Written by: Frank Flavell
Schools are businesses and their product determines the future of business not only in America, but all around the world. Their product is more than reading, writing and math, more than skills in communication, competition and cooperation, and it is more than the doors of opportunity that mastery of those skills can open. The product of our nation’s schools is our children, an entity greater than the sum of its parts. And it is our children who will go on to develop the society of the future through innovations and solutions we can’t even imagine of today.
But one of America’s biggest businesses is failing to prepare its students for a real world those students already face on a daily basis. In the U.S., one student drops out of school every 12 seconds. That’s over 1,164,197 students just in this year alone (www.bigpicture.org). That number not only indicates the amount of students who didn’t see the relevance of education in their lives, but also the amount of creative capital this country has lost. This is why EnTeam is proposing we rethink the way we educate our students. If kids feel they can find more value in the real world instead of at school, then why not bring school to the world of work? EnTeam believes the reason why schools are failing is because the educational system is only half-developed. Schools are missing out on the creative and educational capital that businesses can offer by limiting the scope of their curriculum to the classroom.
Professionals who work for companies, government organizations and non-profit institutions use the skills they learned at school to develop services and products that solve problems directly impacting communities and individuals. They understand the importance of education, because they directly experience how their education connects to the meaningful and empowering work they do everyday. Students don’t have that instant gratification, but professionals can aid in the education of students by illustrating that connection. Organizations like Big Picture Learning, Schools that Work and Expeditionary Learning have proved that it benefits students and businesses when students are able to make a connection between the academic material they are learning in school to the work that professionals do outside of school.
Professionals can become mentors to students, provide volunteer opportunities for students within their organizations, and work with teachers to develop a professional component to their curriculum.
By building these kinds of relationships when a student asks why they are learning something, the answer moves from, “because I said you have to” to, “because when you know how to do this you can change the world.”
Leave A Comment