Educational Leadership

Today’s kids are becoming empowered, both by technology and by society, to do things that kids could never do in the past. These kids represent a huge untapped group available to make the world a better place. The subtitle of my book is “Unleashing the Power of 21st-century Kids.”

The “academic” education we have offered our kids in the recent past—and still offer today to all, with its core subjects of math, English, science, and social studies (“the MESS”)—which was once useful, is no longer right for these empowered kids nor for the world in which they are growing up and will live.

Our current “academic” education is wrong for the future not because we haven’t added enough technology, or because we haven’t added enough so-called 21st century skills, or because we don’t offer it to everyone equally, or even because we haven’t tried hard to incrementally improve it.

It’s wrong for the future because it has—and we have—the wrong ends, or goals, in mind. Up until now, education has been about improving individuals. What education should be about in the future is improving the world—and having individuals improve in the process.