"Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all."
Aristotle
In my experience, no truer words have been spoken about our education system.
My K-12 education certainly educated my mind. I excelled in many subjects, and my teachers consistently provided academic differentiation that satisfied my need to be challenged through advanced coursework and independent studies in math, science, social studies, language arts, foreign language, and music. They made time to meet with me after school to discuss academic topics, gave me plenty of individualized instruction, and even went above and beyond to create and monitor independent studies for me.
With no shortage of intellectual challenge in my education, I look back and wonder why I was so miserable in school and why I felt ill-prepared to deal with real-world issues. The answer is simple: my education severely lacked the anti-bias, social-emotional component so critical to a well-rounded education.
Don't get me wrong. I was challenged socially and emotionally every day and I certainly experienced and recognized bias. In a small town where there is little to no ethnic or racial diversity, socioeconomic status and generational residence became the defining factors in whether one was treated respectfully or cast aside and vigilantly monitored by school officials. In my experience, rewards and punishments in our small town were clearly delivered based on social merit: who you were, how deep your family roots went, and where you lived meant more than your academic achievement or future career goals.
My education focused so much on developing the student in me that the human in me struggled to eke out an existence. We were never instructed in how to deal effectively with major life challenges, and nobody seemed to want the system of privilege to change. In hindsight, I wonder if anybody even realized that this system existed in our town? In any case, I don't remember anybody explicitly teaching us how to respect each other, we rarely worked collaboratively, and social boundaries pushed people to conformity and rejected those who refused to do so. As a result, the system of privilege and power continued to be perpetuated.
So how could my education have been better? What will make the difference in future students' lives in the place where I grew up? And how can we apply this to the bigger picture of education?
We educators must be explicitly responsive to the needs of our students in the greater context of the world around them. This means that when the system within which we operate--the wider community culture--perpetuates discrimination and rigid hierarchies, we must be brave enough to teach students more positive and humane ways to treat each other. Our classrooms must include a variety of collaborative practices and instruction that values each and every student. We must learn to see students as agents of change in their respective environments, humans who are just trying to figure out how to survive and enact positive change despite oppressive conditions. Furthermore, we need to effectively address privilege in our instruction, raising awareness of how privilege, or lack thereof, affects people's realities. Privilege may always exist, but equipping students with the capacity to positively address oppressive situations will go a long way in helping them be successful in their lives.
This work is not easy, nor is it very popular. But it is crucial.
To prepare students to be effective global citizens with 21st century skills, we need to teach them how to think critically about the world around them. They need to understand systems of oppression and balance of power. They need to understand how the world works and how their actions positively or adversely affect others. Most importantly, they must be educated to be compassionate and empathetic, to care deeply about the ripple effect they have on people across the globe.
In short, we need to re-frame our instructional practices to assure that we are educating both the minds and the hearts of our students, giving them both the intellectual skills and the emotional capacity to effectively solve problems in our ever-changing and interconnected world.
Our educational message? Be brave, be innovative, and, most importantly, be yourself.
