• Globalization- operating in a world where boundaries don't exist
• Mobility- "connect to work" as long as you have access to the web you can get your job done
• New behaviors- living a public life, real-time feedback, collaboration, sharing
• Technology- big data, collaboration platforms, internet of things, robots and automation, wearables, and more.
• Millennials/demography- millennials will make up 50% of the workforce by 2020 and 75% by 2025, older generations are retiring later and many are becoming freelancers after they retire.

   It turns out that our children didn't need to be one of a handful of precious kids in a classroom. They can handle the bigger classes, the dozens of children from different backgrounds.  They can be OK and even, sometimes, great. We've learned that our kids aren't so extraordinarily fragile that they need to be bubble wrapped by us before they venture into the world.

We've also learned that they aren't necessarily extraordinary at all. Or, to be more precise, that if they want to be perceived as extraordinary in the public school system, they had better be extraordinary. The school will not create extraordinary for them.

  For decades, cognitive scientists slowly accrued a solid understanding of how people learn but never bothered to tell teachers and students what they had found.

It is as if, says author Benedict Carey, "doctors had discovered a cure for diabetes and spent 50 years characterizing its molecular structure before giving it to a patient."

He is attempting to rectify that with his book How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why It Happens. Teachers, students, parents -- anybody, really -- should find it not just fascinating but useful.

For example, say you need to learn something -- the names and dates of the presidents, the key characteristics of different artistic movements, Spanish verb declensions, musical scales, the state capitals, you name it.