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By Selvei Rajkumar
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The warning signs inside American schools are becoming harder to dismiss.
The NAEP 2024 report shows a significant decline in the nation's math and reading performance, with twelfth-grade scores falling to some of their lowest levels in decades.
According to the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, only 55.3% of U.S. high school students reported feeling close to people at their school in 2023.
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We should not interpret these findings as proof that children are failing. They raise a different question: whether an education system designed around the needs of an earlier era is adapting quickly enough to the needs of today's students.
Much of American schooling is still organized around separate subjects, fixed schedules, and standardized assessments. Yet outside the classroom, problems do not arrive labeled mathematics, science, or language arts.
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Recall matters, but it is not enough. Students also need repeated opportunities to apply knowledge in unfamiliar situations, connect ideas across disciplines, judge whether a source is credible, and consider who will be affected by a proposed solution.
If school rewards mainly the reproduction of an expected answer, young people may leave with information but too little practice using it.
That mismatch is becoming more consequential as artificial intelligence (AI) changes work.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39% of workers' existing skill sets to be transformed or become outdated by 2030.
It also projected 170 million new roles and 92 million displaced roles worldwide. No educator can tell a child with certainty which job will be secure a decade from now.
A New Question
That is why I believe we must replace one of education’s most familiar questions. Instead of repeatedly asking students, "What do you want to become?" we should ask, "What problem do you want to solve?"
That shift may sound simple, but it would fundamentally change how students approach their education and their future.
The first question can push a young person toward selecting a job title before they understand a changing world.
The second invites curiosity, purpose, and adaptability. It encourages students to identify a need, understand the people experiencing it, combine relevant knowledge, and test possible responses.
AI can then become one tool within that process, not an answer machine and not an enemy to fear.
This does not mean discarding subject knowledge or allowing technology to replace teachers. Students cannot think critically about material they do not understand.
Teachers remain essential because they provide context, challenge weak reasoning, and help students distinguish a plausible output from a trustworthy conclusion.
The goal is to connect rigorous knowledge to meaningful application.
Risks and Rewards
Change at this scale is difficult. Interdisciplinary learning requires planning time, suitable materials, teacher development, and assessments that recognize more than memorization.
But difficulty is not a defense of inertia. Continuing unchanged risks producing more students who feel disconnected from school and unprepared for a labor market in which tasks and required skills keep shifting.
The alternative is practical.
A science lesson can incorporate data analysis and persuasive writing around a local water issue. A history project can require students to compare sources, identify competing interests, and present an evidence-based recommendation.
These experiences do not dilute academic standards. Properly designed, they ask students to use several forms of knowledge at once.
A Potential Solution
State education agencies and school districts should begin a measurable three-year transition. Every middle and high school student should complete at least one interdisciplinary, real-world project each semester.
Schools should assess those projects against five published criteria: subject knowledge, application, source evaluation, collaboration, and communication.
Governments should fund teacher planning and training, districts should report participation and results, and parents and students should help identify locally relevant problems.
Within three years, officials should compare participating schools on academic progress, attendance, student belonging and postsecondary readiness, then expand approaches supported by the results.
This is not a call for another slogan or an abrupt national mandate. It is a testable path from an inherited model toward one built for the world students actually inhabit.
If we act, students can learn to see uncertainty as a field of problems they are capable of addressing. If we refuse, their anxiety and disengagement should surprise no one.
A generation should not have to fit itself to an obsolete system; the system must prove that it can prepare that generation for tomorrow.
Selvei Rajkumar is the founder and CEO of Orion STEM Schools, a private K-12 school scheduled to open in Naperville, Illinois, in 2027. The planned school uses an interdisciplinary, project-based model similar to the approach advocated in this article.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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