I look at my young learners and I see disrespect, anger, distrust, fear, disgust...all of which arrive at adults’ doorstep to cause us angst. Too often, we adults fail to realize that these emotions are directed at us because our youth are passing judgment for the messed up world we so generously "provided" for them.
We lie, even about the littlest of things. We obfuscate that which we cannot hide in an effort to hold onto a world whose time is long past...one in which we alone find false comfort. We adults lash out at these judging eyes hoping to silence the plethora of voices that dare to point out our hypocrisy; our aversion to evolutionary thought; our outright fear of direct action towards the concrete realization of that end. Mostly, we lash out in fear because we know our failed tenure as keepers of this Earth will soon end...and we lack the strength and imagination to hypothesize what comes next.
Too often, we ignore those aspects of their lives that exist outside the curriculum. This is a damn shame. In our classrooms, we constantly refer to making connections between school and the real world. In reality, too many of us teach our learners how to get a job, how to keep a job, or how to obey. Rarely do we educe them to become something more. Rarely do we teach them how to struggle, to grapple with an unjust reality they are more than capable of transforming.
If we truly wanted to make education meaningful for our youth, especially in middle school, we need to approach the curriculum via the lived experiences of our learners. I am not saying that the classroom should be turned into group therapy. What I am suggesting is that the LENS through which we view the assigned content should be provided by the learners themselves.
In addition, we MUST MUST MUST allow room in the learning environment to question what we are learning in the first place. I'm sorry, but having a multiple choice question (for example) that asks, "Which of the following contents is the richest: Europe, Africa, Asia, or Australia?" is NOT going to benefit our youth. In my eyes, the only appropriate response to this question would be to question the question itself. What kids are tasked with learning and what we educators are tasked with teaching is sometimes pure crap...quiz show knowledge that lacks the power to transform our world into a place where we are allowed to love unconditionally; where we are allowed to understand we are all WORTH loving; where we can all grapple with what it means to become something more.
What we need to do to fix education does not require more money, more accountability, or more training (as if teachers were circus dogs.) What we need is to radically rethink our schools to where they are unrecognizable to those of us who once attended them. I don't say this because I'm a teacher...I say this because I believe that if we fail to re-imagine our ways of learning and thus perceiving the world, our species will deserve to perish from this beautiful planet we have named "Earth."