We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the necessity of adapting education to the evolving knowledge and future unknowns.
Margaret Mead highlights the importance of progressive education that goes beyond current knowledge and prepares students for unforeseen challenges and innovations. As society rapidly advances, it is crucial for educational systems to equip children with skills and knowledge that will be relevant in the future, which may not even be known at present.
In practice
In a conference about future educational practices, this quote can be used to emphasize the need for curriculum innovation.
Earth Day is the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, is devoted to the preservation of the harmony in nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space.
Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.
Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.
We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.
EARTH DAY uses one of humanity's great discoveries, the discovery of anniversaries by which, throughout time, human beings have kept their sorrows and their joys, their victories, their revelations and their obligations alive, for re-celebration and re-dedication another year, another decade, another century, another eon.
American society is very like a fish society. . . . Among certain species of fish, the only thing which determines order of dominance is length of time in the fishbowl. The oldest resident picks on the newest resident, and if the newest resident is removed to a new bowl, he, as oldest resident, will pick on the newcomers.
For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers; besides, even the productions that are only addressed to the imagination, raise the reader a little above the gross gratification of appetites, to which the mind has not given a shade of delicacy.
I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them.
What we want... is for students to get more interested in things, more involved in them, more engaged in wanting to know; to have projects that they can get excited about and work on over long periods of time, to be stimulated to find things out on their own.
In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.
The wrong things are predominantly stressed in the schools - things remote from the student's experience and need.
I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression.
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