#MindfulHacks — Can Mindfulness Help Educate Our Children for the World of Work in 2065?
Mindfulness is WD 40 for Education — & that’s Official!
In my 2nd piece in this short new series
#MindfulHacks — Can Mindfulness Help Educate Our Children for the World of Work in 2065?
Mindfulness is WD 40 for Education — & that’s Official!
In my 2nd piece in this short new series looking at #MindfulHacks for Mindful Living and Mindful Working, I looked at all the Science around Mindfulness and how it works on the Brain.
In this 3rd piece I want to look specifically at Mindfulness and the crucial role it can play in educating and preparing our Children for their future — And consider this 1st, ‘50 years ago a young person left school knowing 75% of all they’d need to know for the next 40+ years of their working life — Today that same person would be leaving school with as little as 2% of what they will need to know to be employed in 2065!’
A salutary thought, n’est pas?
Mindfulness has been described as being WD 40 for Education — But Why? If we take a look at what it says on the tin, perhaps we’ll find some clues.
Well, WD40 ‘Stops squeaks’, ‘Drives out moisture’, ‘Cleans and protects’, ‘Loosens rusted parts’, &, ‘Frees sticky mechanisms’.
And for me it’s the last 2 claims that in this context have the most resonance, although all have some merit!
In Chapter 5 of my book I go into the whole area of Mindfulness and Education in particular detail, but this piece today is also based on my recent work in the field with Head Teachers and implementing Mindfulness in their schools.
Schools kill creativity
This comes from the title of a famous TED talk given by Sir Ken Robinson in 2006. It currently has in excess of 34 million views.
The core of his argument is a simple one. Given the challenges we face creativity is as important as literacy in the education of our children and the education system needs to recognise and act upon this simple truth.
However, he didn’t just call for the reform of how we educate young people for the future — Their future in work and in life — In fact he called for a complete transformation and the key to this transformation in his view was not to standardise education, but to personalise it.
To build achievement upon discovering the individual talents of each child. To put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passion.
Because without a passion to learn, and without creativity, resourcefulness and resilience, how are we going to prepare children for a future that we really have no idea what it will look like?
Given that a child today will be leaving school with as little as 2% of all they’ll need to know for their future working life, how can we prepare them not only for tomorrows world of work, but also for their next 40+ years in employment?
Mindfulness can and already is playing a key apart in transforming how we approach education and the notion of Hacks as part of this is both a defining and driving force.
To Hack is to improve — To get to know something — To think outside the box. To Hack is to collaborate — To be agile — To be responsive. To Hack is to be playful — To change the way things are done — To be prepared to fail, &, as Ken Robinson has also said:
To Hack is to move away from rigid hierarchies — To adopt a problem based, problem-solving approach — To be transparent — To be accountable — To take permission to act on new opportunities.
Why is this so important?
I believe this is important, particular to the future of Education, because it is this skillset and this mindset that is exactly what is needed by the next generation and the generations to follow, to take them from the known to the unknown and make it their own!
Imagination is the source and creativity is the impetus for every form of human achievement and how we educate for the future has to step-up to the plate and create the conditions under which both can flourish.
No more linearity, conformity and batching young learners. No more aiming too low and succeeding…
We need to reset the bar
And I believe introducing Mindfulness into main-stream educational practice — making it part of the pedagogy — and making it available in every school, in all parts of the UK and across the world, will help us to reset the bar and aim high.
It can become a key driver in a transformational leadership approach that is so necessary to unsticking educational practices and creating new pardigms — Because if we continue to do as we’ve always done, we’ll continue to get what we’ve always got and that 