Why an equitable youth-led education? Why now?
The world as we know it is changing rapidly. The future of work will be different from what it is today. It is hard to predict the job skills needed in 2040. It is hard to predict and plan how to educate today's youth for such an uncertain future. Today's youth live in a circumstance, with access to tools, and have ways of interacting that are innately different from the ones that the adults responsible for educating them were educated or skilled with. Educators need to rapidly reskill themselves and reframe the context of their own education, develop awareness of their own limitations so they might not hinder but instead support youth in getting the education they need and deserve.
Not only is the future uncertain, we are also dealing with unprecedented circumstances and crisis. Between political instability and unrest, economic disparities, mounting pressures to eliminate racial discrimination, climate change and now a health-crisis, today's youth are standing at the precipice of a lifetime of challenges.
Even today, education mainly fosters knowledge acquisition and rote skill development. It’s ultimate goal is material gains and societal status. But now, knowledge is ubiquitous, and rote skills are algorithmized for machines. Material gains are inequitable, and do not ensure individual, communal or planetary well-being. Access to high quality, relevant education remains incomplete and inequitable. A reimagined, equitable, youth-led education has the power to transform the very ways in which we relate, feel, think, understand, respond and act.
The time is now.
Remote learning has propelled digital-first learning, and unknowingly connected not just students to their teachers through technology but created the primordial soup for students, and classrooms around the world to connect with each other.
Today's Gen-Z are inborn activists, innovators, and do-gooders. Born in the rise of 9/11 and sitting on the eve of COVID-19, this generation led by the likes of Greta Thunberg knows that the world as it stands today, will not last. Still, it is the world they are inheriting, and it is their right to make it better.
It's time to ensure they have the power to not only create the world they want to live in, but also be responsible for it. And, the power they must have first, is the right to lead their own education.