What if American colleges saw Ukraine as homework?
What if the education system at large was designed to teach by solving problems and to learn by doing good?
What if, by way of example, our best-known institutions chose to measure themselves by how many Ukrainians they can keep warm over the next few months? Could the B-School at Harvard, the D-School at Stanford, and the labs at MIT help fend off this grim winter in Ukraine? For one person in Kyiv? For 1% of the Ukrainian population?
Ten years ago, when Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast of America, schools in New Jersey became community centers and bases of operations. Students organized to knock on doors, check in on neighbors, and deliver supplies. No bells and no tests, just meaningful work.
Why isn’t making and helping and serving what school is always about? Not because students always need to be in crisis mode, but because there is so much to learn by addressing real problems, especially now that the world has become so connected that a hurricane anywhere is a hurricane everywhere. (Think Ukraine doesn't matter to you or your kids? Check your energy bill.)
What would an institution need to invent and engineer and solve logistically to keep a few people warm in Ukraine? What would everyone learn about priorities and teamwork along the way? If ensuring a few people in Ukraine were kept warm was the chief work on campus this term, wouldn't everyone get better at taking on such problems next term? Be better able to help a few people in Ethiopia or Iran or China? Or America?
Assembly line schools move kids along until they can be purchased by a college or an employer. The pedagogy keeps everyone inside the bubble of the academic. Workshop schools would figure out how to make something that will help the world as it is and builds pedagogy around that.
Yes, Vladimir Putin is a psychopath, and yes fear of a nuclear exchange prevents a more straightforward response from Europe and America. Evil often triumphs and we will not slip easily from the handcuffs of a military-industrial complex and the foreign policy it forged.
But all over the world we demand millions of creative students serve self-advancement rather than a less brutal winter for their neighbors. That is not how school should work in the global village.