Dear global education leader,
Last week’s podcast features Boris Walbaum, founder of Forward College. Like the London Interdisciplinary School and Minerva, which we’ve written and podcasted about before, Forward aims to upend the higher ed model. It offers five academic degrees via London School of Economics and King’s College, complemented by small-group teaching in Lisbon, Paris and then Amsterdam. But that’s only one-third of the degree: another third is focused on personal development via coaching and curricula, and the other third is devoted to building entrepreneurial skills.
Walbaum wants to focus on the development of our multiple intelligences (hello Howard Gardner). “For me, education is an experience,” Walbaum says. “It’s not about teaching, it’s about experiencing — experiencing meaning to understand, to connect, to achieve and to feel. It’s much more than just learning knowledge.”
As a fierce Gen Xer, my inclination is to wonder if students really need to spend a third of their time in college developing themselves. But the world has changed so much in the 200 years since I went to college. There is more anxiety about climate change, inequality, deeply polemical politics, racism, all of which existed but many in my generation conveniently ignored. Young people’s malaise was evident before the pandemic. There’s a reason Laurie Santos’ happiness class at Yale University was the most oversubscribed in the university’s history.
The isolation, disruption and loss Covid-19 has caused has dramatically increased mental health problems. Research published in JAMA Pediatrics shows that the rate of child and adolescent depression and anxiety doubled in the first year of the pandemic. Pooled estimates suggest that one in four youth globally are experiencing clinically elevated depression symptoms, while one in five are experiencing clinically elevated anxiety symptoms. Let me repeat: that’s a doubling of pre-pandemic rates.
Focusing on self-awareness, self-regulation and self-care is not indulgent: it’s a moral imperative. Investing time and academic resources on thoughtful career development does not mean abandoning the pursuit of knowledge and replacing it with a shallow just jobs-orientation: it is necessary in a world where a lot of anxiety comes from a fast-changing, highly competitive job market. That’s why I am all for the newfound attention on social and emotional learning in K-12 and in higher ed. Understanding the link between feeling well and being able to learn well has never been so crystal clear.
A new paper, sent to me by Ed Hidalgo, chief innovation officer at Cajon Valley Union School District makes the interesting case that we should think of social and emotional learning (SEL) and career development in the same continuum. Writing in the British Journal of Guidance and Counseling, Dr. Kim Howard argues:
“While SEL models focus on developing an academic self-concept, career development models focus on developing a vocational identity. These two concepts are better, and more accurately, conceptualized as the same process, as academic development is the foundation of later career development. When understood and presented in that way, students learn to see current school-based learning as something that is not separate from their future life in the world of work, but rather as the foundation for their future.”
These are not discrete issues but interwoven. We discover who we are, how we think, we build knowledge to make that thinking and being more sophisticated, and we contemplate how that being and thinking will fit into the world.
We should care about students’ emotional wellbeing because they are humans. We should also care about it because it’s a prerequisite for learning. As Marc Brackett, founding director of Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence writes in his book Permission to Feel, “The research is clear: emotions determine whether academic content will be processed deeply and remembered.”
Walbaum and other innovators who are elevating social and emotional learning and career development alongside academic learning, are gambling that students today need something very different. It’s a bet worth making.
Stay curious,
Jenny
🎙 LISTEN FURTHER: BORIS WALBAUM, FOUNDER & CEO, FORWARD COLLEGE
