06.24.26 An Education In Change / Should You Purchase A Warranty - Ever?

“I was not a great student. School was hard for me.” That is how Clark Howard begins a story about founding an alternative school called Career Action when he was 23 years old, nearly 50 years ago. The school was a nine-hour-a-day, three-month boot camp for young adults who had not done well in high school or had dropped out. The curriculum was brutally practical: English, math, typing, 10-key machine operation, check encoding, manual bookkeeping. Clark ran it with “extremely strict rules” around timeliness, attendance, and attitude. Many students washed out. But for decades, the school worked. Then it closed after about 25 years, and Clark was no longer involved in its final phase.

The point of telling this story is not nostalgia. It is a warning about what he calls “static analysis”—the assumption that the way things are is the way they will stay. “The skills that we taught became irrelevant in a generation,” Clark says. “We cannot stay with what’s known as static analysis.” His lesson: the jobs and skills people train for today, whether out of high school, trade school, or college, may not exist in a generation. The only reliable strategy is to become a continuing lifelong learner who adapts to changing market conditions. He offers a vivid counterexample: his in-laws, both in their late 80s, recently traded a 15-year-old Lexus for a Tesla Model Y with full self-driving. The