Imagine creating “A Community of 21st-Century Children,” ready for future challenges like climate change, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and new pandemics. In our democracy, we must include all children in this preparation.
Addressing two critical issues will prepare children for these changes:
- Emotional Intelligence (empathy and teamwork)
- Creativity (flexibility and innovation)
Elementary school offers a traditional developmental environment, where children spend 10,000 hours in a classroom from K-8. This makes it the perfect place to cultivate emotionally intelligent, creative mid-21st-century children.
You might be familiar with “education for confluence” from UC Santa Barbara. This theory focuses on integrating cognition (thinking), affect (feeling), and behavior (action). More importantly, you know of a working model of confluent education developed alongside the theory at UC Santa Barbara.
Emotional intelligence and creativity require the right brain hemisphere, often neglected in traditional teaching. Confluent education integrates the brain’s right and left hemispheres. You decide to teach teachers how to implement a “classroom management system” based on confluent education.
Related: Changing Education in the Future
In these confluent classrooms, children experience a stress-free environment. They feel “at home” in the classroom, making them eager to return to school. This nurturing environment fosters their intrinsic growth and well-being.
Your confluent classroom provides a dual management system for teachers and students. This allows children to take charge of their learning and growth, which feels liberating and engaging.
After a couple of years, something interesting unfolds. Though focused on emotional intelligence and creativity, children’s IQ scores and standardized test performances increase uniformly. Professional statistical analysis projects they will become elite students by grade twelve.
This outcome doesn’t surprise you. You have studied emotional intelligence and creativity for decades. A ten-year implementation of the same confluent classroom management model previously produced these exact results. This occurred before the world recognized the importance of emotional intelligence and creativity for the mid-21st-century.
The bottom line is whole-person development—integrating physical, mental, emotional, social, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual faculties. Appropriate developmental strategies empower learners to take charge of their growth in an engaging, enlightening, and empowering way.
A focus on psychological health aims to produce a more developed average 21st-century citizen, ready for rapid and relentless changes. Psychologically healthy children love learning. Humans are born to learn and grow, evolving into our fullest potential for the benefit of ourselves, our community, and society.
– Robbie Robertson