Preparing Our Children for the World of Tomorrow

Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Educational Administration Program at Iowa State University, co-created the amazingly popular video Did You Know?, which asks the question – How do we best prepare our children for the rapidly changing and expanding world of tomorrow?

In this future world of rapidly evolving technological development and rapidly changing global demographics depicted in the video, our children will live in a profoundly different world than we live in today. What these changes mean to the future of individual children and societies is open to speculation.

There are, however, two general approaches we can take as parents, educators and as a society to guide and empower our children. One is to continue with more determination on the path we are currently on – pushing children to ever-higher standards of memorization, test-taking and compliance  to the demands of the state who determine our educational standards.

The traditional, standards-based approach to learning began during the industrial age when factories needed workers who could accurately follow instructions without thinking for themselves or challenging the status quo. These workers needed to tolerate mindless repetitive tasks without complaint.

The other approach to guiding our children requires an entirely new way of perceiving young people and what they need from us to prepare for the realities of tomorrow. The goal of this alternative approach is to empower our young people to think for themselves and to think out of the box from the way things have always been done.

The demands of the future require innovation. We will need leaders, visionaries, and free thinkers with the ingenuity to respond to the needs of a different world reality, one in which the old rules and ideals no longer apply.

Our young people will need to use their natural human talents of problem-solving, intuition, creativity, curiosity, exploration, the ability to think for themselves in the moment and then to respond powerfully and courageously to realities of their time.

This is not something we can teach them with textbooks or standards-based testing. We can’t even teach them entirely based on what we already know or the information we believe to be true.

We are preparing our children for a future that is so radically different from the present reality that we cannot even imagine what it will be like.

To help them develop these intrinsic skills, we must give them relevant opportunities to actually use these innovative, problem-solving skills in real-life situations during all of their growing up years. We cannot expect a young person to suddenly become creative and innovative upon graduation if he hasn’t continuously used and expanded these skills as he grows up.

One of the best ways to develop these intrinsic skills is through real life experiences in programs, such as San Francisco-based Spark , which creates real world experiences for youth through apprenticeships in the community.

Another option is an unschooling approach found in many home schooling families and democracy-based Sudbury Valley Schools.

Other options that encourage individual freedom, creativity and exploration include Montessori and Reggio Emilio schools.

These approaches also help children develop essential life values including empathy, authenticity, autonomy, personal responsibility and integrity and life skills such as communication, observation, and motivation.

As I ponder this new reality of the future, I recall the lines from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran:

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of to-morrow,

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

As individual parents and educators and as a society, we must trust that our children already possess the ability to discover and learn, to think for themselves, and to create new possibilities based upon the unique circumstances of the moment.

Our children profoundly need for us, their parents, educators, and society-leaders, to act with courage to challenge the status quo and to make choices based on what is best for our children now, and not just on what has always been done or is easy.

We must provide meaningful opportunities for their learning, exploration, and growth.The healthy future of our children and our global community depends upon it.

If you haven’t watched the video, do it now. Then go to Scott’s blog at DangerouslyIrrelevent.org and learn more about his ground-breaking work in education.