Could Children Create a Better World?

Rather than seeing schools' role as filling children’s minds with prescribed curricula, what if their primary role was unleashing the unbounded creativity of adolescents’ brains to address the existential challenges adults cannot solve? Teams of children would choose the issues they want to tackle, and adults would help them learn everything they need to pursue innovative solutions.

Young children are less tainted by fear of failure or racial, religious, gender, political, or national prejudices. They are, however, deeply concerned about issues they hear about, like refugees, gun violence, drug overdose, injustice, bullying, homelessness, plastics in the ocean, climate change, war, and global warming. They see national and civic leaders in the media daily deadlocked on critical issues, disparaging those with opposing positions, and seemingly incapable of arriving at solutions that could improve the world they will inherit. Child and adolescent brains thrive and grow with these types of challenges. Unless challenged now, most will eventually absorb the entrenched prejudices and inertia of the adults in their world.