NEW EPISODE OF THE 180 PODCAST
Listen: Jeff Duncan-Andrade: The Purpose of Education Should Be Youth Wellness
"When you find the tenacity and the will to show up to school in a society that teaches you to hate yourself for the color of your skin and the texture of your hair, the language that your parents speak, the neighborhood that you come from, and you still show up? How do we not have institutions that see that as the most important ingredient for intellectual development?"
— Jeff Duncan-Andrade, Professor of Latina/o Studies and Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University
Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade has a way of asking questions about the American public school system that are as precise as they are provocative. One of his questions: “Why do we take children by law from their families at age six for 13 consecutive years for eight hours a day?”
The response, he says, should be youth wellness.
Every school, he says, “should make a promise to every family that when you drop your child off to us in the morning and turn your back and walk away, our promise to you is that when you come back and pick them up your child will be more well than when you dropped them off.”
He knows that’s impossible for every child every day. But the point for Dr. Duncan-Andrade is that by simply making that promise, our schools have the chance to own it, apologize, and make it right. And while the goal of wellness might be simple, his remedy to reach it is not: A complete rethink and rebuild of public education, one built through something he calls “community responsiveness.”
Listen to previous episodes of The 180:
- Zaretta Hammond: How Teachers Can Become Personal Trainers of Cognitive Development
- Zaretta Hammond: What is Culturally-Responsive Teaching?
- Dan Cogan-Drew: Helping Students Become Agents of Their Own Learning
The 180 Podcast explores how to transform 21st century education using 21st century science with leading voices in American education, health, and child development.
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