Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

I was at a talk on 2018 education methods and the speaker referred to this favorite Chinese proverb. She was comparing this to education in 2018. This maxim sounds perfect, and we all nodded our heads when we read it.

But then her next question to us was what happens if there aren’t any fish anymore, or what happens if fishing is no longer allowed or practical. How does the proverb sound now? It’s not about what you’ve learned, it’s about understanding how to think and explore a problem.

Amazon is replacing cashiers at supermarkets. Telsa is building a self-driving truck, bots are writing news stories and opinion pieces. The general rule is that if you can be trained, then a machine can be taught as well.

The education system and employer / employee system drums the creativity out of us and trains us like machines. Humans weren’t meant to have masters. We are creative beings who are wired to explore and create with the assistance from machines. Time to jailbreak our young people or they’ll be sucked into the same trap of past generations.