DO YOU WANT TO PREPARE YOUR CHILDREN FOR THE FUTURE? TEACH THEM TO BE HUMAN

If our kids are under pressure to succeed, we're doing them no good.

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We want our children to be well prepared for the future. Perhaps we fear our children's future and imagine it as a very competitive world, in which machines will have beaten human beings… Perhaps this obsession with preparing them well for this future world is putting too much pressure on our shoulders and on our children.

As parents in a very competitive world, constantly seek to give our children a comparative advantage. We want to equip our children with every possible skill to be successful in the 21st century.  However, this mission is causing more harm than we realise.

Our children are growing up under pressure. Enthusiasm has been replaced by anxiety, curiosity has been eclipsed by disinterest, and the joy of learning is losing out to competitiveness. And all of this is slowly diminishing our children's abilities to be tolerant and human. And now, with the imminent march of the machines, we are racing against the clock to ensure that our children grow up to be intelligent, independent and creative thinkers. We are desperately looking for a secret recipe that will allow us to get along with robots and technology, but being human has always been the solution. And we are utterly failing to instil this quality in our kids.

In our day, good grades and a good graduate degree ensured a good career and a good life. But today's world needs a new kind of literacy: emotional literacy. Emotional intelligence and social skills are the keys to growing well in the 21st century.

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Employers are searching for individuals with great communication and cognitive abilities who can work collaboratively and with others.  But that is not all. They also want people with strong emotional skills who can understand what customers are feeling and can build a lasting relationship with them.

Is it really possible to teach values ​​such as compassion and empathy, especially to self-absorbed people like the “selfie generation”? Of course, empathy is a complex concept that we rarely see applied in schools. But it is possible to instill values ​​such as empathy and benevolence.

According to psychologist Michele Borba, “  Empathy is a quality that can be taught  —indeed, it must be taught by parents, educators, and those in the child's community. And what's more, it's a talent that children can cultivate and improve, like riding a bicycle or learning a foreign language.” Educators and social entrepreneurs around the world who integrate emotional learning into their respective ecosystems attest to the benefits of in-class engagement and learning outcomes.

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In our school we are becoming more and more diverse, bringing together students from various socioeconomic backgrounds and with varying degrees of social and emotional literacy, all of which foster an encouraging learning environment.

As schools around the world use movement and expression through dance to teach social-emotional skills, programs like Roots of Empathy or Turning Course for Kids help build positive relationships.

Roots of Empathy teaches children to be kinder human beings. This educational program, which was founded in 1996 by Mary Gordon, an advocate for children's rights and education specialist, relies on the bonds between a child and parent to foster children's empathy and emotional literacy.

Turnaround for Children plays an important role in shaping the lives of children, especially those who witness violence or deprivation. With this program, traumatized children have access to therapy and support to help them build trusting relationships. Teachers are provided with a set of practices that help them promote positive relationships between adults and children.

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Organizations and researchers are making every effort to incorporate the emotional component into regular learning. Stand ford University's Empathy at Scale program uses virtual reality to put students in the shoes of other people. This program tries to promote empathy towards people with disabilities, other age groups, other skin colors, and different economic contexts.

And this is what being human is about. So as we prepare for the march of the machines,  we have to arm our children to the teeth with the skills like trust, tolerance, compassion… Because these are the fruitful skills for the future that will help us beat the robots, deficient emotional”.