“The beardless youth… does not foresee what is useful...”
Horace1st Century BC
There has been, since the beginning of time, a lie that the majority of the world has fallen victim to: our generation is different than the previous ones. We have battled against our parents, against the larger society, any authority, and against the status quo in trying to distance ourselves from previous generations. Our youth are constantly trying to enforce their perceived need for autonomy, while always being told by powers that be what they should do and when. This generational gap is the reality that we all faced when we were young and many of us with children now realize we still reproduce it in the generations to come.
Before we step back from the battle, however, let's look at what it looks like on a day to day basis, specifically in our educational institutions. In mandatory schooling models, the concept of the generational gap becomes a cornerstone of our daily lives. Teachers and parents tend to believe that education is important in raising our children to become productive members of society. Though it is hard for me as an educator to say this, I do believe that his is in fact not the case. Mr. Peter Gray, in his great article "A Brief History of Education", explains that education's history is rooted in various reasons, including forced labor, religious instruction, and more recently as a way of levelling each child's place in relations to others (used by the adult world as placement signs for post secondary). Yes, this all seems harsh, but like it or not it is reality. In fact, take all of the reasons above away, and arguably our children may be happier than they are now and still be successful members of society. Many families are beginning to search for schooling options that go against the traditional track of education, looking to more democratic and status-quo-disruptive school frameworks, such as The Sudbury Valley School model, Project Ancora , as well as the Wondering Schools.
Generational gap, however, is not completely sustained within the educational system. For example, the clashing of various cultures and social styles (First Nations vs. New World; Millennial lifestyle vs more traditional lifestyle; social media vs. traditional media) is arguably the impetus for almost all angst in our world. Even popular music styles go through stages where one generation of music (dark, introspective, grunge movement of the late 90's) seems to be a response to the previous popular musical style (carefree and fun music of the 80's). It must be stated here, however, that this type of responsive change is most likely normal and can perhaps even be positive; change is vital to growth.
So what should education's focus be, then? I believe it's largest purpose should be to battle the lie that there even is a battle. Our children need to understand that this generational battle can be broken, and in fact should be. How? We need them to understand that change is good when tempered with previous knowledge.
But this is not as easy to do. Right now, our students are currently being inundated with fake news, fake videos, fake pictures, fake stories, etc. They are being told constantly that what they think the world is like is not true. In fact, for many of them nothing is real anymore, and nothing can be proven to be real. Though there may not be any actual growth to the number of people who believe in conspiracy theories, the prevalence of their existence in our society is much more easily seen and they may impact society on a larger scale than they did before, thus creating the belief for our students that more and more people are believing in conspiracies and ultimately feeding the "deep state" lie.
This is the biggest concern to our educational society today, because if our youth cannot believe anything they see or hear as being "truth" then history becomes useless which makes previous learning obsolete or untrustworthy and this which in turn makes education and even our own personal histories useless tools for the younger generation to use to build a better tomorrow.
In conclusion, then, I believe that the real purpose of education moving forward should be to battle the lie that there is no truth and give them the tools they need to be able to distinguish truth from lies.
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