Enjoying talk to packed house at the Future of Our Children: Identifying the Issues Impacting Children sponsored by The George Foundation, The Fort Bend Chamber of Commerce & Children at Risk, and held at the Texas Safari Ranch. I gave my talk on the Future of Youth Happiness study we did a few years ago for MTV. As I was prepping the talk, I heard a point about how several nations are getting ahead of the US in large part because they are spending more time in the classroom. The point was they were putting more time into learning. Agreed! But, as I was thinking about what I learned during the MTV work, it wasn’t adding up. My dissonance came from the idea that more time in the classroom is the solution. More time yes, but in the classroom? No. One thing we can be pretty sure about is that confining today’s and tomorrow’s kids into classrooms for eight hours a day year round is going to make schools seem more like prisons than places to learn. A key challenge for educators will be coming up with ways to bring learning outside the traditional classroom, to wherever it makes the most sense to take place. Admittedly, this raises a hornet’s nest of issues, but clearly the educated person of tomorrow will be much better served by more hands-on field experience type learning than sitting in classrooms listening to lectures. Andy Hines
About Andy HinesAndy Hines
Lecturer/Executive-in-Residence, University of Houston Futures Studies
Andy Hines is Lecturer and Executive-in-Residence at the University of Houston’s Graduate Program in Futures Studies, bringing together the experience he earned as an organizational, consulting, and academic futurist. He co-founded and is currently on the Board of the Association of Professional Futurists, and has co-authored three books -- Thinking About the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight (Social Technologies, 2007),” 2025: Science and Technology Reshapes US and Global Society (Oak Hill, 1997) and Managing Your Future as an Association (ASAE, 1994). He has also authored dozens of articles, speeches, and workshops, including the 2003 Emerald Literati Awards' Outstanding Paper accolade for best article published in Foresight for “An Audit for Organizational Futurists” and the 2008 award for “Scenarios: The State of the Art.” In the last year, he has appeared on several radio and television programs, including KRIV-26 News talking about the future of libraries and the CBS “Early Show,” to talk about an MTV-commissioned study: “The Future of the Youth Happiness.”
