The Silver Lining
How do we prepare our children for an unpredictable future?
What are the implications for education going forward?
On March 19, 2020 Politico Magazine said “A crisis on this scale can reorder society in dramatic ways, for better or worse.” I am not interested in the “worse” so I want to focus on how “we” get "better"! If I focused on the worse, I would also be a major hypocrite. Over the last two years we have been working as a family on taking a “Hero’s Journey”. The Hero's Journey is a pattern in many foundational myths- from religion to classical literature to drama to popular culture. It describes the path of a protagonist who heeds a call to adventure, leaves behind his or her known world, overcomes great opposition, and returns to the starting place having transformed. The greatest triumph is the change that takes place internally. This universal myth represents the original human drama that animates each individual's journey through life.
For us this is another journey and for the collective us- we will all be transformed!
These crisis moments present opportunities- now is the time to re-think how we educate our kids. These are my thoughts on how we can prepare (educate) our kids
How can school/education change to prepare for a unpredictable future:
Teach kids how to think: The old way of school- memorizing knowledge is not productive for the world we live in. Use Socratic teaching methods to get our kids to make and defend difficult real-world decisions. Make them struggle many times daily with questions that are open ended- Don’t give them the answer and force them to take a stand!
Make them solve Real World Challenges: School should be putting our kids in real world situations and challenging them to come up with solutions: Take a series of real-world challenges; tie them together with individual and team-based incentives and a compelling narrative, where they feel as if the fate of the world rests in their hands and have it end with a high stakes public exhibition.
Teach kids how to Learn: If this situation has taught us anything, it is that our kids don’t know how to learn. The stories of kids/parents feeling incapable of learning without a teacher standing in front of them are in the millions! This is scary in the age of unpredictability. Do you mean that we can’t learn unless a teacher is standing in front? This is dangerous. We need to spend time teaching kids how to learn for themselves. Stop using an outdated method, frontal teaching, where the teacher stands in front and teaches all the kids the same thing, on the same day at the same time. Stop. At this point it is literally harming kids by keeping them helpless.
In this situation there is no doubt that we will come out changed. It is up to us to use the information (this experience) and face the challenge that is calling us. Let’s use this opportunity to help prepare our kids for an unpredictable future and give them the tools/experiences to change the world!
Andrew Shahan