A famous quote by Richard Riley, former US Secretary of Education, is as follows:
We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.
I have seen this quoted in hundreds of places, but never a full reference. I'd like to use this quote in an article that must adhere to APA referencing - does anyone know of the first place this quote appears?
Generation Jobless by Peter Vogel has this quote at the beginning of Chapter 3, and attributes it to "Gunderson et al, 2004"
Checking this book's bibliography, we can find that "Gunderson et al, 2004" refers to
Gunderson, S., Jones, R. & Scanland, K. 2004. The Jobs Revolution: Changing How America Works. Copywriters Inc
I would suggest you check there.
With the help of Darren Ong's answer and Google Books, I found the quote in The Jobs Revolution, phrased as follows:
Former Secretary of Education Richard Riley recently noted that none of the top ten jobs that will exist in 2010 exist today and that these jobs will employ technology that hasn’t yet been invented to solve problems we haven’t yet imagined.
An identical sentence occurs in Hearing on careers for the 21st century; the importance of education and worker training for small business, p. 90, freely available on archive.org. Unfortunately, neither source gives a reference, and the quotation is not given verbatim.
The earliest such quote I could find was from Windows on the Future: Education in the Age of Technology by Ted McCain, Ian Jukes, (2001, p. 80):
the Secretary of Education, Richard Riley in the Kentucky Teaching and Learning Conferences in Louisville on March 2, 1999, was quoted as saying that none of the top 10 jobs that will be available in the year 2010 exist today, and that these are jobs that will require workers to use technology that has not yet been invented to solve problems that we have not yet thought about.
They didn't give any source for their quote. But given how specific they were about when and where this was said, this quote is perhaps somewhat trustworthy.
Instead of directly quoting Riley, you can just quote the above sentence by McCain and Jukes like so:
According to McCain and Jukes (2001), Richard Riley stated "that none of the top 10 jobs that will be available in the year 2010 exist today, and that these are jobs that will require workers to use technology that has not yet been invented to solve problems that we have not yet thought about."
Note: The quote probably became popular with this video first released in 2006 by Karl Fisch (accompanying blog).
