In times when we watch our resume's burning up behind us, and education is a life-long experience, we should spend some time looking for skills with lasting value.
The area that seems most crucial to a shared prosperity relates to relationships, and how we get along and work together. Curiously, this area seems absent in most educational programs, as if it's obvious or something.
Most of our lives are spent dealing with one kind or another of relationships, from parents and siblings, to classmates, bosses, subordinates, peers, friends and lovers, community councils, etc.
I have yet to see an actual course in the K-12 curriculum anywhere on "relationships". For that matter, if there is a college or graduate course on "relationships", it has a very low profile.
Isn't that strange?
We have a huge emphasis on math and science, and yet, the average person has far more need of training in getting along and listening than they do for algebra and chemistry.
And yet, the invisible elephant in the room that is guiding our choices remains unidentified.
Colleges are now somewhat torn on the subject, requiring the dread "group work" of students who hate it, taught by faculty who don't understand it. Our businesses are failing from our inability to actually work together, but seem unable to address the problem.
And yet, this is not a national priority. Why not? Usually, if we don't know something, like how to get to the moon, we can assemble people and figure it out.
Puzzling.
Some posts on educational directions of the US:
"Now What -- after the crash"
"OECD/PISA - Our education system should teach collaboration not competition"
The Road to Ruin
The Road to Error (illustrated)
"Why More Math and Science are Not the Answer"
http://www.highreliability.org/
I'm sure the US military tries very hard to keep nuclear weapons under control. Even that intense level of attention isn't enough to do the job 100% of the time, illustrating John Gall's law that "complex systems simply find complex ways of failing."
"Honey, I lost the nuclear weapons"
The US National Institutes of Medicine on how much the social relations of the front-line teams matter when your job is to get reliability in hospital care:
Crossing the Quality Chasm and other links
On High Reliablity organizations, which are sobering. They try really really hard to not have accidents, and still don't succeed from time to time: