How many more credits in Play and Empathy do I need to graduate?

   "College and Career Ready" has been the goal of  ACHIEVE since it launched the American Diploma Project in 2005. With the "Race to the Top" and the impending reauthorization of the ESEA (aka No Child Left Behind; we'll miss that name-- so much fodder for good jokes) that term seems to be the new buzzword.  So I suppose that is the mission of school: to make everyone CCR.
     What is interesting about that is that schools have been saying that for years without having the foggiest idea what makes someone CCR-- we know the test scores that are required to enter college and we know the degree to which certain test scores correlate to academic success in college and to what degree, but success in college does not seem to be paying off in career success to the level it once did. And what about the kids who either could not or did not want to go to college.... hmm... the career readiness part, despite excellent success of many career and technical education programs, was just not cutting it for the vast majority of students.
    One problem seems to be what schools are teaching... we are preparing our kids for the most part for jobs that don't exist any more, at least not in the United States. Our whole secondary school system is set up like a 1950s factory with kids on a conveyor belt from class to class that is started and ended by the sound of a bell... Doctor's don't do surgery like this, pastors and therapists don't do counseling like this, artists and designers and salespeople don't work like this.... teachers... well, teaching is about the only profession that schools are set up to train children to pursue, because even factories in the United States are no longer run on this model.
     Daniel Pink's bestseller "A Whole New Mind: Moving From the Information Age to the Conceptual Age" describes the 3 forces at work in our economy today-- abundance, Asia, and automation-- and what it is doing in terms of the skills needed to compete in our society. Jobs based on algorithmic, or left-brain, thinking are being done cheaper and more efficiently by computers and by outsourcing to countries that have lower costs of living. Because of the abundance of good and services and leisure time, Pink posits that other senses or ways of thinking (conceptual or right brain senses) are more important now: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning.  These are the skills that help people create, synthesize, persuade, teach, counsel and innovate....
     Pink did not in any way argue for this, but WHAT IF instead of math, science, English, etc. we offered courses called Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning.....?????