It’s amazing how much can change in 30 years. There’s this false belief that that statement hasn’t always been true for humankind, that our species spent centuries at a time with very little change at all. But it used to be that 30 years encapsulated two generations. 30 years meant new rulers, new discoveries, new ideas. They say the Greeks learned to think in 30 years, or something to that effect.

But in the last 30 years, what’s new is that our obsession with new has receded. I keenly remember my own days as a student, where all we saw in our future was strife. Around the world, we had gained an awareness of all the crushing mistakes we’d made, but no motivation to make them right. Though we lived longer than at any time previous, our lifespans were still too short to make a difference for ourselves, our minds too narrow to live for a future we couldn’t comprehend.

There’s a power in time that we often forget about. When we live to witness new perspectives, philosophies, and ideals, we are only ever 30 years away from those becoming THE predominant beliefs of our world. We held a lot of blame towards the generations that came before us, for not considering–and then actively ignoring–the consequences of their actions. 30 years later, and WE are that generation, and those that follow us have as much hope as they do anger.

Somewhere in the last 30 years (I know not where) we as a species came to an incredible conclusion: that we had all the means necessary to live happy healthy lives RIGHT NOW. The chief resistors to the great social changes we had for so long envisioned just… disappeared, dropping dead one by one until in their place stood those who realized their immeasurable wealth could be leveraged and redistributed for the benefit of all. The all-consuming race to accumulate wealth before our demise was alleviated because enough people realized that they didn’t need all that much to do the things they wanted to do, and lived happily enough to convince others that this was a universal concept. The exponential rate of technological increase slowed once people realized they didn’t need to capture institutional investors’ hearts to make their own sing, and for the first time, we decided to be content with what we had. This by no means our world has ground to a halt. There are ongoing developments in the fields of entertainment, medicine, and academia (to name a few) but these are driven by a desire for collective wellbeing more than anything else.

So how do we teach? Well, even in this perfect world, our system is not perfect. The early grades of a students’ journey look much like they did 30 years ago: a collection of students in a single classroom, with one–or sometimes two–teachers to fill them in on all the fundamental forces they will observe in their lifetimes. Once they hit adolescence, they begin to gain more freedom. There are established tracks that follow different lines and subjects of thinking, but students are also able to diverge from these, and are connected to the resources they need to further their learning. Teachers still exist at the middle- and high-school levels, but they spend much less time teaching in front of entire classes. They predominantly spend their time running workshops, lectures, and other activities that students may choose to (or occasionally, required) to attend. They are also available to students who need guidance, another perspective, or more insight into a particular subject. In this way, today’s teachers are tutors, mentors, guides, and almost never experts.

Universities have been completely reimagined, though traditional forms still exist in rare cases. They are open to the public at no cost, and can accomodate greater numbers of learners by distributing them among inquiry projects, online and AI-driven learning opportunities, seminars, workshops, etc. Undergraduate degrees are much shorter, and always include some amount of time working in public wellness fields (like agriculture). Students feel a mere fraction of the pressure they used to, because we don’t expect students to know at 18 years old exactly what they want to do for the rest of their lives, and what they need to know to do it. They are free to pursue the knowledge they need to be happy and fulfilled at any given time, because they can always return to learn more if and when they feel like it.

There are flaws with this, as with everything, but what strikes me is that these people are not afraid to make mistakes. They lived through a time period where the prevailing thought was “things are as bad as they could possibly be” and this bestowed the courage to try things people were too scared to try. It’s a terrific shame that all this grew from feeling like we had nothing to lose, but we got here, and words like “climate crisis” and “social injustice” will soon be footnotes in histories that students may never read. Yet somehow, we can be sure that every young person will learn from those mistakes. We’re on a good track, here’s to the next 30 years.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash