I. Identify Your Skills

The post-industrial, 21st Century model of education is clear and implementable. Students must (with help):

1. Identify, understand, and hone their unique skills (aka strengths, gifts); 
2. Identify, understand, and hone their passions and missions in life; and then 
3. Use their unique skills to work on their missions through projects and eventually careers.

And that is it!

Any model of schools, no matter how much money is spent, that does not support this simple framework will fight students rather than enlist them.

Part I, identifying skills, requires exposure, reflection, and practice.

Exposure
Over the course of days, weeks, months, even years, expose students to a variety of environments where they can participate in different projects with and for a variety of constituents.

Understanding Manufacturing and Design

Just to scratch the surface:

• Environments include computers, gardens, fields, and workrooms.  These should include adult work environments as well. 
• Projects can include cooking, building, designing, nurturing, programming, traveling, and writing,
• Constituents can include a few peers or many, needy or accomplished adults, animals, or no one at all.  

The greater the diversity of environments and opportunities, the richer the process.

Most skill identification happens outside the classroom.

Reflection
Then, work with students to ask:

1. What do you do when you are not doing what you are supposed to be doing?
2. Where is everybody else incompetent?
3. When you help someone else, what do you do for them?
4. Where do you strive for mastery?  What tools or applications do you use over and over?
5. What YouTube videos do you watch?
6. Where do you want to spend resources, such as time and money?

Practice
Finally, students need the opportunity to practice.  In many cases, the adult's role is to protect the student from distracting and trivial demands.

Real projects and feedback are necessary.

As with all of education, this process is inefficient and critical.  Further, it is iterative and recursive, implemented immediately but for many it will take decades. But understanding where we are better than anyone else in the world is a power like no other.