Beyond Babysitting: Prioritizing Human Development in our Schools
“You cannot teach a man anything;
you can only help him to find it within himself.”
We had high hopes of a fresh start as we came out of the pandemic into the 2021-2022 school year. As people emerged from their isolation and schools restarted in-person learning, an air of hope filled school halls. Yet, there was a palpable weight to the 2022-23 school year–a fatigue and lingering worry that got worse, not better, with time, and which continues to linger well into 2024.
Education is at a crossroads yet again. But this time it’s not a virus causing the crisis. We are being asked to make a conscious choice about what the purpose of school should be–not for generations to come, but for today, for students in schools right now. While generative AI like Chat GPT is at the forefront of this conversation, it is just one of several existential crises, like climate change and social unrest, that have thrust us into this “red or blue pill” moment. The choice has consequences far beyond budgeting and enrollment or university placement. All over the planet, schools are being called on to support the viability of civil society.
Staying on the path we are on–blocking generative AI, doubling down on proctored exams, and searching desperately for trends in point-in-time high stakes assessment data–leads us to the certain future of educators as glorified babysitters. Teachers are already calling this out; recent teacher polls show educators’ greatest dissatisfaction is not burnout, but the lack of agency to truly support kids who struggle with disruptive behaviors or need personalized help with academics. We are not a decade away from being babysitters, as complex algorithms carry out education tied to standardized testing metrics, but a year or two at most.
However, there is another path, one where education is the most important profession on the planet–where we embrace the fact that we are and always have been in the business of human development for the sake of civil society. Education can either encourage social reproduction or social transformation. Schools can reaffirm, calcify, and perpetuate systems that undermine the viability of our democratic society, creating further inequities and division, or they can help to re-engineer, terraform, and redesign a more just, prosperous, and healthy world.
The reason schools are designed as they are dates back to 1840, when then secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Horace Mann, traveled to what was then Prussia. While there, Mann witnessed an innovative new way to educate. Previously, those with means hired governesses to tutor young scholars. Others sent their kids to a few years of primary school, where teachers gathered students of all ages in one-room school houses. But in Prussia, Mann witnessed a miracle: students organized by age, in classes organized by subject, all part of the country’s drive to ensure a fit army that would not lose the next war.
Mann brought this vision of education back to the United States, where captains of American industry took notice and, with a group of university heads, created the system we have today. This was innovative at the time, and successful in preparing the labor to work in new factories that dotted the landscape. But is this still the world schools are preparing our students for today? Or might we need to reimagine the purpose of our schools?
In the authors’ opinion, the real purpose of education should be to foster human development–the development of the self and the self in relation to the world. There are a wide range of forces that make it increasingly difficult to avoid school becoming a daycare system. But if we focus our time inside the schoolhouse on three elements of human development–academic growth; equitable access to resources and experiences; and emotional wellbeing, belonging, and safety–school can redefine its purpose. We believe that this is indeed the path forward–in fact, the only path forward for schools that aspire to be relevant a decade from now.
Figure 1: Three Elements of Human Development
After Mann’s innovations, the purpose of school was clearly and solely academic growth. In this first stage, those who were able to succeed, did. Those who weren’t dropped out to pursue trades that didn’t require a high school diploma. Over time, schools learned to embrace equity, finding ways to support learners who didn’t succeed on the first try, and who faced obstacles to their academic success. A new era of learning that acknowledged factors like child safety, social-emotional wellbeing and equity of access emerged. In this second era of schooling, factors such as socioeconomics, diversity, learning differences, and disabilities began to be addressed. We hired student support teachers, launched initiatives to support students with disabilities, and embraced multilingual learners. We hired directors of diversity and provided scholarships to students from financially disadvantaged backgrounds.
And this brings us to today, over two decades into the 21st century. The new purpose of school is human development and this demands, as Jal Mehta writes, a new grammar of education. The new purpose of school is the development of humanity and civil society; schools can no longer afford to see emotional wellbeing, belonging, safety, and equity of access as precursors to academic success, but rather must embrace them as outcomes of equal value.
Academic Growth
It would be comforting if education were simple. Yet it’s so apparent that real learning, deep learning, is messy, complex, and wild. In our new book, The Landscape Model of Learning: Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion (2022), we share the metaphor of the landscape in contrast to the metaphor of the race track. While a race track is emblematic of the same learning for all students in the same way and at the same time, the landscape metaphor acknowledges the unique starting points, goals, and aspirations of each individual student, as well as the context of the school, its community, and families. By recognizing and valuing the diversity of students' backgrounds and experiences, educators can create more equitable learning environments that meet the needs of every student.
