The lessons we choose to prioritize in school are largely driven by what we assume children need by way of preparation for the world. But who among us can look at the world we have now and responsibly argue that we should use our sacred time in schools to prepare children for the world as is? This is not the time to teach children how to be in the world as is. This is a time to invite them to imagine the world we want, and then to figure out and practice who we will all need to become.
Dreaming up a new world-a more humane world-requires the work of our children. Age is a disadvantage when it comes to imagination. Our longer-lived experience in the world as is constrains our capacity to imagine the world as it could be, as it should be, as it must be. (Shalaby, “Calling on Omar,” in Teaching When the World is on Fire, pp. 59-60)
Similar to Ayers’s call to action from the same essay collection, here Carla Shalaby reflects on how much we can learn from our youngest students.
As a teacher of young children, I have tried to envision my classroom as a laboratory for students—and grownups!—to practice creating the kind of community we want. That begins with a simple premise: we hold each other up. As students learn and develop, that mindset turns outward: how can we create communities beyond school where we hold each other up?
I think it’s critically important that we also foster adults’ imagination and their power to create the world “as it could be, as it should be, as it must be.” Children’s voices are important in this regard, but that should not distract us from the real work that adults must do to put our collective dreams of a better world into action. In the words of Greta Thunberg (2019):
This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!
Teachers must go beyond listening, making space for students’ imaginations, creating classrooms that are microcosms of the world we want. We must also create that world!