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What should you be teaching your kids right now to prepare them for an AI-scrambled job market?

The best educational choice you can make for your child might not focus on your child at all.

I work with a lot of very smart people, and sometimes one of them asks me a question that stops me in my tracks. That’s what happened after I published the newest installment of my advice column, Your Mileage May Vary, which was about whether it’s morally icky to send your kid to private school instead of the local public school.

Bryan Walsh, one of my editors, hit me with the question below. I felt so many people would relate to it that I wanted to publish it along with my own response to it. In the future, I hope to share more of these smart questions from within our newsroom. For now, consider this one about making decisions under radical uncertainty. Here’s Bryan’s question:

Sigal’s column is characteristically smart, and I’d encourage anyone wrestling with the decision about how to educate their child to read it. But as a parent of an 8-year-old in a Brooklyn public school, what strikes me most about the private-vs.-public debate isn’t the ethical dimension — it’s the sheer vertigo of not knowing.

Something I realized fairly soon as a parent is that we get exactly one shot at it. There is no control group. You can’t run your kid through public school, rewind, try private, and then compare outcomes at age 30. You’re forced to make what could be a massive, consequential decision with radically incomplete information.

That uncertainty gnaws at me. When I was growing up in the 1980s, the basic formula for life success was still legible: get good grades, go to a good college, get a good job. That pathway still exists, but it’s fraying in ways that make school choice, like so much else today, feel even more like a shot in the dark. What skills will actually matter in 15 years? Will the curriculum your kid learns in third grade have any bearing on a labor market being reshaped by AI? Will the network your child builds matter less — or even more?

I’m supposed to be a futurist, and I have no idea. I suppose it’s some comfort that neither does anyone else, though plenty of people will charge you $40,000 a year in tuition to pretend they do.

The research Sigal cites is genuinely reassuring — family background matters more than which building your kid sits in. But knowing that intellectually doesn’t silence the 3 am voice that whispers: What if you’re getting this wrong?

This is such Relatable Content! How are you supposed to set up your child’s “one wild and precious life,” as Mary Oliver put it, when life offers you no clear instruction manual and you only get one try?

This is hard in the most stable of times. And it feels even harder now, when so........

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