The current generation of kids are not to be raised with the command and control tactics which you were raised. The mechanics of parenting in your era which was not confronted by exposure to digital realism is different from what your children see and hear on a daily basis. If you try to hide any piece of information from them, Google is there to their rescue.
When you try to ground them from visiting their schoolmates Facebook, Twitter and Instagram can bail them out from boredom. They won’t read the hard copies of your favorite books which you decide to pass to them, if there are no Amazon Kindle or Google Chromebook versions. Some will prefer them in a gamified manner as they will be fun and easy for them to learn.
When they are done with secondary schools, please don’t force them to study medicine or law as their career choices or you might risk them being jobless after graduation despite massive investment made in their tertiary education. Instead encourage them to learn emotional intelligence, critical thinking, design thinking, agility, collaboration, data science and artificial intelligence, digital marketing, industrial design and product development.
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Even if you want them to study medicine, let them do bioinformatics which is the application of computing to solve biological issues. We are now in an era where robots are capable of executing routine office tasks and the worst thing that can behalf any parent is to continue feeding your children after they have graduated due to lack of jobs. Doctors can now use robots to perform complex surgical operations on patients even remotely.
For parents who want their wards to study law just be informed that not just smart machines which are capable of drafting legal briefs and searching for landmark judgements faster than human lawyers will ever do but that smart contracts which run on the blockchain will make many lawyers who are not looking to the future to lose jobs because who needs a lawyer to draft a Sales and Purchase Agreement, Memorandum of Understanding when technology has made it possible to be automated and execute terms between only the two parties in the agreement.
China will not solve your unemployment problem. She has a 2025 target which is to make the nation the world’s no 1 manufacturing power with different capabilities. The nation’s investments in artificial intelligence to solve the problem of rising wage costs from industry workers will make it difficult for developing countries like in Africa who are looking eastwards for industrial support.
Deploy massive social investments to prepare your youths for the future because their competition is not local or global. That is the only way to unlock prosperity because all the security crisis plaguing different African states is as a result of neglect by those in power towards their citizens causing the continent to have the highest unemployment and poverty rates in the world. Give scholarships to deserving youths not on nepotic basis to study and gain skills of the future which they will deploy to transform the continent. Massive empowerment of youths in agriculture without exposing them to cutting edge technologies will not help in the continental competitiveness.