It's Inside the Kids

It's Inside the Kids: We Need to Listen More

In education we hear so frequently things like, "... to prepare them to compete in the global economy." What we should hear are things more like, "... to provide them space and opportunity to develop their innate creativity, to communicate their ideas, to think through solutions in new ways, and to hone their collaborative skills."

It's a kind of hubris to insist maintaining the status quo is the way to go. And it has created the stressful, anxiety-laden, competitive, exclusive, and excessively costly education systems we have today. And it contributes to many of the problems we have in the country and world today.

We need to spend less time and effort training kids to work in and live in the lesser world we are leaving them, and more time and effort helping them discover in themselves how they might contribute to the greater world they will help design, build, and live in.

It's inside the kids. It's not something we can teach them, because we don't have it. They have it. We try to teach them all kinds of stuff. But it's just stuff. We make them jump through all kinds of hoops. But they're just hoops, and they're negative and exclusive and unhealthy. The light is in them. We need to value, honor, respect, and trust them, and the light that is in them, that is them. We need to not extinguish the lights. We need to let the lights shine.

We don't have the right answers for kids these days. Kids these days have better answers than we do, inside them, innately. We need to listen more.