What if young people designed the future of education? — A few months ago, prompted by an invitation to ask "What if" as a way to reimagine our education, this question rang in my ears. Something about it felt intuitively right to me, and deeply intriguing. I began wondering, could the way to transform education be through attuning to young people's needs and letting them guide the way?
Wanting to move from intuition to understanding, I started researching. In discussion with my brilliant friends and colleagues Jessica Spencer-Keyse and Valentina Raman, we set out to start a project to explore this question - "What if young people designed the future of education? - by gathering young people and youth organizations around the world who are interested in influencing and transforming their education.
Through the process of researching and discussing with incredible youth activists and advocates from around the world, I've come to strongly believe that young people should be leading the necessary process of change (or rather transformation) that our education needs to go through. In this article, I would like to lay out the reasoning that has led me to hold this belief.
In order to do so, I've divided my argument into the following sub-questions:
Before delving in, I would just like to clarify a couple of terms I will be using. First, "education": Education does not mean schooling. Schooling is the institutionalization of our education but far from the only place where we learn and get educated. John Dewey once said, "Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself." Hence, when talking about young people leading the process of educational change, I mean both in schools but perhaps even more importantly in their lives outside of school, including how they consume information (and in particular social media), and how they decide to spend their time. The second term I would like to clarify is "youth-led education revolution" by which I mean a process of reclaiming and re-owning both of our personal education (in and outside of school) and our education systems driven by youth agency and supported by adults, whether parents, teachers, schools administrators, community members, or youth advocates.
The way we design our education will determine the future of our societies.
The starting point to defining our vision for education is answering, What kind of society do we want to live in? and; Who do we need to be and become for that societal vision to be possible? In Education in a Time Between Worlds, Zachary Stein states “Education is the human making function of society; What kind of human should we make? To reform education we have to reform our vision for humanity and humans.” It is essential that we understand the core role education has to play in the creation and transformation of our societies, in particular at a time when societal transition is necessary if we are to have a livable planet for future generations.
A vision for humanity I think we could all get behind is one where human potential is unleashed and liberated to allow us to actualize our individual and collective potentials. A flourishing society would be one where every person would be able to rely on strong foundations - such as a climate that sustains life and healthy communities - upon which to build a fulfilling life and determine one's own path.
For such a societal vision to be possible, our education should enable everyone to have the ability to inquire, create, contribute, and feel a sense of belonging to the communities they are a part of. Educational processes should lead to self-directed, lifelong learners. The goal of education would then be the flourishing of individuals for thriving societies (Raab, 2017), thereby re-aligning the goal of society with the purpose of education. However, many current educational practices in schools and universities do more to perpetuate dependency than to create self-direction. Schools more often than not rely on controlling behavior rather than shaping it. But subordination, dependency and helplessness cannot and will not lead to flourishing individuals and to a flourishing society.
Unfortunately, our current education systems worldwide are shaped by the "reductive human capital theory", meaning that the main function of education systems is to supply the economy with the next generation of workers (Stein, 2018). We live in a world that has put capital and growth on the throne and our institutions, including our schools, have made it its master. As it stands, students are seen as a commodity: a market value to companies and future taxpayers for governments.
The societal fractures we are witnessing - climate change, biodiversity loss, polarization, abject inequalities, etc. - are a result of a failure of our current education systems. What does it say about our values and the values we are taught to care about that we are currently in the midst of a 6th mass extinction event caused by humans and that 8 men own the same wealth as half of the planet? Could we have tolerated the way we have willfully destroyed and mistreated entire species, ecosystems, and peoples, if we had been educated to care? These disgraceful outcomes are a byproduct of an education that taught us to ruthlessly compete with one another for our personal "success" over our collective interest, an education that robs us of our natural curiosity and dulls us into becoming cogs dedicated to the good functioning of the economic machine.
We need to be driven by a new vision of our education. A vision that carries us out of civilizational collapse and into a new form of human civilization capable of taking care of our planet and ourselves. In Zak Stain's words "The core task of education today is to confront the almost unimaginable design challenge of building an educational system that provides for the re-creation of civilization during a world-system transition." We are in dire need of an evolutionary education, an education that would enable our conscious evolution for the awakening of our personal and social potentials. In Barbara Marx Hubbard's words "Conscious evolution education is the process of discovering each child’s creative expression, cultivating it as the most precious resource on Earth, and connecting it with the people and tasks where it can best flower in an ever-evolving world."
Rather than an abstract vision of education, I find it helpful to imagine the life of a young person in 2050 or 2080 as a way to make this vision come to life. So I would like to take you on an imagination walk to the future if you will...
There are many ways education in 2080 is fundamentally different from education in 2020 because the goal of education is no longer the same. Up until about 2035, the logic behind most education systems was the reductive human capital theory, essentially it meant that the main function of education systems was to supply the economy with the next generation of workers whereas the purpose of education in 2080 is the thriving and wellbeing of society and all its members. To make this a bit more tangible for you, I would like to give an example of what a child’s education looks like in 2080. Her name is Shemsy, which means My Sun or Sunshine in Arabic. Shemsy is 13 and she is confident, luminous, and loves learning.