Abstract:

Education systems around the world largely fail to prepare young people for the challenges of life in the 21st century. Faced with the terrifying realities of climate change, inequality, fracturing democracies, state-sponsored inhumanity, pandemics and dwindling natural resources, children everywhere need to be given the opportunity to develop the skills and capacities to lead the change required to reverse these growing threats to humanity and forge a new world built on equity, love, empathy and tolerance.

There is a growing movement across the globe in support of a new approach to learning and schooling, one that takes as its aim the ability of every young person to thrive. This demands a new focus for what we learn and how we learn. A narrow focus on facts, knowledge and information – underpinned by the objective to assess, rank and rate learners based on their performance in exams – does not provide young people with the human capacities they need to navigate the world around them. We need to actively, explicitly and systemically foster the skills and human capacities everyone really needs to thrive – empathy, tolerance, resilience, self-awareness, compassion, thoughtfulness, creativity, the ability to communicate, the ability to collaborate and so on.

And in this debate about the ‘new curriculum’, one thing is often left out: the ability to make choices. As human beings, we make hundreds of small choices every day – what we eat, how we talk or listen, the focus we give to others, the time we invest, the compassion we show, the books we read, the small acts of kindness we share and so on. Alongside that – and as we get older – we are making ever bigger choices – the subjects we want to study, the job or career we want to pursue, the partner we want to spend time with, the place we want to live, the political causes we want to support. And our ability to choose – from what we have for dinner to the job offer we accept – has a significant impact on our wellbeing, on the wellbeing of those around us and on the wellbeing of our community, society and planet.

And yet we never learn about choice. So many of our choices are instinctive – we don’t really think about them or take time to understand the consequences of our choices. We often labour under the ‘illusion of choice’ – that the choices we have made are our own, even if the reality is that we are being guided towards certain choices either by the natural functioning of our brains or by clever external forces that understand how we make choices much more than we do and that can manipulate us accordingly.

In this paper, we argue that the ability to choose – to take control of the choices we make and to make better choices – is a skill just like any other. And it’s a skill that we can learn – in school and beyond. We present an argument as to why this skill is so critical to our wellbeing and what the impact may be if we all become better ‘choosers’. And we explore what, specifically, we might teach young people if we want them to be empowered to make better choices.

Keywords:

Lifeskills, new curriculum, learning to choose, 21st century skills.