International Youth Day

Did you know that according to the U.N. today is International Youth Day? A day where we celebrate young people, youth-led organizations, governments and others who are all working together to transform education and help lift up our youth. After all, they are our future.

Currently there are 1.8 BILLION young people between the ages of 10 to 24 across the world. This is currently the largest youth population ever recorded.

International Youth day was originally created in 1999 by the UN General Assembly and is a way to annually celebrate the role of young women and men as partners in change and is an opportunity to raise awareness of challenges and problems faced by our youth. This year's theme is transforming education.

Transforming education attempts to highlights efforts to make education more inclusive and accessible for all youth. Did you know that children between the ages of 6 to 14 lack basic reading and math skills? It is no surprise that high quality education plays a crucial role in youth development, and overall comprehensive youth development benefits society at large.

So why should we transform our education? For one, it's important to recognize that each community will have different priorities and assets, so it's important to collaborate with educators and find strategies to support the whole child. Meet them within their context. What is important to someone in Alberta, Canada may look different to someone in Tokyo, Japan. More than this, inclusive education includes teaching our kids concepts such as social awareness, self-management, efficacy, a growth mindset, and mindfulness.

So how do we create this? It's been suggested that there are 3 key components to transforming education

1. Vision: Help educators develop values in their students to guide them towards creating a vision of a better world for themselves and others. Guide our youth to look at the future
2. Disruption: Think back 10 or 20 years ago. Did we have all the gadgets we have now? Inventions have led us to do things we could have never imagined doing when we were kids. While this is exciting, it also causes many of us discomfort. This is just not an area we have a lot of expertise on, unless you are someone who takes a keen interest in it. But this is all part of the process. In order to transform eduction we need to accept that its going to get uncomfortable, messy, and annoying. But this pushes us out of our comfort zones and forces us to see what is possible.
3. The ability to appeal to base emotions: If an idea has no relevance to the people we are speaking to, it's not going to stick. What is it about your idea that is going to matter to these youth? What is going to make them excited about this conversation. Too often do we leave them out of this conversation, when really it is ultimately about them. 
4. Scalability: To transform education it needs to work on multiple levels. It needs to work individually, within a classroom, at a school, in a district, in a community, and so forth. In addition, it should also be relevant across cultures. We want to be able to ave anyone in the world understand the basic philosophies and want to adopt them with no loss to the purpose or effectiveness. Make it globally relevant! We have youth across the world, don't they all deserve a high quality education? While it may not look the exact same in terms of concepts, there are many values that do cross cross-culturally. 
5. Creative: Creativity is what captures people. An idea has to be appealing- draws people in. It should look good in print and practice. This is one way we can get people excited
6. Endurance: Any idea should be built to last. We need ideas that have a longer shelf life than just a few years. We want something that people will be studying, following, and perfecting for years. Proper transformation takes time and is at its best when it happens gradually. 

Transforming education for youth will take time and a lot of teams coming together. It will involve collaboration from not only different sectors of our community, but it also involve collaboration with the youth it is impacting. This is part of their livelihood and they deserve to have some say in it.

Join us this week as we explore what YEG has to offer with their own policies in transforming education and find out how you can get involved!

YWC

Resources
UN Youth Day
Transforming Education
6 Ways to Transform Ed.