The unlikely champion for testing kids around the world on empathy and creativity

Andreas Schleicher is a German data scientist--tall and precise with a grey mustache and a steely gaze. The head of the education division at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), he gives off an impression of determined focus. That's useful, considering that he's on a mission to change the way countries around the world teach their children. Society, according to Schleicher, is preparing for the future of work all wrong. We're scared that human jobs will be replaced by robots. But we're still teaching kids to think like machines. "What we know is that the kinds of things that are easy to teach, and maybe easy to test, are precisely the kinds of things that are easy to digitize and to automate," Schleicher said at the LearnIt conference in London in January. It's fairly easy to teach and test math, for example--but robots happen to be pretty good at math, too.