While academics have always been at the heart of schooling, the new purpose of school must question both academics as the ultimate outcome of education and the utility of academic growth itself. Certainly, literacy and numeracy remain important, but it’s time to question assumptions, such as whether calculus is the goal of a robust math program or if coding prepares students for employment in the age of generative AI.
Rather than lean into redefining the purpose of school and redesigning it around subjects and dispositions that support students’ success in career and life, we obsess over and even weaponize “learning loss.” Looking at data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), we see that over two decades trying to increase reading and math scores in the US, we only improved scores by about 2%--and we did so by throwing out music, art, and PE, and even trimming hours for science and social studies. When we threw all we had at standardized measures, we could only muster a 2% increase nationwide. And in the most disruptive years of modern schooling, the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw only a 2% decrease. Should we not expect that kids being out of school for two years would slow learning? If not, what is the value of our schools to begin with?
If the new purpose of school includes a redefined slate of academic priorities, then it’s time for us to aspire beyond learning loss and traditional academics. In reality, all students have different starting points, challenges, strengths, and assets. The landscape metaphor allows educators to acknowledge and value each student's experiences and position on the landscape (what we call their contributions to the ecosystem), and support their growth and development in a way that recognizes they may have different horizons or aspirations on that landscape. Finally, the landscape model invites educators to ensure multiple pathways through learning, to ensure that all students can leverage their talents. Academic growth is still a core outcome of school, but it is only part of how we prepare students to transform their world.
Equitable Access to Resources and Experiences
The first element of The Landscape Model of Learning, the ecosystem, invites educators to know their students deeply, to understand each child’s starting place on the landscape, and to ensure that every student has experiences that build on who they are and want to become. While life outside the schoolhouse can be rife with inequities–the student with no access to preschool, the student without books or internet in the home–schools help to transform the inequities of the broader society by ensuring that every student has equal opportunities for rich learning experiences and access to high-quality resources.
Learning to play a musical instrument outside of school, for example, is a privilege available to students whose parents can afford private music lessons. But inside of school, music classes ensure all students have experiences that develop their appreciation for different genres of music, and that develop their skills as musicians. Even if a student does not decide to go into music as a career, the development of their personal aesthetic and sense of beauty still supports their development as thinkers and doers, and as members of a species that has created music for 60,000 years.
The lack of access to resources is another significant challenge to deep, rich human development. A child who creates products for class with markers and poster board will never “measure up” as compared to the student with access to a color printer, stick-on letters, and other high-quality supplies. But if the work happens in the classroom, where all students have access to the same quality supplies, all learners have the opportunity to create something that demonstrates the quality of their thinking and learning, not of their resources.
If the new purpose of schools is to foster human development, and through education to support the transformation of civil society, then we must also ensure that all students have access to experiences beyond the schoolhouse walls. Even in more affluent schools, not every family can afford to send their children on domestic trips, much less global programs. How might we ensure that every child has opportunities to see themselves in relation to the world beyond their local environment? The authors have seen the profound impact that global experiences can have on students from all backgrounds, and the drive toward a life of purpose such experiences can create. Human development is not just about academic studies; it’s also about experiencing different ways of living and knowing, and it’s about understanding ourselves, something every child needs for success beyond the schoolhouse.
Emotional Wellbeing, Belonging and Safety
In The Landscape Model of Learning, the element of the pathway is about ensuring students can find personally relevant and appropriately challenging pathways through the learning process, so that every student feels successful not as measured against other students but in their own right, based on their own starting place (ecosystem), aspirations (horizon), and potential. The development of a sense of self, and the confidence to build a life of passion and purpose, depends on students feeling a sense of wellbeing, belonging and safety in school. When students feel unsafe or excluded, their emotional health is put at risk, and mental health has a direct relationship with academic growth. A student may have access to all the resources in the world but still feel like they don’t belong at school, and that will invariably impact their academic success. We believe that emotional wellbeing, belonging and safety are just as central to the purpose of school as academic growth, since without them there is little learning to be done.
Framing this topic from the perspective of child protection, a central role for schools, the lack of social belonging and safety can result in extreme forms of violence occurring inside schools as much as outside their walls. School shootings often have roots in social exclusion, as we saw at Columbine High School in Colorado, where the shooters experienced bullying and exclusion for years before deciding to respond with violence. This begs the question yet again–will schools simply replicate social systems that put everyone’s safety at risk, or will we seek to transform those systems, both inside and outside the schoolhouse?
