The World is Changing. Education Must Respond.

I was recently expressing frustration to my friend in medical school about the fact that my primary care physicians rarely discuss or consider nutrition.  To me, what we put into our bodies via food is a fundamental component of our health challenges and the solutions.

He didn’t disagree but said, “Jess, there just isn’t enough time.  Med schools have to prioritize other areas of learning.  But many med students do choose to pursue nutrition on their own.”  This is an answer I’ve been hearing a lot lately in education: ‘We do not have enough time or money to teach X, Y or Z.  But some students decide to pursue this learning on their own.‘  ”X, Y and Z” usually share a few things in common.

They are skills or knowledge for which we will see results of in the longterm rather than the short-term.  They are complex and thus require interdisciplinary approaches.  They are difficult to measure.

In a tough economy in a society more focused on “treatment” rather than a vigilant journey into the messy arena of root causes, it is easy to prioritize learning topics that relate to maintaining the status quo, applying short-term bandaids and for which we can easily show measurable results to bosses, funders or the government.  But in rapidly changing world where the very nature of how power is distributed is up for debate annually, it is this very  ”X, Y and Z” that we need our young people, our leaders and our doctors to be equipped with.

Thankfully at least the medical profession is starting to take note.

As Chelsea Conaboy (@cconaboy) writes in a recent Boston Globe article,  “The idea that physician training needs to be overhauled is nothing new. But the revolutionary changes taking place in the American health care system — more people gaining insurance coverage, shifts in how doctors are paid, a growing emphasis on preventive and community-based care, and a driving need to control costs — has put a spotlight on the issue.”

Among the changes Dr. George Thibault of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation proposes is more training in empathy and compassion.  “Students are taught communication skills in the first two years of medical school,” the report said. “However, these skills are not reinforced later, when empathy has been shown to decline.” (Check out the full article here.)

Applied empathy is certainly a skill we talk about a lot at One World Youth Project.  We also talk about the need for cross-cultural communication skills and and ability to make discerning choices.  These seemingly ‘soft skills’ are priorities to employers in a global and in flux economy.   We need people who can handle complication with nuanced, informed approaches.  If we continue to treat these ‘soft skills’ as a luxury then is it the kids who have parents with time, money to spend and access to ‘outside of school’ learning options who will acquire this crucial skill-set while others are left behind.  We will perpetuate the status quo at a time when, as Einstein wrote, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”  Thus the answer ‘But some students decide to pursue this learning on their own’, isn’t an answer at all.  It is not even a bandaid solution.

I was recently had with Daniel LaTorre (@danlatorre) of Project for Public Spaces who spoke of “slow crises”.  Education, he said, was a slow crisis.  We may not feel the devastating effects of a failing education system that does not value ‘global competency’ immediately.  But they are slowing unfolding and seeping into the soil all around us.  It is hard to get people to take action on the slow crises our global society faces because –like the very skills that will help solve them– they are long-term, complex and difficult to wrap our minds around.

Bottom line, whether we want to admit it or not, the world is changing in ways that education must respond to -at every level.   We need an overhaul of what learning areas we value and why.  We have to get our priorities straight.