Let's not require kids to grow up too fast: Education for the future.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I’m asking because I think I’m still deciding, and I just celebrated my 37th birthday!  It’s taken me some time to undo the effect policy makers and an invisible world of adults had on my education.  While I was fortunate to have a somewhat broad exposure to studies in Math, Sciences (I was ok in Biology, but just made it through Chemistry), Literature (my favorite), Music (my passion), Film (my interest), History (didn’t care at the time), Visual Art (wanted desperately to be good), my foundational pre-university education still lacked a cohesive element that helped me to make meaning of all of this.  Let’s just say it was another decade before I felt like I had my existential moment.  After saying I’d never be a teacher, like my father, I became an educator and every year reflected on how I could be a better facilitator for the growth of each and every one of my students.  It’s not easy, but it is wonderful! My decision to leave the classroom (for now) is in the hope to do my part to ensure the educational experiences of students within my sphere of influence truly prepare them for the future, but even more than that, I hope that the education that we provide students today, is a platform for many generations to come.  Yes.  I’m suggesting that we look beyond the 21st century when we think about what education should be. 

It is within this context that I am excited to see the field of education redefining approaches to teaching and learning to be more student centered and better driven toward a real world application. But I also wonder why we feel we have to offer so many “signature” programmes for students to choose from and why they have to be so specialized that students are locking themselves into a specific skill set or field, too soon.  Shouldn’t learning experiences surprise us?  Shouldn’t they bring out qualities that we didn’t know existed?  Maybe an education is about exploring what we enjoy and learning how to make sense of what confuses us so that we can understanding who we are and what we can contribute to the community we serve. 

In this way 21st century learning should provide opportunities for students to explore the way the world works, nurture their natural curiosity (or reignite it), challenge them to think critically while actually enjoying what they are learning. Yet, I feel that we seem to keep pushing them to decide who they want to be, too soon.  When I reflect on the educational buffet we present to students to choose from, I wonder if we think that all knowledge and understanding exists in a vacuum; that adopting an exclusively STEM focus solves all of our 21st century future problems.  Will it? Do our career pathway programmes actually prepare students to learn on the job?  Do they understand how to further develop their skills? ... I’m just asking. [Symbol]  

We need to stop for a minute and think about what matters most. I think we all want to prepare young people to be successful in a rapidly changing world. Right? We must work together to be accountable to this goal, and not be like those invisible adults who define the future for school age students. In an effort to define education, we design the future of the world. It is really that important that we get it right.   As designer Bruce Mau says, “we live our lives inside ... a world that we create. If we don’t design that well, our life is bad” He uses automotive design as an example of an industry that has reconstructed the world in which we live.  He suggests that because of successful automotive design, we now have created bigger problems such as congestion, long commutes to work, pollution, etc.  There are many examples of the way innovation has created problems, and perhaps it is because of rapid success, progress and profit that we haven’t imagined how what we create will change the way we live.  We need engineers and designers to think about populations and systems and societies, within the context of history and relationships.   

When designing education for the future, I think we could pay more attention to wonderful capacity human beings have to think critically and creatively.  Let’s just think on that for a moment... What an incredible gift.  What if our educational programmes and systems focused more on activating this gift holistically, and less on the subject matter, or the stuff we think young people should know? What if students in K-12 education could be prepared to do anything, and also focus on what they enjoy?  If you can sing, sing it; if you can write, write it; if you can build, construct it; if you can invent, make something!  But don’t forget to explore the full potential of what the world has to offer.  I’m not advocating for a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ approach.  I’m just hoping that we can refocus education on what will make a better world. In my mind, it’s simple. We want and need lifelong learners.  We need to prepare for a future where there are more adults who are lifelong learners because they learned how to learn in school. They should also be open-minded enough to learn from those who do things differently.  This philosophy of education is one of partnership and collaboration.  It is about principles and practices, not standards that ultimately repackage content and the stuff.  We need to work together across all knowledge areas and disciplines, with employers and universities to offer students holistic and balanced opportunities to explore the world they find themselves in.  Perhaps then, we will develop the lifelong learners we need in our world.