The purpose of education is to prepare kids for a world that doesn’t exist yet so that when faced with a problem they choose to think instead of remember.

What gives kids confidence is having enough creativity to overcome a challenge. The look on a students’ face when they finally crack something is the best feeling as an educator.

So putting mindfulness to one side for a minute, why do we continue to use rote learning, the regurgitation of facts and tests as barometers of success when as adults these are only really useful things in a pub quiz?

Mindfulness in school is a symptom of a much bigger issue which is the sidelining of creative and engineering based subjects and the commodification of education via (at least in the UK) the introduction of neoliberal ideas like competition which has forced schools to mollycoddle kids through their exams to game the system rather than instilling confidence and creativity in them for life.

By big hope is that AI will make all rote assessment methods invalid and force educators to take the student experience into account and teach and assess on more investigative learning.