One of the tropes of the last 20 years of education reform is that we are preparing the kids for a world that we cannot fully understand. The intersection of new technologies like artificial intelligence, and on demand short video and algorithmic life has upended much of the way we live our lives, to say nothing of how our current political and environmental conditions are creating instability across our society and our world. And the changes it will make in the world of work and in the social fabric of our lives is really just beginning. And we have to consider what that means for the institution we call school.

At a minimum, we have to understand that more than ever the idea that we can teach kids things with the promise that they will need this information someday for the world of work, and that the education that we are offering them will guarantee them a good job and therefore a good life feels to kids more fragile and less truthful than ever.

For more and more kids, this is calling into question the utility of school. They look around and see a world that is ever more detached from what we traditionally have tried to do in school. There is little that we do in the American high school that has anything to do with becoming “an influencer,” for example. And kids are seeing higher education, get attacked by both right and left as being increasingly irrelevant or out of touch – to say nothing of completely unaffordable.

On one level, this is why we are seeing a rise in the return to trade school because – at least as of now – AI can’t fix your plumbing. And we are seeing more and more folks who are saying, “get your hands in the dirt” as a remedy, for the increasingly disconnected and solipsistic ways, we live in the modern world. And this isn’t a wholly new idea, Shopcraft as Soul Craft was written 15 years ago, the farm to table movement is hardly new, and educational ideas as varied as career in technical education and project based learning at its core speak to a need for a practicality and utility where what we do has use and meaning that is real and tangible. And again, the question of “Why School?” has been asked for a long, long time.

It is why for twenty years we have been saying that “Why do I need to know this?” Is a fundamental right of every child to ask in school.

And yet, I find my own answers to those questions continuing to change and evolve, especially given the moment we are living right now.

As in any historical moment, maybe there is no one thing that school must be for all kids, and any attempt to make it about one thing will inevitably lead to disengagement and failure for far too many. The need to serve so many goals at one time is what makes school a beautifully inefficient enterprise even at its best. But I think there is a growing need to accept and understand that our society has a need that is cross cutting for all of its citizens if we are to – quite simply – survive.

We are going to need our kids to become complex and critical thinkers — about everything.

And we’re going to have to make the case for why. More than ever, we are really going to have to create the conditions by which what we do in school asks students to actively analyze the world around them. We are not going to have the luxury of hoping that kids make the connection from what we are teaching to their own growth as people. That is going to have to be explicit now. We are going to have to teach in such a way that asks kids to think about the relevance of the things that we teach for the lives they lead today and in the future. And the thing is, much of these ideas aren’t new. It is the best of what progressive pedagogy has tried to do for many, many years with varying levels of success.

When we teach history, we have to ask ourselves, “What does this moment in history tell us about the moment in which we live today?”

When students examine the world through a scientific lens, they have to ask themselves, “How does this make me a better consumer? A more informed voter? A more responsible citizen?”

When we read novels and poems and stories, we should ask ourselves, “how does this give me a lens on the world that I otherwise did not have? How does this allow me to have more empathy for those whose stories are not my own? And how does this inform my own voice, so that I can tell my story to the world in meaningful ways?”

And so on and so on and so on…

And when we ask these questions, when we dare kids to analyze their world around them through the many lenses that we can apply, and then when we ask kids to consider the actions they would take, and the artifacts they would create to demonstrate their knowledge and their thinking, they can do great things. More importantly, they can see themselves in the world around them – not as passive, and not as powerless, but as active agents in their world, able to take on difficult questions and hard challenges and to seek out answers that are better than the ones that we have come up with ourselves.

This is how working on becoming bigger thinkers is the intellectual equivalent of “getting our hands in the dirt.” It is understanding that all content that we teach and school is to serve the larger purpose of helping kids become bigger thinkers. And it is understanding that we can’t simply tell students, “this will be good for you someday.” Rather kids have to be able to see the utility of what they learn because of the work that they do to synthesize and analyze and create every day with teachers, and it is incumbent upon us as educators to help students realize the agency they have in the larger world.

This is why experiences like senior capstones, allowing students to engage in year-long inquiry projects of their own design, that culminate in artifacts and performances and activism are so important. It is why we must allow students to see their work in the larger world, not just in our classrooms. It is why the stories they write should be read to others, why the films they create should be shown in our communities, why the research they do should be read by other expert voices, why they must engage in scientific field work that is shared.

Critical thinking can — and must — be done through critical doing.

The old utility promise of school was that we could tell the kids that doing well in school was a pathway to success later in life, and even if school didn’t always seem relevant or important, the lessons that were being taught would reveal their value some day. That promise has faded. Today the utility of school is simply this — the challenges students face in the world today will only be met by those who can observe, inquire, analyze, empathize and take thoughtful action.

We have an obligation to allow our students to experience how the intersection of head, heart, and hands can help them to thrive in a modern world. It will help them to be the fully actualized citizens who can tackle the challenges that we face in an evermore complex world.

For twenty years, we have said that four years at SLA should help kids become more thoughtful, wise, passionate and kind. We have always tried to live up to that as our northstar, and more than ever, those words must be more than platitudes, they must live in our pedagogy every day.

Two Important Notes:

• EduCon 2026 is open for registration! EduCon is SLA’s educational innovation conference where hundreds of educators come from all the country to spend three days talking and thinking about how we can make schools more modern and authentic for all who we serve. EduCon 2026 will be January 30th through February 1st at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA. This year’s theme is Intentionality. Join us!
• Give a listen to Re:Building School 2.0 — the podcast where Zac Chase and I take apart a different chapter of our book Building School 2.0 every week.