This line from Eric Hoffer succinctly describes much of our approach to teaching:
This has been far more relevant for me than it was for my parents -- most of the jobs I've had since leaving college didn't really exist when I finished high school. And it will be much, much more relevant for my students than it has been for me. We as educators cannot instill in our students the specific skills they'll need for their success, because we do not know what those critical skills are. Many of them haven't even been developed yet! But we can teach them strategies for discovering and developing those skills. We do so by confronting them with challenging problems that aren't exactly like other problems they have seen over and over. Through this, they learn how to use old tactics to solve new problems and how to develop new tactics. Above all, they learn how to learn.