Really Good Schools by James Tooley

Author:James Tooley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent Institute
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Knowledge

I am not alone in having thoughts, from time to time, about the end of the world, what form it might take, and whether one could survive it. Sometimes I find myself browsing YouTube using keywords like “end of the world,” “last days,” and “apocalypse.” Judging by the amount of material out there, I know I’m not the only one. For decades, there have been many films featuring post-apocalyptic worlds, from the 1950s’ The Day the Earth Stood Still and The War of the Worlds through to this century’s The Day after Tomorrow, The Road, and 10 Cloverfield Lane. Some of these are based on novels, and there are many more novels not made into films. There are numerous postapocalyptic video games, including the Fallout series, Darksiders, and Metro 2023.

Of course, it goes back much further than these recent works of fiction. Where does the word apocalypse come from? It’s the original Greek name for the end-of-the-world story incorporated as the last book of the Christian Bible, translated into English as “Revelation.”5 The other “religions of the book” have their own end-of-the-world stories too. In Islam, the Great Judgment and the Great Resurrection are described in the Quran, and the Great Tribulation in the Hadith. Judaism, of course, has its end-of-days transition from the old to the new era, when the Messiah will come.

Clearly, apocalypses strike a deep chord in the human psyche. Apocalypses connect with our deep angst about our place in the universe. They connect with fears about the harm we are doing to our planet, to each other, and to ourselves. They highlight terror about what lies outside of humanity’s control. But apocalypses also connect with hope, about what might be achieved afterward, once so much of what is wrong with humanity has been wiped clean. They can nurture our hopes as to how we would be able to rise above adversity to become a hero in the strange, new postapocalyptic world.

Young people find these apocalyptic scenarios especially stimulating, as evidenced by the market for films, novels, and computer games aimed at young people. One writer explained it as follows: postapocalyptic novels are “essentially heroes’ journeys … set in an imagined future world.” When something catastrophic happens, “the teenage protagonist is catapulted out of their normal existence into the unknown.” Their journey begins, along which they are tested, and as they survive these tests, they realize their destiny to change the world: “the stakes are high. … It’s heady stuff, far removed from the routine of everyday life.”6

Young people are particularly interested in the hopes and fears excited by postapocalyptic scenarios. This idea set me thinking. Could the idea of apocalypse and postapocalyptic survival somehow be incorporated into the end point of the curriculum, framing children’s motivation to engage with it?

An end point must satisfy three criteria: First, it must provide motivation for children and young people to learn the content. Second, it must also go some way itself to provide a justification for the content to be learned.

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