Your Guide to Teaching Essential Skills in School.
Dear Educators, Parents and Educational leaders,
I write to you an open letter. One which I hope can change the world and ultimately save it. I have put this together with one Intention in mind. To change the way, we all look at education forever.
In 2007 when our current first year university students sat in kindergarten learning phonics and the alphabet there was no Spotify, Uber, Airbnb, or Tesla! Today as they sit in their first university lectures, we must ask ourselves; Have we set them up with the skills to embrace the world? Can they be the voice of change, the innovators and the change-makers, or have we prepared them to fall in line and become a worker bee?
Attached: Your Yearly Essential Skills Timetable (please print and Include in your program folder.)
“If you are a Kindergarten student today, you will graduate from school in 2032. Who knows what the world will be like?”
Although we cannot predict 2032. By equipping and exposing our current kindergarten children to the essential skills such as empathy, time management, executive functioning, independence, and emotional intelligence we will be able to deal with whatever the future holds.
Our current educational outcomes are designed not for the future, but even worse, they are designed for an Industrial Age that’s over 150 years old. Designed for a lifestyle and workforce long gone. A time where doctors thought that draining blood from your body would cure disease or that herbs would protect us from plagues and disease!
There’s no point in ‘teaching for the sake of learning and remembering facts’ I mean what is the point in teaching something just because it says it in your textbook, or because the curriculum says so? We have a duty of care to our students and those who will follow them, to teach our children how to love in a way that protects all living beings and the natural habitat we call Home.
The essential skills that should be included in every teaching program, every lesson plan and every assessment task are those that will make the world a better place to live. Make these skills the “learning objective” of your lessons and cultivate students who will emerge as change-makers, young adults who will understand that there’s only one race “the human one” and that we only have one planet, if we take care of it, it will take care of us.
I urge every educator on earth to print this letter, to place it on the desk of their principal, to take it to their next staff meeting and to hang it up the staff-room for everyone to read. “A teacher’s job is not just to inspire the students in their class, but to inspire the world.”
If we work together, if we all include these skills in our weekly planning and delivery of lessons then maybe, just maybe we can change the course of the future and make this world a better place!
“The only constant in education is change, and that change is you”,
Thank you
#education #teacher #school