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- Educating for Now
Most of schooling is “future focused”
Students are told the reason they are in school or the reason they are learning anything is for the future.
They are told that everything they learn—from factoring trinomials to diagramming sentences"—is to help them for some “later” moment
for a quiz on Friday
for the semester final
for the transcript
for college admissions
Indeed, the entire point of education is to help them “someday”
To help them someday:
get into college
get a good job
make good money
We advertise our schools as “college and career preparation,” requiring students to sit in desks and rows and cram information for a quiz or test they will take later
for a grade that will open a door later
for a job that will provide for them later.
Then they get to that job and continue living for the future, working:
for the weekend
for the two week vacation
for retirement
We require students to attend school not for any value in the moment in which they are filling out the worksheet, answering the reading questions, or memorizing the lecture notes…but to some far off future, some “someday” they can barely see
Without ever really stopping to ask this very real and important question:
What are we asking of students that gives value to their lives now?
What are we asking of them that betters themselves now?
What are we providing that helps them fill the space of this moment that they exist in right now?
And it is this sense of later and of someday that leads our students to so often ask with such glaring honesty
“When will I ever use this?”
Even they sense the learning they are doing has little significance or value to their lived experience now
We hold out the “future” to students without offering them the most valuable asset they possess: the present moment of now
And yet, in a very real sense, NOW is all they ever have.
Now is the moment in which they experience life
Now is the moment in which they experience community
Now is the moment in which they do the learning
Now is the moment they are asking themselves questions related to belonging, purpose, meaning, and identity
And Now is the moment far too many of our students feel hopeless, helpless, unseen, invisible, unheard, isolated, and alone.
The research is crystal clear that the students in our schools are experiencing extraordinarily high levels of stress and anxiety, leading to overwhelming states of depression and, tragically, self harm.
Perhaps a part of that is due to the fact that we are not inviting them to do educational work that gives them a sense of belonging, identity, value, engagement, enlightenment, wonder, imagination, hope, and joy now.
The Gates Foundation revealed in their longitudinal study on school dropouts, that the reason students give for dropping out of school, second only to feeling that nobody cared about them, is that they felt they work they were being asked to do in schools did not matter
In a survey of dropouts throughout the country, nearly 50 percent said they left school because their classes were boring and not relevant to their lives or career aspirations.
Read that again:
Our students are dropping out because they see no connection or meaning to the work they are doing and their lives
Perhaps we would find our students more engaged, more enthralled, more enthusiastic if we ensured that the time we insist they spend with us matters to who they are right now
Education is always rooted in NOW
The godfather of American education, John Dewey, said it this way: Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
By this, Dewey meant that education should not only be something that prepares students for tomorrow
But that it should provide students a deep sense of value now
He believed that education properly understood matters in this moment as much as it matters for all moments
Dewey understood that most of a student’s sense of apathy, boredom, and malaise in school was not that school was too hard…but that it was too disconnected from the student’s actual life
He wrote: “This connection of a topic with the promotion of an activity having a purpose is the first and the last word of a genuine theory of interest in education”
The question for us today is: What are we cultivating in our students that opens them up and invites them to experience
Wonder
Engagement
Purpose
Meaning
Thoughtfulness
Curiosity
Hope
Challenge
Passion
Flow
Creativity
Depth
Joy
Right now…in this very moment…in our classrooms?
What are we doing that opens them up to the fullness of this moment, that invites them to bring their most robust self to this particular moment, that stops time for them now?
That enlarges their horizons, that leaves them feeling that the time they spend with us is not wasted but is extremely valuable to who they are as human beings?
What are we doing to ensure the time students spend in our schools, in our classrooms, in our learning environments are worthy of the time we require of them?
Worthy of their one precious lives?
By reorienting the arrow of time from “future preparation” to now we can give meaning and value to the brief yet somehow eternal moments we have students in our care, helping them find the learning, and even themselves, come alive.
By giving our students back the very now in which they experience the entirety of life, we give them the most precious gift of all…themselves
Dr Scott Martin
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