Five Great Questions to Start Changing Education Right Now.
Get decision-makers to convince themselves change is needed.
In an SDG pivot project, this question came up. What will make people actually start to change education toward the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN? There are many great ideas around, but too few officials are acting on them. There are terrible numbers of youth suicide, stress, and depression related to school. Yet little changes. Clearly repeating the reasons for change doesn’t help. Then I realized I have been often much more successful by asking, one or more of, the following five questions to others. Try answering them for yourself and or test them on others. Write your answers down, even if very sketchy in a few words. Then check and consider the consequences of your answers.
The Five Essential Questions
- What are in your profession the 5 most essential things to be great at your work?
- Consider your dream project. See it in front of you. What are all the skills, traits, aspects you need to make it successful?
- What are your biggest life lessons in life? Where and how did you learn them?
- If you died now, what would be your biggest regrets? What made you have those regrets?
- What do our society and planet most urgently need more kinds of people of? What do they bring to the table?
Preferably only when you wrote down a summary of your answers read on.
Why this matters.
If you’re honest about your answers, if everyone is honest about their answers, then our whole test-driven, knowledge-driven, educational system makes no sense at all anymore. Thus these questions can help educational changemakers break open the minds of people who honestly answered these five questions. Because then you can ask them how their answers correlate to our current educational system. They themselves must see very evident gaps. Most people don’t realize deeply enough, what’s at stake. Lucky, when it comes to longing for change: you are not alone!
“I know a lot of creative people who have been proverbially beaten down because they never learned about the system, and many more who never learned that something exists outside it. The question I have is how do we teach children how to be free and creative and playful while teaching them how to avoid the pitfalls.” ~ Kara Fernstrom of The Conquest of Bliss
1. What are in your profession the 5 most essential things to be great at your work?
I asked this question a lot to managers I worked with as a trainer. The average list looked a bit like this: leadership skills and or bravery, social skills or people skills, overview or systems thinking, vision and our creativity, knowledge. Other words coming up often: integrity, organizational skills, network or community building, team building. These answers made it very clear to them, why my training them in aspects such as social skills, leadership, creativity, community building, etc. was so essential. It won them over.
Notice how knowledge at max takes up only one-fifth of the essence. Compare that to how maniacal knowledge-driven our educational system is. Training all the other aspects then makes much more sense. And if you really want to know, google it. Okay, that’s too simplistic. Yet for knowledge better teach people how to acquire knowledge, learn critical thinking when considering sources, and how to let their own curiosity guide them. Sadly our control-driven educational system prefers measurable testing, by demanding you prepare rigid answers to shallow knowledge. All because questions with correct answers make education measurable, not because it boosts real learning or any other quality. Where’s the aliveness in giving the one right answer? How does that help all the other much-needed skills?
2. Consider your dream project. See it in front of you. What are all the skills, traits, aspects you need to make it successful?
I designed this question when we offered people workshops for a new school we were developing, which didn’t have a curriculum yet. So in the workshop, we asked some participants to share their dream projects. In small groups, other participants would help them make some steps. Then we’d ask them to list all the skills, traits, aspects you’d need to make it successful. Then we’d put all lists together and declared this to be our curriculum. We offer everything you need to make your dream project come true. This list as the basis for our curriculum made much sense and often was found inspiring. Our curriculum basically said: here’s how our students can realize their dream projects and or create their own profession or business. We also found many of our students never fitted traditional education, or, after university still were looking for their own gifts and skills.
Now, to be honest, we didn’t teach the essential technical skills, like singing, motor engineering, software coding, etc. We taught them the list most often coming up with the managers in question 1. And we added stuff like finding your personal gifts, discover your Ikigai, develop a healthy work/life balance, perseverance, the art of failing, decision making in groups, nonviolent communication, some spiritual outlooks, how your history shapes you today, playfulness, social activism, some marketing, branding, social media, process design, business canvas and more. And we found out a business plan may make sense when you need money from a bank, but many small businesses don’t need such a plan. They just need the courage to start.
3. What are your biggest life lessons in life? Where and how did you learn them?
When new students entered our alternative school I’d often ask them, this question. I let them share answers and the atmosphere in the room often warmed up. People got touched. Then I’d ask whose stories were about lessons in school. Often very few. And if they had happened in school, I’d ask them: “Was this thanks to school, or in spite of it?” Often laughter and then most remarked, “in spite of.” I remember some stories of students finding a way to face down a terrible hurtful teacher.
