What if…
What if every person knew and lived out what their purpose is in this world?
What if each person used their unique talents or passion to help our world? How different would our world look?
Currently, we are in an unprecedented time for education.
Many school administrators, teachers, parents, students are proceeding through uncharted territory.
Parents are overwhelmed with the thought of having to step into the role of being the at-home educator along with balancing their own job.
Educators are feeling overwhelmed, stress, and anxious as they try to navigate online and in-person teaching.
Students are feeling stressed as their whole world turned inside out, school as they knew it changed overnight.
While it might seem frightening or overwhelming with all the uncertainty there is a silver lining underneath all this change.
There is an opportunity.
An opportunity to improve the learning experience for our learners.
Imagine creating learning experiences that ignite a desire to learn new things, experiences that instill a life-long desire to learn, try, and experiment.
Right now, our children don’t need more busywork. Filling out “interactive” worksheets or reading a mandatory article and writing a response in a google doc is not going to help our students spark their desire to learn.
But right now we have an opportunity to change the learning experience for our learners, a chance to spark and ignite their love to learn.
Why is it by the time a child reaches 5th grade they are no longer interested in school? What happens as children move through the current education system? Think back what were your feelings about Middle School and Highschool classes?
We are born naturally curious.
Think of a four-year-old, they want to know why and how things work? We are born to be curious and curiosity is the building block to go on to be a scientist, a mathematician, or whatever they wish to grow and be. So what happens that makes us lose our curious nature? Is it educated out of us?
Our current education system is designed to turn curiosity into compliance. Our students are told what to learn and when to learn it.
The education system here in the United States was set up over 100 years ago and not much has changed.
Yes, the tools and electronics have changed but the overall educational system is still very much the same. Yet, our world is not the same as it was 100 years ago. In fact, our world isn’t the same as it was just a few months ago.
When our education system was first set up it was to produce workers that could read and compute basic math for the factory owners. One hundred years ago, our country was in an industrial age. Factory owners didn’t want creative or out-of-the-box thinkers.
But our society today is no longer in an industrial age….we are in an innovative age, where technology advances quickly.
To advance our global society forward we need innovative thinkers.
We need our children to discover their unique strengths, gifts, and talents.
Imagine a world where everyone was able to use their talents to help benefit our communities, even our world.
This time of uncertainty is a new opportunity. An opportunity to bring back the spark and re-ignite our love to learn to be the innovative thinkers and change-makers that will advance our society forward to be a better place.
So, I ask you to think to yourself… what can we do better? What can you do to ignite your child or your students’ love to learn, to discover, to wonder?
