Why Is the Contemporary Education Framework Important in Our Times?

Contemporary Education’s mission is to transform education to empower students to make meaningful decisions in their lives, considering how they make choices about own health, how they develop their social relationships with others and how they impact the natural world around them. 

One of the biggest challenges we face in the world today is complacency and acceptance of things the way that they are.  We go about our daily lives without much reflection about what we doing, how we are doing it and why we are doing it.  The most mundane actions in our everyday lives impact and are impacted by the world around us  - our actions and practices are based on concepts and theories and those concepts and theories are situated in our actions and practices, yet we are not always aware of these connections.  This lack of conscious awareness, deliberation and intentionality in our decisions can lead to multiple problems affecting our health, social justice and peace and environmental sustainability - the 3 core values of Contemporary Education, which can be thought about as within 3 dimensions to our decision making: 

1.    Ourselves: Are we making healthy decisions in our lives?  Healthy, in terms of physical health, mental health and spiritual health.  We can see that around the world there are serious crises involving all of these aspects of health.  This should be a key focal point in education - how can we empower students with knowledge for them to make meaningful decisions in their lives involving their physical, mental and spiritual health? 

2.    Others: Are we building families, communities and societies that are just and peaceful?  Are we making decisions for action in our lives that are aligned, or coherent, with what we claim to believe, englobing the wide array of factors involved in the choices we make?

3.    World: How do my actions and the actions of those around me impact the ecosystem that I am apart of? There are so many everyday actions that we take that have far reaching harmful effects on our environment, yet they are normalized to such an extent that we don’t often pay any attention to them. 

The Contemporary Education Framework is not only about individual change, it is about changing schools in order to change society.  If we want societies that are more environmental sustainable, healthy, just and peaceful, we must change schools such that these are their fundamental values.