The biggest life lessons are often about overcoming loss, bullying, guilt, failure, self-doubt, etc. I’m not saying the school should mix such experiences into it. But what education can do, is put more effort into helping to overcome these setbacks. Too often schools push you to learn to put them aside and focus on the expected work. It feels like ‘targets to get’ trump ‘thinking about (your) life’. Huh? To me, that teaches a feeling of: “you don’t matter, your results do.” Because, hey, schools will be rated against their output and the scores of their students; not against whether they made essential differences in people's lives. Ain’t that weird?
4. If you died now, what would be your biggest regrets? What made you have those regrets?
There’s a famous list, several variations exist by now, made up by a nurse who worked with dying people. She noted down their biggest regrets. Nobody wished to have made more money or worked harder. The most common regrets consisted of: Never having lived or expressed their true self. Wishing to have spent more time with friends and family. Having related more to the world and nature, let alone traveled more in it.
Once again school in general hardly seems to prepare you for a life without regrets. Nor does it shows much interest in your ‘true self’, let alone helping you expressing it. “That’s not what our curriculum prescribes, sonny.” It rather pushes working very hard ‘to get somewhere’ and making money. Relating to family, nature, or the world we live in as a whole is neither put front center. Yet relating to others, to nature and the world, makes people actually care about climate change, social injustices and helps them to want to do something about it. If you’re hardly ever been in a forest, let alone climbed a tree, why should you care? This disconnect from the basis of life is deeply worrying and often found to be at the heart of depression or lack of sense of meaning.
5. What does our society and planet most urgently needs more kinds of people of? What do they bring to the table?
When most people answer this question, many of the issues they should be able to solve won’t surprise you. Systemic racism, air pollution, extinction of 200 species a day, economic collapse, political upheavals, pandemics, climate change, corruption, etc. Clearly, this list doesn’t ask for more bankers, oil producers let alone to just find any job and fulfill its requirements. Yet, somehow too many young people will end up having jobs keeping the system in place that created all those problems.
School tends to educate students to fit in smoothly into society as it is. What we need is education on how to solve those issues. Education that questions our current assumptions of what is good for us all. It needs to educate how our system works, and what the different professions either contribute or help damage further. They need to understand political systems, money systems, the need for social entrepreneurship, and what roles they can play in making a difference, or at the least doing the least damage possible to our ecosystems. What we need more of are sensitive loving people with a heart for the planet and for others, who have the skills and guts to make a difference.
A Bonus Question would be: What’s the greatest teacher you ever had? What made her or him stand out?
The greatest teachers most often are those who never give up on some of their students, are inspired, see talent in people others don’t believe in, are great storytellers. Notice anything. The matter of their specific topic only matters as in, they touch some students with their love for it. Rather than push teachers to write more rapports, give more tests, we should give them space. We should give them space to stay inspired, work from love, rather than pressure to reach targets.
What to do with the outcomes?
The consequential question coming out of all the answers then logically should be: What should all this mean for our educational institutes and paradigms? What do we need to change?
You can formulate your own answers. I’d say, many consultants and trainers have for decades made good money to train many of the mentioned essential aspects that schools forgot. I think it’s time schools start way earlier doing the same. The conclusions seem logical: More people should care to live real lives, not just fill jobs. More people should be able to embrace their true talents, express their true selves, their biggest gifts. More people should feel capable to deal with setbacks, failures, and big changes in society. They should be able to help us all find solutions and contribute to their realization.
How can we teach that? While many traditional teachers suffer from pressure, the most inspiring ones often know how to circumvent stifling procedures and curricula. So they should be sought out and invited to share what would make education better. They can help other teachers learn how to both offer the traditional curriculum (help students neet government targets, sigh) and life wisdom in it or around it. How do they do that? Find them and learn from them.
The outcomes should also lead to many new approaches in education and ways to teach. It would mean teachers would become a bit more social workers and facilitators of processes that hand more reigns to the students. Teachers should develop much more exercises that help reveal unexpected gifts, make students shine in unexpected talents no curriculum ever provided for. Curriculums should focus less on being tested to a norm, but given space to shine their true self. That cannot be measured, but it can be experienced when it happens. Many alternative educations and teachers, like myself, have been developing such lessons in many countries around the world. The foremost has been offering such lessons outside of the dominant system. Perhaps it’s time we’re invited in.
Thanks go to Alan Dean and the Covid-19 Pivot project, a network of thinkers seeking to uplift the SDG’s in these times, for inviting me to the table and include me in the educational dialogues.
More of my suggestions can be found here.
There’s actually a great number of sites and quotes answering the question: what does the world need more of. Here’s a fun example that makes sense.
