The Purpose of Education in 2024
Every single day that I teach I spend a few minutes each morning thinking about the lives of my students and what they might be bringing to the classroom that day. I’m wondering if they got enough sleep, and got to have some fun outside of school along with wondering what kind of challenges they’re going through that might impact their day.
Each of their individual lives is also under the backdrop of the world they live in. Of course, they have some of the normal teenage concerns of maintaining a social life along with school and family expectations but they are also going to school during a time when they can see the scenes of genocide in Gaza take place in real-time. They are living through late-stage capitalism as their social media is filled with charlatans attempting to manipulate them to “get rich at all costs” along with the enduring climate crisis that doesn’t even seem to be an issue of concern when they’re also seeing the rising uncertainty around international conflicts, the threat against queer and trans youth, and the lasting impacts of a pandemic we’re still struggling through.
As an educator, I have to ask myself what kind of education or curriculum would meet the needs of these students. How do I find meaningful connections within the disciplines of history, geography, and the social sciences to create a learning experience alongside students that not only exposes them to learning and ideas they’re not familiar with but also connects their lived experience to that knowledge.
In our classrooms, we can look the other way and trudge through the curriculum making sure we balance out our assessments with projects, tests, and quizzes as we’ve always done or we can acknowledge that our approach to teaching needs to rise up to the times that we are living in.
In what ways can we co-create a curriculum that helps students understand the world, themselves, and their place in it? What knowledge is required to help students understand the complexity of the world and their lives along with creating meaningful learning experiences to engage with.
Education for memorization on standardized tests is an idea that should have died a long time ago. Our world calls for something more and not just new ideas to be memorized for the next test. The curriculum we need is something that can be co-created by students and teachers who face the challenges of our world head-on. We do a disservice to students when we fail to address the real challenges in our world.
Of course, the curriculum that we must build must not just be filled with challenge and despair but also of hope and possibility that a better world is on the horizon and the work we do in classrooms can be part of the process that gets us there.
How we meet these challenges as educators will determine if the purpose of education in 2024 and beyond will meet the needs of our students and the world.
