“The thing that really surprised me was that it [Earth] projected an air of fragility. And why, I don’t know. I don’t know to this day. I had a feeling it’s tiny, it’s shiny, it’s beautiful, it’s home, and it’s fragile.”
— Michael Collins, Apollo 11 (Chang, 2019)
At the University of Virginia, I teach a class called Mindfulness in Health and Human Development that I originally intended to prepare students going into helping professions such as teaching, nursing, or medicine. However, the course has become extremely popular and draws undergraduates from across all programs and majors. I am fortunate to have access to a classroom set up well for practicing mindfulness and yoga. The floor space is open and there are shelves stacked with cushions and yoga mats.
We spend two and a half hours a week with our technology turned off, engaging in mindful awareness practices, doing reflective writing or drawing, discussing our experiences and insights about ourselves and our experiences. The first half of the class is designed to help students learn these practices and apply them to supporting their own well-being and development. The second half of the class is designed to help them apply mindfulness and compassion practices to supporting others. On their own, they complete reading and writing assignments through which I get a chance to observe the growth in their self-reflection and understanding of their place in the world. This has been one of the most rewarding teaching experiences in my 40-plus-year career.
Teaching this class has taught me so much about our most valuable human resource: our young adults. They are hungry for purpose; they are hungry for community; and they are super smart and insightful. Fewer of these young adults are choosing to become teachers. Why would they? They will be saddled with huge debt, so earning teacher’s salary will not be adequate, especially if they want to live in a large, expensive metro area like New York or San Francisco. This saddens me because many of them should become teachers.
For example, Elizabeth enrolled in my course to learn to manage her stress. Bright and energetic, she was graduating with a degree in chemical engineering. She told me she was looking for a job in the pharmaceutical industry, but she didn’t seem excited about the prospect. I asked, “Is this what you really want to do?”
“Well, not really. But my parents won’t be happy if I don’t have a good job that pays well.”
“What do you really want to do?” I asked.
“You know, I worked as a volunteer at an afterschool STEM program at a middle school this year and loved working with the kids. I think I would really enjoy teaching.” As she told me about how excited the students were to learn about chemistry, her face glowed.
“Sounds like you have some passion there!” I said.
“You reminded me of something. The reason I decided to major in engineering was because of a fantastic teacher I had in high school. She made science thrilling. Maybe I will return to school to become a teacher later,” she said.
I certainly hope she does, because we need her!
Teaching this class and getting to know these young adults so well gives me incredible hope for the future. We just need to figure out how to transform education so that it again attracts young people so we don’t lose the precious human capital that is at the doorstep of their careers.
So, what can we as a society do? Let’s start by looking at the big picture. We see a kind of change that’s new for humanity. Not only do we see rapid technological changes, but also social, cultural, economic, biological, climate, and ecological changes. All of these changes converge and impact our lives in ways that interact with one another. Some of this change is exponential, like Moore’s law: the development of computing power follows an exponential curve. Some of the change is chaotic and unpredictable, like weather disruptions and social upheavals. Our human brains were not cut out for this, so we try to simplify things to tolerate all this change without becoming distressed. But obviously, this strategy is not working very well.
The COVID-19 pandemic is an example. The verdict is still out at this writing, but it appears that the virus began in bats and mutated to a form that could infect humans. As human beings have encroached on the earth’s remaining wilderness, such zoonotic pathogens such as H5N1, SARS, and MERS become more prevalent (Jánová, 2019). Because of the globalization of travel, COVID-19 was able to extend its reach across the entire earth in a matter of weeks. It happened so quickly governments could not stay ahead of the rapidly growing pace of infection and death. At the end of February 2020, there were just a few cases in the United States. But within two short months over 50,000 had died.
The pandemic disrupted our lives in numerous ways, above and beyond stressing the healthcare system. Physical distancing shut down the economy. Millions lost their jobs. We had to rely more on technologies to work and connect with one another. Rising to the challenge to meet students’ needs, schools rapidly transitioned to provide remote learning and distribute food. Teachers struggled to provide instruction remotely while also coping with the impact of COVID-19 on their personal lives (Gewerts, 2020). The crisis highlighted existing disparities. While well-resourced students were able to access online learning, many students were completely disconnected from school for the last half of the 2019–2020 school year (Kurtz, 2020). While it’s too early to predict what will happen next, the virus has certainly changed our lives in ways we could never have imagined. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic may be only the first in a string of disasters that our society will need to address.
Even before COVID-19, rapid and unpredictable change had left many of us behind in one way or another. The population of hard-working blue-collar families is being devastated by hopelessness (Kristof & WuDunn, 2020). Globalization, the destruction of union power, and rapid technological change have left them stranded in ghettos of despair that span rural and urban landscapes, riddled with drug abuse, death, and suicide. Highly educated, white-collar professional families are suffering in a different way. They have no other idea of how to prepare their children for the future than to impose great pressure and high expectations. Fearful for their children’s future, many are “bulldozing” them into a narrow gorge that they have labeled “success.” These parents overcontrol and push their children into the best schools, thinking that this is the only road to a happy future, but that instead leads to increasing levels of drug and alcohol use and mental health problems (Luthar & Kumar, 2018). All of us live with the results of this suffering, and meanwhile, our schools plug along as if doing more of the same is going to improve things. Clearly, it’s time to shift the paradigm and shift it quickly. I submit that we teachers are best positioned to lead this change. I hope that the next chapters will show you how we can do this.