I would say the purpose of the elementary and secondary public education system is to provide students with a set of skills that they can use in any area of study that they choose to pursue or any workplace. In terms of some of those I mentioned, problem solving and critical thinking, and all of those sorts of things, some of the information that we've received in recent years has been that students need to have that basic skill set because they may end up changing completely the type of work that they're doing over the course of their lifetime several times.
On April 3rd, 2014. See this statement in context.