Essential learning

I've been having a lot of conversations lately about learning standards and targets. These are the things that are essential for a student to learn as determined by various groups with a stake in education. Those groups can be federal, state or local governments, regional offices of education, etc. And they serve as a laundry list of specific things that a student should know when they leave a classroom.

As I look at the list of things that a physics student should know, it occurs to me that although it would be great if students knew how to solve for the velocity of a cart that rolls without friction down an incline of a certain height, that particular skill will likely never be of use to them, even if they go on to moderately technical careers.

So what would be useful?

I'll think about this some more, but when I think of the skills that were most valuable in any of the techs or entry-level engineers with whom I've worked, three things immediately come to mind:

1. Vocabulary. When someone is already familiar with basic science terms and doesn't use words like "whatchamacallit", "thingy" and "whatever", not only do I have confidence in that person's intelligence, it makes communication much more efficient. 
2. Basic familiarity with science. I don't care if someone can recite the relationship between electrical power, current and voltage, nearly as much as I care that she has a sense that there is a relationship and can look up the specifics if necessary. 
3. Logic and critical thinking. It's hard to overstate the importance of the ability to think in terms of "if this, then that." It's the difference between being a valuable employee/teammate/asset and a helpless robot. This could be the biggest indictment of science education in America, but there's an alarming lack of people in industry with the ability to stand back, and ask themselves if what they're seeing makes logical sense. So many people just go through the motions of what they're doing without thinking about it. What's worse, when prompted, they can't think about it.

I'll see if I can refine this list, but I have the feeling that it's my duty to use these as "standards" at least as much as the standards I'm given by the state/ROE/etc.