In 20 years’ time, I believe today’s classrooms will appear to future generations much as those old one-room school houses look like to us now. If we have a goal for the next 20 years, it’s to fundamentally change education to include compassion, service and global citizenship.
For a start, it means adding some important subjects to the course curriculum. In some respects, our school curriculum today – with math, science, history and geography – is no different than it was in our grandparents’ day.
Social-change clubs dealing with issues from environmentalism to human rights exist in every school today. But they are still treated as extracurricular activities, divorced from classroom learning. That must change. Core subjects should be connected to real world events and issues with practical hands-on engagement projects. For example, a science unit on water should include a class on water pollution. Students could research a local water pollution issue and take action on it, perhaps by writing letters to local politicians. Recently we spoke with a teacher in Paris, Ont., who was teaching her students about world events by having them correspond with an aid worker in Yemen, in the middle of that country’s civil war.