I was cleaning up some comments on this blog when one of them lead me to an old post from 2009:
In this post, I talked about how my job is almost entirely made up: I teach people to use things that they only need to use because I told them these things exist and they should use them. In the post I mentioned several tools that no longer exist - I'd completely forgotten they existed, to be honest, and we don't miss them. I wonder how many of the tools I teach people to use today will be forgotten relics of a brief period of time in the near future?
Almost 15 years later, I'm still teaching people to use tools they only need because we tell them they exist, but with slight variations. Instead of "training a unicorn to fly a spaceship", I'm now teaching people what they should now about flying spaceships with unicorns, so they understand the principles and can better adapt to the new spaceships they may encounter in the future and the legendary creatures that might be flying them.
But...
Teaching transferable skills is all well and good, but - as I have bemoaned many a time - if these skills aren't transferable to a post-apocalyptic wasteland, then what's the good of them?
After the "something that happened", will we need to know how to use a database that uses boolean operators? I doubt it. Will we need a plumber? Yes.
If I run away from this job and move to a quaint sea-side town with a population of 20 farmers, 10 fisher folk and a vet, will these people need me to teach them how to use EndNote? Probably not. Could they do with someone who can make cupcakes and coffee? That's more likely.
What I do isn't real. I don't make anything real.
I need to learn how to bake bread. Bread is real. People will always need bread.
 |
| Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash |
No comments:
Post a Comment