Learning to Experiment

Leanne Hanson
Aug 27, 2017 · 5 min read

As automation begins to effect society, education and work more and more, what is the world that youth currently inhabit like? Future-U Team member and blogger writes from her experience…


This morning I typed “is teaching” into the Google search and auto-complete came up with:

Teachers around the world are challenged by perceptions about the profession (yes, Google, it certainly is one of those): nice easy hours, lots of holidays, authority and respect… sometimes I hear these things and wonder if the people who say them are deliberately ignorant or if they’ve just come from some magical land where teachers are a cross between frontier schoolmarms, Mary Poppins, and Robocop.

Yet arguing with those misconceptions is not even close to what concerns me most as a teacher. My biggest worry is whether or not my students will die when they leave my classroom.

This time last year, the “ice epidemic” was all the Australian media wanted to talk about and you’d think, from their silence on the subject now, that they’d singlehandedly wiped out all traces of methamphetamine throughout the country. Not only that: you could be forgiven for assuming that all drug users had first switched to meth and then been miraculously cured, abandoning all other illicit mind-altering substances. I don’t recall anyone asking teachers what “drug addicts” look like, or what it’s like to have them in the classroom. In fact, I don’t remember any indication that “drug addicts” were anything other than a breed apart, rather than the product of a selfish, disconnected, disinterested society. The reality is, they’re not only on our streets, they’re in our classrooms — and they could be anyone.

We are teaching to encourage young people to become “productive members of society”; in particular, to participate in some form of gainful employment. The problem is, how do you convince someone who’s grown up in a household that normalises drug use — and has possibly used drugs from an early age — that he/she should get a low paying job when the life of a street criminal is so glamourised in popular culture? Bearing in mind, of course, that your goal as an educator is to make students realise that they’re worth more than being a money-maker for someone who values life less than a new set of rims on his car.

I decided that the only way to even begin to solve the problem is to understand it, so I took a deep breath and tackled it as part of a lesson on social issues facing Australian society.

“Why would people choose to take illicit drugs rather than find something else that makes them happy?” I asked.

The immediate answer was: “What else is there?”

Many classrooms are made up of young people whose lives are severely restricted by lack of resources and community isolation. They live in “planned communities” built by developers who knew that high-density housing was the quickest way to make a profit, approved by short-sighted councillors for whom the word “infrastructure” is overlooked as being more difficult to pronounce than “fee”. The streets are narrow, the housing blocks are small, the green space is limited to the occasional isolated swing set in another small block, and the most exciting place for young people to congregate is the train station or, on weekends, there’s the thrill of meeting on school grounds when they’re off-limits. It is not a difficult task for the predators to find their prey.

The conversation turned to decriminalisation. The general consensus was that — hypothetically — nobody really likes dealing with criminals and, in addition, being involved with these people makes it very hard to remove yourself from that environment (e.g. to seek rehabilitation — even if there were sufficient facilities for such a thing, but in order to access most rehabs locally, one must be over 18). In other words, knowing it’s wrong and being able to change it are not the same thing.

There followed many tangents, and eventually it was time to go home. Which brings me to that lovely myth of teaching being nice easy hours, because my brain was not especially cooperative in my efforts to leave work behind. I know each of these students — their strengths, their weaknesses, their learning styles, their personality types, all the other things that teachers are supposed to know in order to properly differentiate and adjust and modify and whatever other buzzword is making its way through the ranks. Through informal interactions (and overhearing conversations) I also know boyfriend/girlfriend names, parents’ jobs or lack thereof, pets, favourite foods, mental health presentations, reasons they got expelled from school, philosophical preferences, what they think about politics, and several new names each day for various body parts. I do not want to know how they’re going to die.

If we’re to create a sustainable, productive and fulfilling future for these young people, we need to start well before they enter the education system (whatever that may look like). We need to ensure that we’re building communities, not just housing developments. We need to ensure that parents are supported and really understand that a child is not just an accidental product of intercourse, but a commitment and a gift to be cherished. And we need to build hope — starting with a decent standard of living for all, because regardless of what we think of the decisions the parents have made, the children do not deserve to be punished for them. For young people to show empathy to others, they must first witness it being shown to them.

And when they do reach school age, let’s have some significant institutional change so that teachers are able to do what they came into the profession for: to teach. To reach into the depths of a child and draw out hidden abilities, to show them a future full of possibilities, and to set them on the path to reaching that potential in a safe, secure environment that doesn’t begin and end with the classroom.

The day after the discussion, one of the kids who had always worn a hoodie and sunglasses came to class with a packet of herbal tisane. He’s been drinking that ever since, because giving up caffeine is helping him give up “other things”. I didn’t ask for details. I just bought him some more tisanes.

FutureWe

How can we think beyond tomorrow to thrive today? FutureWe is a framework + community + missions + advice to help learners and leaders succeed > Education > Work >Life More at FutureWe.org (formally Future-U)

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