As a teacher, I always approached parent-teacher conferences with a certain amount of trepidation: how was I, in the short span of 10 minutes that I was allotted (and in any given year, I would have been teaching around 120 students, so we had to be pretty ruthless about the timing) going to be able to discuss anything truly insightful with parents about their child’s experience in my class, far less their experience as a whole person?
Students and teachers need the skills to be successful in a fluid, rapidly changing, and ambiguous future.
For students and teachers to be prepared for that future, they need to become self-evolving learners with a growing individual and collective comfort and capacity for change.1
I take it that the aim of education is not to gain more and more detailed knowledge of the world but to understand the world and ourselves in it. If we split the world up in order to gain detailed knowledge of it, at some point we have to put it together again in order to understand it.