My Take On How Schools Are Evolving--And Need To Evolve--For A World Of Challenges
The future is here
For the past 15 years, I’ve been writing, speaking and thinking about the future of education, including how schools adopt new technology, how they assess learning, and how educators and students think about their roles in a changing world. My lecture agency branded me, sort of bombastically, as an “educational futurist.”
Last week I was invited to BETT2024, a giant education technology conference in London, to share my latest thoughts on the subject. A version of this post also appears on their web site.
This is the kind of gig I used to do a lot more of. I was looking forward to it, and to the trip, which would give me some personal time away from family duties to reflect. And London, in its pearly light, a cool 47 degrees, did not disappoint. I ran on the waterfront, was welcomed to a Shabbat table, took in some monumental contemporary work at the Tate Modern, wandered in and out of bookshops and charity shops, and hung out at a super fun gay bar with my beloved cousins and their friends.
All of this was shadowed by talk of war and politics. Folks in the UK I talked to are terrified of Donald Trump’s reelection, primarily because they fear his isolationism and mismanagement of world affairs will bring Putin’s bombs even closer than they already are. And everyone is heartsick over the situation in Gaza.
(Read this: Hala Alyan, in the Guardian, on distant witnessing)
This was all on my mind when I took the stage last Friday. Here’s a version of what I said:
Since 2020, nearly every child in the world has had their education interrupted due to the pandemic, climate-fueled disasters, and conflict. Currently, a record 43.3 million children have been driven from their homes by these events, according to UNICEF. That number doubled over the past decade.
And I hate to tell you, but emergencies like these are likely going to become more common for the foreseeable future.
Not only that, they are likely to affect a growing proportion of the world’s children, for the simple reason that the youngest countries demographically happen to be located in some of the most climate- and conflict- prone areas of the world.
But there is hope. In the process of reporting my 2022 book, The Stolen Year, about the impact of COVID-19 on children in the United States, I discovered that many schools adapted to the upheavals of the pandemic, sometimes in remarkable ways.
It’s easy to enumerate failures, but also important to think about successes.
Schools, and the people who power them, grew in their comfort with appropriate uses of technology, of course. This includes switching flexibly between remote and in-person learning as appropriate to changing conditions, and students’ changing needs.
They also renewed their focus, of necessity, on warmth, trust, relationships, mental health and social-emotional development.
These days, as they seek to combat the decrease in enrollment and the growth of chronic absenteeism, schools need to build environments of what Sarah Rose Cavanagh, in her book Mind over Monsters, calls “compassionate challenge.” This includes how teachers and students relate to each other. It also includes working with their local communities to create learning experiences that are directly relevant to students’ workforce aspirations and their desire to make the world a better place.
A major example, of course, is found in the global student movement for climate justice and climate action.
I’ve reported on two surprising examples of how education and learning is shifting around the world post-pandemic.
The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 created one of the largest and fastest displacements of children in history. And yet Ukrainian teachers resumed offering classes remotely within two weeks. This would not have been possible before the age of mobile phones; it would not have been conceivable, arguably, without the experience of COVID remote learning.
Children in Gaza, unfortunately, are not receiving the same universal right. The level of bombardment in civilian areas is too intense. Schools have been turned into shelters. Families are not being allowed to flee to safety.
The second example I recently reported on (forthcoming in MIT Technology Review) is in Lebanon, where the biggest-ever investment in humanitarian aid for early childhood suddenly had to pivot to remote delivery due to the pandemic. The outcome was a randomized controlled trial. It showed that teaching delivered over WhatsApp calls, combined with specially produced Sesame Workshop videos, could produce measurable academic and social-emotional gains in a population of Syrian refugee children living in hard-to-reach, remote, rural camps in Lebanon.
The focus on social and emotional skills is important.
Remember there are tens of millions of children forced from their homes right now, exposed to toxic stress. And we have the tools to help them weather these storms, and help their caregivers support them.
In searching for a hopeful conclusion to my book, I wasn’t really resonating with the term “resilience.” That implies bouncing back, as though nothing happened. That didn’t feel true to the experiences of the children and families I followed through the pandemic. It didn’t feel true to my own family’s experience.
Instead, I learned about the concept of post-traumatic growth. This requires recognizing that you were indeed scarred by an experience, and at the same time, you learned from it and grew in ways that make your life measurably better. People can find that trauma makes them more appreciative of their relationships, more compassionate towards others who have suffered, more oriented toward new possibilities, more aware of their inner strength, more focused on what’s most important in life.
I believe that the education system as a whole, around the world, can also experience this kind of growth. And in a world of constant disruption, children need it.
I’m giving a talk in Brooklyn Feb. 29 on How And Why To Talk To Kids Abot Climate Change !