We Should Want to Learn from Our Students

Our content knowledge may no longer be relevant and we are gifting them a challenging world. They may have more to offer us than we have to offer them.

We've long operated under the assumption that knowledge and wisdom flow predominantly from elders to youth. We position ourselves as teachers, ready to impart our hard-earned expertise to the next generation. However, as technological advancements accelerate and traditional careers transform, we must question whether our accumulated knowledge retains its relevance.

The traditional model of education, where elders transfer "sacred" professional knowledge to students, is increasingly inadequate. Much of what we learned in school or mastered in our careers may soon become obsolete. Yet this doesn't diminish our value as mentors. Instead, it invites us to shift our focus toward sharing timeless wisdom: the life lessons, relationship skills, and communication strategies that remain valuable regardless of technological change.

Simultaneously, we must recognize that today's youth navigate a world fundamentally different from the one we experienced. Unlike older generations who witnessed the transition to digital technologies, young people have never known a world without smartphones, social media, and constant connectivity. This shapes how they process information, form relationships, and understand themselves in profound ways. The boundaries between online and offline existence are fluid or nonexistent for them. Their identities form across physical and virtual realms simultaneously, creating a more complex understanding of self than previous generations experienced.

Many young people maintain ongoing conversations across multiple platforms throughout their day—shifting seamlessly between text messages, social media comments, video calls, and collaborative documents. They continuously track conversation threads across these different contexts while simultaneously engaging with their physical environment, developing a unique form of distributed attention that allows them to remain responsive across multiple social contexts simultaneously.

As a result, their perspectives on identity, community, and purpose are shaped by forces we're still trying to comprehend. They intuitively, whether they realize it or not, understand digital spaces, collaborative networks, and the cross-pollination of ideas in ways many elders struggle to grasp.

Young people today also approach identity formation with remarkable flexibility. They're more likely to see identities as fluid, contextual, and constantly evolving rather than fixed. This extends to gender, sexuality, cultural affiliations, and professional aspirations. This generation more readily embraces the idea that people contain multitudes—that one can simultaneously hold seemingly contradictory interests, beliefs, or aspects of identity. “Older” — literally 70+ year old white men —people cannot understand the idea of fluid identities and are fighting to preserve previous ones, trying to return to an old world that no longer exists that they grew up in.

This is magnified by the fact that their concept of community transcends physical proximity. Meaningful connections form around shared interests, values, or experiences rather than geographic coincidence. A young person may feel deeper kinship with an online community of creators or activists around the the world than with neighbors or classmates. Many youth have developed the cognitive ability to maintain awareness across multiple information streams simultaneously—a skill that could be valuable in increasingly complex professional environments.

Study groups on platforms like Discord have evolved beyond simple note-sharing into dynamic learning ecosystems where students collectively tackle complex problems. A calculus concept that confuses one student might be clarified through multiple explanations from peers across different time zones, each bringing their unique perspective until understanding emerges from the network rather than from a single authoritative source.

These distributed communities allow for unprecedented cross-pollination of ideas across traditional boundaries. Young people routinely engage with perspectives from different cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, and life experiences through digital networks, developing a more global consciousness. “Older” people cannot understand that and we now see a revolt of the elders against distributed communities, as the “adults in the room” want a return to local physical communities and values that our students don’t actually live in.

Many young people approach work, education, and civic participation with a stronger expectation of alignment with personal values. They're less willing to compartmentalize their ethics from their professional lives or accept institutional structures without questioning their purpose. We can see this in the youth-led revolt against part of “big law’s” capitulation to the administration.

Today's youth also intuitively understand collaborative knowledge creation. They've grown up with wikis, open-source projects, and crowdsourced information. Their learning often happens through participatory communities rather than hierarchical instruction and reading. While older generations sometimes misinterpret these skills as shortened attention spans, they might better be understood as adaptive responses to information environments that reward different cognitive strengths than traditional education valued. And they aren’t going to allow their learning to be limited by adults.

Having witnessed rapid technological disruption and economic uncertainty, many young people approach career development with fewer assumptions about stability. They anticipate needing to reinvent themselves multiple times throughout their working lives. They aren’t buying into our “study hard, work hard, get a good job” narrative, as they know that world has ended.

This perspective often makes them more open to entrepreneurship, alternative economic models, and unconventional career paths. They're less likely to measure success through traditional markers of achievement and more likely to prioritize flexibility, purpose, and well-being in their work choices. The knowthat much of what adults want them to learn in school, content that is often shaped by powerful economic and political forces in government, is not especially relevant to them preparing to thrive in a new world (and even the old one)

This generation has also grown up amid accelerating environmental damage, political polarization, a growing concentration of economic and political power, and economic uncertainty. Many have developed a heightened sense of urgency about addressing systemic challenges and are less patient with incremental approaches to change.

In many ways we’ve left them a pretty shitty world — one filled with escalating violence, racism, sexism, growing unemployment, and capitulation to economic, political, and technological power. We rationalize the scarifice of their generation, claiming that pushing through will lead to some future utopia of endless abundance. They’d be very right to tell us to F-off, that they’ll take care of things from here on out.

As adults, we can do better.

Rather than clinging to one-directional knowledge transfer, we need genuine dialogue across generations. Young people possess unique insights that deserve recognition: their fluid approach to identity formation, their comfort with constant adaptation, their understanding of digital communities, and their expectation of purpose-aligned work. They grasp the interconnected nature of global challenges and often approach problem-solving with fewer institutional constraints. They’ll probably leave their children a better world than we are leaving our children.

The path forward requires humility from elders. We must acknowledge that while we can offer wisdom about human nature, resilience, and ethical frameworks, we don't hold all the answers for navigating the future. By creating collaborative learning environments where different generations tackle questions together—"What skills might remain relevant?" "How can we build meaningful connections in changing circumstances?"—we can collectively prepare for a future none of us can fully predict.

This approach transforms education from knowledge transmission to collaborative exploration. It honors elders' life experience while respecting youth's intuitive understanding of emerging realities. Only through this mutual exchange can we develop the adaptability and wisdom necessary for an uncertain future—one where the most valuable skill may be the ability to continuously reimagine what learning itself means.

Hopefully the youth will save us.

Information Processing and Attention

The Future of Work

Understanding these distinctive perspectives isn't just academic—it's essential for meaningful intergenerational dialogue about education, work, and social structures that will serve us all in an uncertain future.