Why we Strive!

To save our children

An old colleague sent me a message a few days ago and in it he made the comment that in the US in June last year the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention released its Youth Risk Behaviour Survey data for 2015 which revealed that 8.6% of high school students had attempted suicide at least once in the previous twelve months.

That amounts to more than one million US high school students attempting suicide each year.

That is an almost unimaginable amount of suffering and not at all normal for young humans to behave that way.

It highlights the urgency to reorient our societies and our education systems towards human well-being and healthy growth and away from what is, literally, killing our children.

We know that the education system that creates two mind states, that focuses on conscious and unconscious (rote) memorisation and procedural repetition disconnected from any meaningful purpose has reached its sell-by-date. Everywhere, educators are struggling to make the necessary changes.

I wonder what it would take to speed things up and reach that critical mass where, suddenly almost, momentum grows exponentially and the change is in free-fall, what to do is so obvious that it is happening everywhere.

We are not there yet but we are much closer than we were five years ago and we will be ever so much closer in another five years.

We just have to keep the faith and keep moving ahead.