Currently, unless a youngster is a gifted entrepreneur, it takes 40 to 50 years for the average person to have any sort of impact on the bureaucracy of business and government. For young people, this is a grueling and exhausting path that squashes motivation and desire.
The age of technology has shown that we are still a country of innovators and pioneers. Yet, we grind our children through a seemingly endless process of practice runs and assessments before we let them try out their own ideas. Honestly, our mistakes are really pretty glaring. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that we have a host of economic, political, and environmental problems.
We need to quit tinkering with education and find ways to engage students in solving the problems that face their generation, right now. We need to bring them to the table much earlier and reward them.
Flipping, in this sense, requires a change in the way we overlap and infuse education and work. There needs to be multiple avenues into the real world that students can access at much younger ages. We can't really afford to wait. What we are doing now is simply wasting one of most valuable resources: the gifts, interests, and ideas of our young.
