A good article on a topic that has come up here a number of times is in
The New Atlantis
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/13/crawford.htm

Much of the "jobs of the future" rhetoric surrounding the eagerness
to end shop class and get every warm body into college, thence into a
cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are heading to a
"post-industrial" economy in which everyone will deal only in
abstractions. Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as
thinking...

Summary lifted from a site I read, MetaFilter.
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/54601