An Elevator Pitch on Today’s Schools

I believe that schools are becoming irrelevant in the lives of young people. Adults are trying to improve schools by looking towards their past; “what worked for me will work for them,” is their misguided reasoning. We (and this pronoun includes educators and all other adults who care about our children’s future) must reinvent our schools so that they provide experience that prepares students for their futures and not adults’ pasts. These schools will be unlike those that prepared adults for their lives, and any school built following a “one-size-fits-all” solution  is doomed to fail. Those are all doomed to fail because they ignore the fundamental aspect of human learning—it is complex and multifaceted, and different people experience the same events quite differently. Even if we can decide on the “standard” of education (a very dubious proposition), the standard will be understood and valued and experienced differently by different people and that makes all of the difference.