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GREENSBORO - Today, we get busy.

We - the parents of 72,000 students in Guilford County public schools - will lose our laid-back summer. We'll crowbar kids out of bed and move them toward the door for another year at 120 schools countywide.

Our schedules will shift into overdrive. We'll keep a litany of numbers in our head - classroom, bus, tardy time, pickup time - until it all spins into one big, confusing mass.

But since last winter, I've been nagged by a video no more than six minutes long. It's called "Did You Know?" It should make any parent - public school, private school, home-school - ask one question:

Are we failing our kids?

I saw it in early March at Peeler Open School for the Performing Arts, where my son and daughter go. I sat in the back of the library, clinging to my coffee, as principal Marshall Matson queued up the video, first shown in August 2006 to a crowd of 150 at a Colorado high school.

Since then, "Did You Know?" has gone through at least three updates and been watched by at least 11 million people worldwide.

It's a sobering look at our education system. It'll crank up your competitive side faster than you can shout "Michael Phelps." But more importantly, it'll get you thinking about our changing world and our priorities as parents and as a community.

"Did You Know?" is all facts. Here are a few:

* Twenty-five percent of the population in China with the highest IQs is greater than the total population in North America. In India, it's 28 percent. Translation: They have more honor students than we have kids.

* The amount of new technical information doubles every two years. Translation: For students starting a four-year college degree, half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.

* The top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn't exist in 2004. Translation: We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't been invented to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet.

That'll get your attention, won't it? It did for Matson, too.

A little more than a year ago, Matson worked as a program director for the N.C. New Schools Project, a nonprofit created by Gov. Mike Easley to redesign high schools for the 21st century.

A colleague sent him "Did You Know?" and Matson, a former middle-school teacher and principal in Tarboro, thought, "I know I can use this."

He did. It came during his first year at Peeler - as he helped the K-5 school in east Greensboro rediscover its focus on progressive education.

Matson, a 40-year-old father of four, used "Did You Know?" to get our attention. But it could be applied to any school anywhere.

We live in a country where we spend $8,700 on every student - the second highest in the world, behind Switzerland. Yet, we live in a country where 30 percent of all students don't graduate from high school.

So, what's happening? Let's go to the front lines.

Matson sees us as a country still running our education system as we did in 1950, where we put a 6-year-old onto an assembly line and use the same old tools to build their education, part by part.

We can't afford to do that any longer.

"We're not preparing our kids just to be screwing in widgets," Matson said. "They'll have to fight and navigate through a lot of change. They'll have to manage their retirement, their health care and think through how to retrain themselves over and over again."

We need to ask our teachers, our principals, our school board, our legislators - and ourselves - if we are preparing our kids enough to be successful in the 21st century.

They'll be walking into a dizzying time, full of new technologies, new jobs, new problems, and new words such as "yottabyte," or 1 trillion terabytes. That's the amount of information accessible online in two years.

That number has 24 zeroes, y'all.

So, what does it all mean today, as we get busy with our new litany of numbers?

Shift happens. Get ready.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com