Bestselling author Alvin Toffler wrote:

"As work shifted out of the fields and the home, moreover, children had to be prepared for factory life. The early mine, mill, and factory owners of industrializing England discovered, as Andrew Ure wrote in 1835, that it was 'nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands.' If young people could be prefitted to the industrial system, it would vastly ease the problems of industrial discipline later on. The result was another central structure of all Second Wave [industrial-age] societies: mass education.

"Built on the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the 'overt curriculum.' But beneath it lay an invisible or 'covert curriculum' that was far more basic. It consisted, and still does in most industrial nations,of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labor demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitious operations.

"To prepare youth for the job market, educators designed standardized curricula. Men like Binet and Terman devised standardized intelligence tests. School grading policies, admission procedures, and accreditation rules were similarly standardized. The multiple-choice test came into its own."

Toffler goes on to show that the economy is now changing in drastic ways, and those who are prepared in their schooling for such industrial-age work will be limited to low-paying jobs. The economy now rewards employees and entrepreneurs with a totally different set of skills: initiative, independent and creative thinking, ability to work in and lead teams, and especially, in Toffler's words, "self-starting entrepre-neurialism."

He shows that the economy is looking for people who have learned "in and/or out of school" to be:

• "less pre-programmed and faster on their feet"
• "complex, individualistic, proud of the ways in which they differ from other people"
• hungry "for more responsibility and more vital work with a commitment worthy of their talent and skill"
• interested in diverse values, the synergy of teams, and leadership by principles rather than authoritarian hierarchies

The new affluent economy, "penalizes workers who show blind obedience. It rewards those who, within limits, talk back." It prefers people "who seek meaning, who question authority, who want to exercise discretion, or who demand that their work be socially responsible."

The result is that most schools don't prepare young people for success in the realities of the affluent economy. To help youth become effective in highly-compensated work, schools need to train leaders.