Common Core and Gen(i)

Having been a teacher for 26 years I am constantly amazed at the general confusion surrounding the process of educating young people. Every semester I look at a room of young bright 18 year olds and I have watched how that group has evolved. They appear to me as little fuel cells waiting for the right engine to spark their potential and to generate new amazing things. The engine has to evolve to match the new fuel. However I do look back in amazement as to my generation (I will be 58 this year) and am also amazed as to how we made it given our common core. My relatives for the most part went through the same educational system. A large percentage of us became senior vice-presidents, Ph.D. accredited educators and researchers, acclaimed teachers, some how we all have risen to the heights of our chosen field. How did we make it? We were taught we chalk and blackboards, textbooks from the Ottoman Empire, was it just a work ethic?

I have met many students today who have a strong work ethic. Not a coal miner-like strong work ethic but decent enough to make it. These students are the ones I refer to as Gen(i) - Generation interactive, Internet, isolated, itinerant, isomorphic, indulgent, etc.

Many of the students I have come in contact with over the years have now gone on to reach the heights (if not further) that I just described for my own relatives. So what is up with the Common Core?

My take is that we are living in disruptive times. For every job available there are three applicants. So what is actually happening and why is education invoking a system that seems to convolute a process that has had what seems to be a successful run?

It appears to me that we are trying to slowdown the potential of the fuel to match the economics of the time. Dilute the fuel through obfuscation and confusion until its ratio matches the current potential of the engine. If not the engine might implode and create even a bigger problem? So – has technology advanced so far that the automation of jobs is by far outpacing the growth of the educated population? Simply put we don’t need as many clerks, typists, even entry-level trained business people as we did before?

Maybe to understand this better we should look at the last meeting of industry and technology. Back when the typewriter was created the keys were purposely spread around to actually slowdown the typist as to not jam up the gears of the machine. The machine sped up the process of course but at that point no machine could work properly to the actual speed of a human using them if the keys were in an easily read order. In other words the process could be converted very easily to automation but the typewriter mechanism hadn't been developed that would work flawlessly to the speed of the user and their brain.
I believe it is the same today with education and the inclusion of computers. Some students are outpacing the existing educational system when technology is introduced - they are exceeding the potential of the mechanism. So in order to slow down their rate of use we need to create a "keypad of confusion" - spread out the information in a confusing way to actually slow the use. 
As I said before I teach and for the last 26 years I have seen a rapid growth in the use of technology by the Gen-i (generation interactive) and the amount of information they can absorb is amazing. However teachers have only “x” amount of curriculum approved content in the class so it means a revamp of the educational content system if we allow the information to be processed at their current absorption rate. Do we need grades K-12? Can it all be taught given current curriculum content in K-8?

Did John Henry actually win and is now beating us over the head with the machine?