I believe we all carry an inner drive to connect with other people, to understand the world, and to be some part of helping to create a more equitable, safe, and peaceful society. Perhaps at no other time in our lives does this inner drive flare up then in our teens (or sometimes earlier) and early young adult lives, when we first become aware of the many injustices and inequalities in our communities and around the world. Unfortunately, U.S. education policy and the standardized and stifling curricula implemented at most schools ignores this inner drive and provides precious few opportunities for young people to learn about current issues and get involved either locally (in one’s school and one’s community) or globally.
In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof highlights numerous powerful stories of young people surmounting the barriers and, as the title of Kristof’s op-ed suggests, “Saving the World in Study Hall”: raising money to build a school in Cambodia, speaking around the world about the dangers of global warming, and fundraising to buy mosquito nets that protect families in Africa against malaria, among other initiatives.
I want to specifically mention one section in the op-ed in which Kristof describes some ideas on how to advance more of this type of youth engagement in society:
Senator Chris Dodd has pushed for a requirement of 100 hours of public service in high school. There’s a risk that a mandate undermines the virtue, but on balance I’m in favor. Colleges should also emulate Princeton and encourage young people to take a “gap year” of public service abroad (I list a few possibilities for a gap year and for student activism on my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground).
Kristof mentions what so many people seem to forget – the dangers of mandates. I support the idea of considering a gap year (I wish I had chosen and figured out a way to take a year off before college so that I could have opened my eyes up earlier to different cultures and societies), and getting involved in the community and service projects is a great thing. But even more than the virtue aspect of it, service mandates reduce the opportunity for young people to actively choose to be part of the world around them and limit the effectiveness of such projects on the young people themselves. Think of other educational mandates – math, science, English, etc., and how the external motivation through requirements often creates an adversarial relationship (especially in teens!) that greatly reduces the learning, the enjoyment, and the creativity of the activity, as well as the likelihood that a person will want to pursue it in the future. (See Self-Determination Theory for an abundance of research and resources on motivation and autonomy-support). Contrast that with the excitement and flow state we reach (not to mention the intense learning that goes on) when we personally decide to be involved with something meaningful, challenging, and important to us.
Young people want to learn about the world, want to gain the skills to be a productive part of society, and (often most especially) want to help create a more equitable and just society. Instead of requiring service projects or global engagement, or indeed requiring specific academic courses and units of study, we can acknowledge the natural curiosity and inner drive of young people and have that guide our educational approach. We can bring meaningful student involvement and the principles of democratic education to our schools in all aspects, and give young people not only the opportunity to engage with and save the world, but also to engage with and help direct their own learning process and participate in the planning and decision-making processes of their school.
That is democratic education. And it can indeed save the world.