As a French educator and a toddler mom, I’ve been asking
myself an uncomfortable question: are we preparing our
children for the future – or simply preparing them to fit into
today’s systems?
Are We Raising Children for the
Future… or for the Past?
The past few weeks have been noisy.
Not toddler-has-found-a-marker-and-a-white-wall noisy (although that’s a
different kind of national emergency in my house). I mean the kind of
noisy where every news notification arrives with another protest,
another policy change or another debate about education. As a French
educator, watching conversations around removing French from
students’ curricula felt deeply personal. As a mother, it felt unsettling.
Somewhere between government policies, curriculum revisions and
political debates, I found myself looking at my toddler—who currently
believes socks are optional, spoons are drumsticks and cardboard
boxes are luxury real estate—and wondering: What kind of future are
we actually preparing her for?
Not which textbook she’ll carry. Not which language she’ll eventually
learn. But whether she’ll grow up believing she gets to choose.
We love telling children they can become anything they want. Doctor.
Artist. Entrepreneur. Marine biologist. Content creator. Princess
Dinosaur. (The last one seems surprisingly achievable if you’re under
five.) Yet somewhere between kindergarten and adulthood, that
sentence quietly acquires an invisible footnote: You can become
anything… subject to terms and conditions. And lately, those terms seem to
change every few years.
The irony is that while adults are busy arguing over what children should
learn, children themselves are busy learning things nobody taught them.
Give a four-year-old a cardboard box and they’ll build a spaceship. Give
an adult the same box and they’ll ask where to recycle it.
Having spent years teaching children, I can confidently say they are
gloriously difficult to standardise. The quiet child who barely says a
word in class suddenly writes the most beautiful story. The one who
struggles through grammar effortlessly switches between three
languages at home. The child who can’t sit through ten minutes of
maths somehow spends two hours constructing a Lego city complete
with traffic management that’s probably more efficient than most Indian
roads.
Children are wonderfully inconvenient that way. They stubbornly refuse
to fit neatly into boxes.
Which is unfortunate.
Because adults seem rather obsessed with manufacturing them.
As parents, I sometimes think we’ve confused preparing children for the
future with preparing them for next Tuesday’s test. We optimise for
marks, then admissions, then degrees and finally jobs—all while
forgetting that by the time today’s toddlers become adults, many of
those jobs may no longer exist. The careers they’ll eventually pursue
probably don’t even have names yet.
So perhaps the question isn’t whether our children should learn French.
Or coding. Or AI. Or robotics. Those are all wonderful things. The real
question is whether we’re raising children who know how to learn long
after someone stops teaching them. Can they ask uncomfortable
questions? Can they disagree without becoming disagreeable? Can they
change their minds when presented with better ideas? Can they create
instead of merely consume? Can they remain curious when the world
insists on certainty?
Because curiosity has a rather rebellious habit.
It refuses to stay inside a syllabus.
As a mother, that’s oddly reassuring. I cannot control government
decisions. I cannot rewrite educational policy. I cannot predict which
subjects will survive the next reform. But I can decide what learning
looks like inside my home. I can let my daughter make spectacular
messes in pursuit of tiny discoveries. I can allow boredom instead of
filling every minute with structured activities. I can encourage the fiftyseventh “Why?” before breakfast instead of rushing to answer the first. I
can surround her with books, stories, languages, music and people who
think differently from us. Most importantly, I can make sure she knows
that her worth will never be measured by one exam, one subject or one
career.
Maybe that’s how we future-proof our children—not by trying to predict
tomorrow’s world, but by raising humans who can adapt to whichever
version of tomorrow eventually arrives.
Democracies will evolve. Governments will change. Educational policies
will continue to swing like a playground seesaw. But childhood? We only
get one chance at that.
So perhaps the question isn’t whether democracy is failing our students.
Perhaps it’s whether we’re becoming so busy designing the perfect
system that we’re forgetting the beautifully imperfect children it’s
supposed to serve.
After all, children aren’t blank pages waiting for us to write on them.
They’re stories already unfolding.
Our job isn’t to choose the ending.
It’s to make sure they always have the freedom to write it themselves.
