FOR aeons parents taught children all they knew to ensure successive generations were well equipped to make their own way in the world. And we continue the practice in the hope of preparing our own offspring, though we no longer teach them to make of spears and skin rabbits; we concentrate on the more relevant skills required for today . . . Or do we? In a world of accelerating technology I see young people wrongly counselled by minds locked in the past.

Soldiers returning home after the Second World War were reunited with wives and girlfriends employed in munitions factories for the duration. The wisest had saved enough to buy a house for around £450 - about two years' average earnings at the time. But very often their parents had mindsets in the depression of the 1930s and advised, "Don't do it". Many couples took decades to recover from this flawed advice; some never regained their financial advantage, and ultimately purchased houses at over 10 times the price.

When I was 22 I had a job paying £1,000 a year - a handsome salary at the time. But I resigned to go to university, and faced a period of living on an annual grant of only £130. This was considered the height of folly by my peers and advisers. But they were wrong. Yes, it was risky, but not life-threatening, and ultimately I made it, along with many others who chanced their arms and broke the mould.

Today it takes far less than a generation to find yourself well-qualified in the delivery of bad advice to younger people. The stable, long-term, job-for-life mentality of many parents, teachers, employers and managers, born of the smoke-stack era, is now dangerous. A substantial proportion of youngsters now gain more, job and career-wise, from their time at home on a computer, than from their formal time at school and university. They are mostly self-taught, with software skills that are in great demand compared with those imparted by some irrelevant university course.

Who advises these young people to spend two to four years of their lives dedicated to the study of topics for which there is little or no demand in society at large? At the very point when they have to make strategic decisions about their future education, and hence, employment prospects, they are confronted by an array of people with outdated and irrelevant experience of life and employment. The result is that we are churning out people who have been educated in topics about as relevant to the future as how many angels can stand on the head of a pin. Curiously, we have liberal arts courses, but no equivalent in science and technology.

In some respects, basic computer skills are now more essential than being able to read and write. But the major part of our education system and budget is focused on creating expertise where there is no hope of recovering the cost, let alone making a profit. Training and educating our young people is no problem provided the older generation is prepared to unlearn the irrelevant tracks and wisdoms of the past. Technology is not only essential for personal and national prosperity, it is the kernel for accessing and studying everything from language to cosmology.

Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is:
http://cochrane.org.uk