A new RAND report argues it's our entire system of educating and employing people, from their first day at school to their last day on the job. We are preparing workers for a labor market that no longer exists, researchers concluded, and then sending them flat-footed into a world of dizzying change.

What would it take to fix that? To answer that question, the researchers asked another: What if we just scrapped everything and started over? What would we want the American education and labor system to look like if we built it from scratch?

A good education, reformer John Dewey once proposed, is one that helps young people develop “in an orderly, sequential way into members of society.” He was writing in 1934, but that's still a pretty good description of how we prepare the next generation for work and for life. It's orderly. It's sequential. You go to school, you get a job, you retire.

But the world doesn't work that way anymore.

Read the full article about education and employment by Doug Irving at The RAND Corporation.