Thriving takes both labor and leisure. It takes curiosity. An education system that segregates labor and leisure and that removes curiosity from our essential needs drives and sustains inequity and must be challenged.

The extinction of curiosity stifles our imaginations, paralyzing our ability to author better futures.

We take the profound power of conjuring new expressions, interpretations, and constructed worlds for granted.

Are we so numb to when life is our teacher that we can only recognize learning when it has been tagged, packaged, evaluated, and offered as currency?

How we think about learning, cohesion, time, youth, aliveness, nature, and value is being upended. The legacy frameworks that have defined these core human conditions are giving way to new, emerging narratives.

The blueprints of the past are artifacts of the thinking that created the very problems we seek to confront. We need to discard these outdated models that no longer serve us.

For such a large economy, it is oddly unsure of its purpose—even in conflict with itself. As is the case with so many of our inherited legacies, we participate in this enormous social system yet remain unfamiliar with its history, naive to the conflicting values at play, and disengaged from the cultural battle for its future.

What results is a national education system that deepens the economic class divide and makes curiosity available to those who have position, wealth, and the luxury of time without the burden of labor.

For hooks and Freire, the classroom is a mirror of the world. So, when the world struggles with sexism, racism, and the many types of prejudice shaping social life, our education system struggles with them as well. The space for learning can be one of oppression, or one of liberation.