School board meetings are full of shouting parents lately. Many of the complaints are about how we teach racial histories and how much we expose kids to the idea of different gender identities.
But of course, it’s not reeeeaaaally about that.
The historical moment we find ourselves in, like many historical moments before it, is seeing a rise in rejecting new understanding that threatens our way of living. A couple of decades ago, some school boards wanted to ban teaching on climate change, some decades before that, evolution.
Whether it’s a re-evaluation of scientific knowledge or of human actions, when we change what we know, we threaten the status quo of ‘how we do things’. And the collective agreement for ‘how we do things’ is what we call ‘culture’. So new knowledge is almost always going to be culturally-threatening.
For example, once we understand (and therefore teach) that a rise in carbon dioxide from human activities produces a climate we don’t want, then we’re forced to consider changing those human activities. In this case, burning coal and oil as fuel created industry, wealth, and higher standards of living. It is inevitable that facing these changes will (and perhaps even should) scare us. They aren’t small changes, they’re systemic.
Once we understand (and teach) that subconscious racism is pervasive even among clearly non-bigoted, open-hearted white people, then it means we have to accept the ‘way we do things’ in virtually every public realm isn’t working for a large percentage of humanity. And so again, the changes we have to make aren’t small, they’re systemic. Scary stuff.
The people who most vocally oppose teaching this new understanding are of course, those who have the most to lose in the current culture (in terms of power, prestige, or wealth). But if we’re honest, it’s likely to make most of us uncomfortable.
However, humans can’t flourish by ignoring new knowledge, even when - especially when - it might lead to cultural change.
Education is perhaps most important when it allows students to see flaws in our human systems - because it gives a new generation the opportunity and the enthusiasm to change that system for the better. Yes, this threatens ‘how we do things', but unless we’re willing to explore that, we will stay stuck in a culture that at best, limits us (and our children even moreso), and at worst, actively harms us and the the environment on which we depend.
I believe ‘good’ education (and we can explore what that means over more than just this post!) is absolutely core to the future of humanity and for a healthy and thriving planet.
And I’d argue that even after several millennia of modern civilization, we still have a rather sketchy handle on what we need to know, and why.
But it does seem clear that the education that got us here, will need to continue to evolve to get us to a healthy next chapter.
Our task is going to be to deliberately create and support education that promotes human flourishing in these times, for new generations, with different technologies, on a changing planet. No small task.
The current behavior of some parents, and the capitulation of some school boards (in banning books, for example) seems to be catapulting us back before the industrial revolution, but I think it’s a good sign that we’re all getting more engaged in education again. It’s time.
I’m looking forward to exploring more on this topic, and profiling people and institutions that are taking a look at how to educate for our next chapter in the 21st century and beyond.
There’s a moment to seize here.
Tell me your thoughts…