And yet we're meant to be educating them for it. What does this mean?

Question

I was watching a TED video and didn’t get a few of the sentences. I hope someone can explain them to me. > So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years' time. **And yet we're meant to be educating them for it.** So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary. What does "And yet we're meant to be educating them for it" mean?

Answer 1

We've talked about this in my credentialing classes. What the speaker is suggesting is that we are to be preparing out students to jobs that don't even exist yet -and for some educators that they won't see. What this means to me as an educator, is to prepare our students with skill sets that are adaptable, such as being resourceful and learning how to be self-taught in certain aspects. For example, we are not simply teaching our students how to use the basic principles of Google Slides (text and a picture for presentations) but how to "play" with the different functions and create something more with what they have. Thus, teaching them to teaching themselves and look beyond what meets the eye. I hope this may have helped.