国产成人综合久久免费导航

Dear Keystonians, 

Wishing you and your families a peaceful Qing Ming festival! This ancient festival is the start of the Qing Ming Solar term—clear and bright! This is a time to pay respects to those who came before us, to honor our ancestors.? 

It is also a perfect time to reflect on what kind of ancestors we want to be. What do we hope that we are known for long after we are gone? What will be the legacy of our short lives on this beautiful planet? What are our individual and collective acts that will make things better for those who come after us? 

I have written before in this space about the idea of “ancestors in training”. Our responsibility as a school is to create learning environments that prepare our students to be good ancestors—good stewards of their communities, and people who respect the privilege they are given, and know the responsibility that comes with it. This attention to intergenerational continuity and responsibility is grounding and inspiring. 

Last weekend, I heard a very important point of view about how we view intergenerational responsibility that shifted my thinking a little bit on this important topic. At an educational forum, a colleague from another school shared his strong point of view that it is wrong for us to say to our young people: “Previous generations have failed; you need to step up to fix it all.”? 

As a call to urgency around all the important issues facing our planet (as summarized in the UN Sustainable Development Goals), and the need for education to transform to meet the needs of our planet, we often hear the idea that the young people must step up to solve the problems where previous generations have failed. 

This colleague had really strong feelings about exactly how this is communicated. He said that it is wrong to continue to insist that the young people have responsibility to “fix” what is broken by those who came before them. He made the point that education must be a hopeful and joyful endeavor and that this “doom and gloom” approach inhibits a hopeful and joyful learning environment. He shared that while students need to be aware of the current realities, yoking them to the failures of those who came before them can be quite limiting. The most compelling reason for this, he argued, was that tying students to the past limits their thinking about possible futures.? 

Pessimism, he argued, stunts creativity. And creativity is exactly what the world needs most of! 

This shifted my thinking. He’s right. It is a small shift, but a meaningful one—from pessimistic to hopeful, from a fixed mindset to a growth one, and from narrow thinking to broad, creative problem solving and solution finding. 

This festival this week is about those who came before us and honoring them. They did what they could in their lifetimes to allow us to be here doing what we are doing in ours. There is so much joy, and hope and gratitude in the endless possibilities ahead for the next generation. 

Wishing you and yours a peaceful festival! 

Emily