These dangers are particularly salient for vulnerable populations such as our LGBTQ+ students. The research is unquestionable–queer students and faculty are among the most vulnerable members of any school community, much more likely to experience bullying and violence inside and outside of school, and far more prone to self harm and suicide than any other population we serve. Protecting and including vulnerable populations, whatever the source of that vulnerability, is a central facet of our legal role in loco parentis (in place of parents). Not only do schools have the responsibility to accept and support every element of students’ identities, but to offer every child the kind of deep, personal development that can’t be replicated by AI or glorified babysitters. And we have an opportunity to transform our broader society in the process, so that civil society protects the vulnerable as well.
If the new purpose of schools is to foster human development and support the transformation of civil society, then children must feel safe and connected at school. Students who are invited to share who they are in meaningful ways, and are honored for the skills and knowledge they bring into the community, will thrive academically and socially because their education leverages their strengths and empowers them to embrace their full potential. This is what the educational non-profit What School Could Be refers to as a “Caring and Connected Community,” where all students feel seen for their assets and invited to be their whole selves at school. This in itself is an act of transformation, one that can only benefit the broader society.
Conclusion
Holding this multiplicity of outcomes of this new purpose of school can seem daunting, even overly complex. Yet it is similar to an art teacher taking students to a piazza to sketch a statue. When students sit in a circle around the statue and sketch what they see, each drawing will be slightly different, some capturing the front, some the sides, others the back. By definition, the statue is complex–it’s three dimensional. Similarly, education is complex. To say that its sole or even ultimate purpose is academic growth is to miss what makes the human learning experience special. We are multidimensional beings, and we need to grow in multiple dimensions. In fact, it is this multiplicity that our civil society needs as well; the more we embrace pluralistic goals and perspectives, the better we can educate a generation prepared to support and transform our multidimensional societies.
It’s time for us to reexamine and even change the purpose of school, and for educators to regain their place as the most relevant profession in the world. We need to create systems through which students can grow academically, gain access to resources and experiences in equitable ways, and grow into positive emotional health, with a strong sense of belonging and safety. While AI may be able to pick up some of the lower-level learning and skill building we need, it can never replace professional educators who know how to recognize vulnerabilities, who step up to fill gaps when they appear, and who help young people grow into a strong sense of self and their place in the world. And it takes humans to ensure that the new grammar of education allows us to transform our schools and societies, so that we can build systems with more unity than division and more equity than inequality, both inside our schoolhouses and in the world at large.
Jennifer D. Klein is a product of experiential project-based education herself, and she lives and breathes the student-centered pedagogies used to educate her. A former head of school with extensive international experience and over 30 years in education--including 19 in the classroom--Jennifer facilitates dynamic, interactive workshops for teachers, leaders and students, working to amplify student voice, to provide the tools for high-quality project-based learning in all cultural and socio-economic contexts, and to shift school culture to support such practices. Jennifer is also committed to intersecting global project-based learning with culturally-responsive and anti-racist teaching practices, and her experience includes deep work with schools seeking to address equity, build healthier community, and improve identity politics on campus. Jennifer has published articles in Kappan, The Educational Forum, EdWeek, GettingSmart, and NAIS’s Independent School magazine. Jennifer’s first book, The Global Education Guidebook: Humanizing K-12 Classrooms Worldwide through Equitable Partnerships, was published in 2017, and her second, The Landscape Model of Learning: Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion, written with co-author Kapono Ciotti, was published in 2022.
Kapono Ciotti attributes his educational philosophy to his own schooling experience in a progressive, social-constructivist school during his early years in Honolulu, Hawaii. He taught in Honolulu, Hawaii, and Dakar, Senegal, for over a decade before moving into school leadership. Kapono has led schools in the United States and Egypt, where he put into practice the philosophy of "students making the world a better place," shifting school culture to impact-based education practice. His strong belief in education being an act of social justice drives his work.
Kapono has worked internationally in educational change organizations, leading the work of Deeper Learning and place and culture-based pedagogy, and he is currently the Executive Director for What School Could Be. In these roles, he has trained teachers in over 100 schools and school districts over four continents, impacting hundreds of thousands of students. In addition, Kapono spent 15 years as National Faculty for the National Association of Independent Schools in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice, facilitating national and international learning experiences. As a curriculum writer, he has authored multiple curricula for federal and non-profit programs. His work has significantly contributed to the organizations What School Could Be, The Buck Institute, EdLeader21, The Pacific American Foundation, and many others.
Kapono holds a Ph.D. in International Education Leadership from Northcentral University, a Masters degree in Social Change and Development from the University of Newcastle, and a Bachelors of Language and Culture from the Evergreen State College. He currently lives between Hawaii, Cairo, Egypt, and Dakar Senegal.