It’s not a matter of stuffing more into our kids’ heads. There’s simply too much stuff to get it all in. Rather, focus on the skills to acquire, analyze, and exploit information, processes, and technologies. And more importantly, to fuel a hunger in them to pursue that. Graduation is not an endpoint anymore than getting your drivers license is one. It’s merely an acknowledgment that it’s safe to let you practice on your own from here on out.