"Computer" used to be a job description. That bundle of roles no longer exists. The roles have been partially automated, and moved elsewhere. Jobs that use s

"Computer" used to be a job description. That bundle of roles no longer exists. The roles have been partially automated, and moved elsewhere. Jobs that use spreadsheets for instance. Surgery once did far more harm than good. Then took killing people for granted. Now it's discovering checklists, and teams, and crew resource management. Surgeons are discovering their roles of skilled technician and team manager conflict. Medical error is still a major cause of mortality. For a given condition, there's a very very broad spread of institutional competence. The best, are learning organizations with an intense focus on continuous process improvement and on not failing each and every one of their patients. The worst... don't wash their hands going from bathroom to ICU. Instructors at first-tier universities describe incoming introductory science students as expecting to be "spoon fed" - lacking both the skills and willingness to wrestling with a body of knowledge to extract understanding. With wealth, they've had such "good teachers", they haven't needed to. Consider a country with a focus on memorize-and-regurgitate - even more so than the USA. When a school fails to teach memorization, it's at least easy to recognize the failure. But what might equitable and effective science education look like? If every freshman class resembled incoming Ivy, a question might then be: "ok, we've nailed equity... now when are we going to make a start on effective?" Chemistry education research describes pre-college chemistry education content as "incoherent", leaving both students and teachers deeply steeped in misconceptions. With science education at least, we're currently failing badly and pervasively. Tech is coming. VR/AR, hybrid human-computer teams, ML, spoken dialog system, etc, etc. "Classroom teacher" is bundle of roles of breathtaking difficulty and scope. As with surgeon, those roles are now being specialized and rebundled. Like barber surgeon, it was a bundling that required accepting that we would pervasively fail our patients. Perhaps decades from now, we'll end up with something like a "classroom teacher", but with a vastly greater support system. Or perhaps people will forget that "classroom teacher" was once a job description.