What? If I couldn’t read at the age of 42, I’d go to a high school and learn. I really don’t have an adequate math grounding, but I am bright, and I would rather retake precalc with bright teens than a remedial precalc class in college with dumb adults.

What makes me wince as an historian is my knowledge that the exact same argument was used for vocational education 100 years ago, and it was also used in the 1960s, when the phrase “dropping out” first came to dominate how we describe those who don’t graduate from high school (see my book “Creating the Dropout” for that history). It can be used, and has been used, to justify both wonderful programs and mediocre programs, and it doesn’t help us figure out which is which.

“Condemned to lives of continued learning” is sort of a strange way of looking at it. And “There’s no technical skill we can give that won’t be obsolete in five to ten years” is quite an overstatement. If Fred learns to be a graphic designer, for instance, he may need to learn a new computer application at some point, but his basic design skills will still be applicable. If Sally learns to be a pilot, she will need to learn about new avionics over time…but this will probably be less of a transition than the prop-to-jet change that thousands of pilots went through in the past.

It’s certainly important to avoid locking people in with too narrow a skill base or industry focus–for instance, I’ve heard about colleges that offer “sports marketing” majors, which strikes me as too narrow–but (a)this is not just an issue with technical schools, as the preceding example points out, and (b)people have always had to learn new skills on their jobs: saying that we live in a “knowledge economy” doesn’t really mean everything has changed.