Predicting the future

If you had to do High School all over again, what classes would you take?

Last week we noted that our tutor strongly resists giving advice to his students on what classes to take in the following year.  His reasons, as we gave them, had to do with things like the college admissions process and the current administrative structure of High School classes and grades.  However, these are not his main concerns when he works with his students.  Underneath the details of this problem in logarithms or that one on chemical reaction rates is his desire that the students actually learn something, and learn something useful.  A choice of classes that best contribute to this end would seem a valuable piece of advice to give.  There is one difficulty, however: our tutor is terrible at predicting the future, and he knows it.

There are students who know very well what they want to do as adults, and have a program worked out to get them there.  There are doctors and lawyers and real-estate moguls, journalists and graphic designers.  For these the choice of classes is, if not already laid out, at least restricted within certain bounds.  There are two major problems with this approach.  First, there is no guarantee that the world in a decade’s time will have a place for any particular student.  It’s clear we’ll always need doctors; but being a doctor then might not be an attractive option (we are looking at the current troubles of the National Health Service of the UK with dismay).  Second, actually being a doctor may turn out to be not how the student thought it would.  Somewhere along the line the actual work of treating ill and injured people could lose its appeal.

Some years ago our astronomer noted that the subfield into which a new astronomy PhD chose to work had an enormous effect on employment success.  He then asked five or six established and highly-respected astronomers what areas they would recommend for a new grad student.  All declined to answer.  None would risk making predictions about the future.  And these were presumably among the most knowledgeable people in the science.

Indeed, our tutor has exploited the uncertainty about the future in sessions with recalcitrant students.  When faced with the declaration, “I don’t need to know this!  I’ll never use it!” he replies, “You don’t know that.  I don’t know that.  None of us know what will be useful in a year’s time, much less a decade.”

The irony of the would-be doctor discovering that medicine is not, after, all, something he or she wants to do, appears in miniature for each elective course a High School student chooses.  Of course the student can’t know the content of the course when checking the request box on the form; otherwise there would be no point in actually taking it.  Here our tutor can be of some use, describing what the student would be dealing with, at least in general terms.  (He is slightly worried that his description of Microeconomics sounded so attractive that a student signed up straight away.)

And last, there is the chance that a certain teacher, class or activity turns out to be useful all out of proportion to its promise.  But these are the hardest things of all to predict.