Stop Doubting, Keep Building
Teachers’ Systems-Critical Optimism for Today’s Students is Our Only Hope
Comments by educators claiming students these days are less/more X than they used to be are more often about educators’ professional and/or personal frustrations, disappointments, and development than they are an accurate reflection of how students are these days.
Our students are excellent. Our students face multi-level, interlocking obstacles systematized, institutionalized, and normalized by previous generations. Our students are themselves.
Deficit-based comparisons of our students to idealized former students do not do justice to current or past students. It’s okay, reasonable even, for teachers to feel frustration and disappointment, at times. It’s never okay to take that out on our students. When we feel down, we must take care of ourselves. If we are feeling down on our students, let us try to reconnect to how we felt about those idealized past students. Certainly, students change, but some of the change in the way we feel about the way things are these day is about us teachers more than it is about our students.
Nearly everything I experience, and nearly all the data I’m privy to, suggest the people who are students today, whether they’re 4 or 44 or 104, are the group of students in modern history most capable of addressing the emergencies of climate, capital, White supremacy, cis-hetero patriarchy, ableism, colonialism, and nationalism. To suggest otherwise, to suggest some other past group of students were more likely than the current group of students to change the world, is the ultimate former of pessimism, because no past group of students has sufficiently addressed these emergencies.
Today’s students have what it takes. We must only stop doubting them and redouble our efforts to construct the just systems in which they actualize their potential.
