Let's face it: adults are the real curriculum.

On Friday night, as I listened to Edinburgh Schools' orchestras, a young man at the end of high school introduced his orchestra's performance by pointing out that it was his first and last time performing to an audience, because of the disruption to curriculum and learning this past few years.

What follows is from March 2022, and keeps coming up in conversations this past week:

"Adults are the real curriculum." These are the words we wrote two years ago, as Colina Learning Center founder Andreia Mitrea and I sat down to work out what her new school would look like. The manifesto containing our promise to our students continued:

"The only real limits of education are the limits of adults. Parents and teachers. That is why we will not limit the education children deserve by forgetting the learning of the adults."

I can't help looking at my own kids, and some of the teachers, students and families of our partner school in Kyiv, some of whom are sleeping in the metro station for the sixth night in a row.

It seems that young people have been disrupted for two years, and in many places are set for disruption for months, or years, to come. And all this disruption is because of the adult curriculum around them. What adults choose to do, and when, seems to result in young people often picking up the tab.

It's not in today's politicians or army commanders, I fear, that the solution - long term - will be found. The solutions are in what schools and families can do today to set children and teenagers off on a better track than many of their elders leading us today.

This is hard when school is seen as sacrifice-able. It took politicians days to close them all two years ago, and up to two years to get them open in any consistent way once more. The New Yorker puts this short (to an adult) timeframe in stark sharpness :

"If you are seventeen years old, roughly a third of your adolescence and almost all of your high-school career have been lived under the shadow of COVID-19.

"You may have been sick or lost family members; perhaps you have feared being a vector of infection to vulnerable loved ones. Your schooling has almost certainly suffered, and your social life has been curtailed.

"Granted, these years were never going to be easy. Even before the coronavirus was first detected in the U.S., in January, 2020, more than one in three high-school students in the country reported persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness."

This week, in spite of the fear and doubt, the uncertainty and incredulity that might surround us all, I think the important work is down to you.

What is the real curriculum you, as an adult, will choose to share with the young people in your life, those you own, and those you teach?

How can you co-design a curriculum, a conversation, a thought, to ensure that we have a better chance of tomorrow's generation knowing what it feels like to generate ideas, projects, books, films and movements that diffuse joy and hope?

The Evidence

The New Yorker: Teen Lives, Interrupted by COVID

This was originally published in The Provocation email newsletter in March 2022, as Episode 165.?Subscribe now so you don't miss out on what we're writing today.