The need to educate and encourage young people to change the world is even greater now. The challenges humanity faces are greater than they were in the 1950s when adults like me were young. Those challenges include global warming, gun violence, drug addiction, hunger, income inequality, inhumanity and conflict in many countries that is prompting an immigration crisis.
Making addressing these problems even more challenging is that we have an aging population in many countries. And yet, as John Gardner pointed out in Self- Renewal, “We have designed our society in such a way that most of the possibilities open to the young today are either bookish or frivolous.” It’s time to change that design.
Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka, an organization that supports the work of 3,500 social entrepreneurs in countries around the world, says that the major challenge of our time is to make everyone a changemaker and to accomplish that we must start with our young.
To change the world we need to empower young people to become agents of change, not sometime in the future, but right now. That must become the mission of schools and of parents.
Here are some suggestions for teachers and parents about how to encourage young people to become changemakers
- Begin by clicking on the hyperlink above and seeing Bill Drayton’s suggestions for doing this.
- Have your kids (if you are a parent) or students (if you are a teacher) read books like Young Enough to Change the World so they see the many ways they may change the world. This is a link to the book’s chapter summaries http://michaelrconnollyjr.weebly.com/table-of-contents-young-enough-to-change-the-world.html
- Show students some videos of young people who are positive agents of change. Here are two from Steve Hartman’s On the Road.
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/edwin-pratt-learning-center-honoring-a-civil-rights-leader-open-thanks-to-an-11-year-old-activist-sarah-haycox/
- https://www.cbsnews.com/video/at-one-high-school-no-one-eats-lunch-alone/