- What if education’s true purpose was to build hope – not just deliver content?
- A personal classroom story from the 1960s reveals timeless lessons about student agency and relevance.
- Learn why cultivating pathways and agency is essential to countering student disengagement.
- Explore practical steps schools can take to transform “garbage time” into future-shaping learning.
First, A Personal Story
Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with school leaders at conferences in Australia. Amid conversations about disengagement, curriculum changes, and the rapid pace of change generally, I’ve found myself returning again and again to a central idea: education must be about building hope.
Let me start with a personal story – one that I shared in my presentations. It’s about my own experience as a student at intermediate school – back in the 1960s. My experience was a little different to many of the other students at the same school as I had ended up in a streamed class with other students who’d been singled out for their academic potential.
My teacher in form two (year 8) was Mr Brown (not his real name). He was a younger teacher who, it turned out, was a fan of progressive education and ran his classes accordingly. On our first day with him he stood by an empty chalkboard and asked simply; “Well, we’re going to be together in this class for a whole year, what would you like to learn about?” You can imagine the confusion on our faces – and our reluctance to answer at first. What sort of question was that? Surely he was the teacher, and he should have had that all figured out – after all, we were in his class as the empty vessels waiting to be filled just like we had in previous years!
Over the course of the first week with Mr Brown, once we’d overcome our shyness, we’d managed to fill the chalkboard with ideas, group, classify and prioritise them until we eventually reached agreement on what our curriculum should be – and that’s how it was for the year. During the course of that year we experienced lots of changes in the world around us, the change to decimal currency, the Wahine disaster, the strongman mine disaster, and the Inangahua earthquake. Internationally, war was raging in Vietnam causing protests to be held in cities across NZ and other parts of the world, we read about the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy, and there was an emerging concern about global population growth.
I remember so many of these things vividly as they were woven into the curriculum we’d outlined for the year. We’d engage with newspaper clippings and seek answers to questions we had (yes, it was possible to do that even before the internet!) – sometimes inviting ‘experts’ to come and talk to us as a class. (And yes, we did the inviting, it wasn’t left to Mr Brown to organise it all – his job was to encourage us in our pursuit of knowledge and to equip us with the skills we’d need, including valuable skills such as note-taking and how to deal with multiple sources of information, how to construct an argument and how to present our ideas in multiple ways.)
My story highlights two things here. First, it explains something of where the fire was lit for me as a learner to value inquiry and to seek answers to questions that can seem too hard. Second, the world was a turbulent place back then – just as it is now, the difference being that despite the turmoil and bad news occurring, there was a sense of optimism about the possibility of being able to do something about it. It didn’t seem so overwhelming.
I put a lot of that down to Mr Brown’s method of teaching. But I also recognise that there were many things happening at the time that highlighted how people could make a difference if they put worked together with common purpose. Despite the assassination of Dr King, lots began to change for African Americans after the Selma protests, the rising tide of public opinion regarding the war in Vietnam eventually saw an end to that happening, and the inspiration to land a man on the moon that was started with a speech by Robert F Kennedy in 1964 became a reality in my first year of high school.
These were all signs of or encouragements for hope. The counterpoint to much of the ‘bad news’ were stories (and movements!) that managed to inspire confidence and action. This has had me thinking a lot about the differences between then and now (and there are lots!) – about the level of disengagement and lack of motivation among our young people as it is reported in school data.
In these current turbulent times too many students describe school as “garbage time”—something they have to endure, disconnected from their lives and futures. This happens when education becomes a process of compliance and content delivery, where success is defined by test scores and the curriculum is seen as disconnected from any real purpose. For many of these young people the prospect of seeking to achieve something different for their lives seems futile.
Education as Hope Building
Hope isn’t a soft, vague sentiment. It is a construct grounded in research and deeply tied to student wellbeing and success. Psychologist C.R. Snyder defined hope[1] as “the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways.” In simple terms, hope emerges from two things:
- The ability to imagine meaningful pathways forward
- The belief that one has the agency to act on those pathways
These are not abstract concepts. They offer a practical framework for reimagining our purpose as educators. If we are not helping young people find direction and believe in their ability to make a difference—both now and in the future—then we risk reinforcing the very disengagement we seek to overcome.
Instead of operating as we have for decades previously, we should be asking: “How might we design learning that helps students see and shape their futures?”
Pathways: More Than Careers
We often reduce “pathways” to career options. From a young age, students are asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” – as if identity and aspiration are somehow fixed, a predestination we’re committed to grow into. We now know that the jobs students will hold may not yet exist, and their interests and strengths will evolve in complex ways.
Rather than trying to predict specific roles, we can help students develop the capabilities to navigate change. This means valuing adaptability, critical thinking, creative problem-solving, and emotional intelligence—not as “soft skills,” but as essential tools for life. Reflecting back I now recognise this is the curriculum that Mr Brown introduced us to back in my Form Two year.
How might we introduce entrepreneurship education across subjects, not just to create businesses, but to cultivate a mindset of seeing problems and generating solutions? Could we create partnerships that expose students to areas like regenerative agriculture, AI ethics, clean energy, or social innovation?
Agency: The Power to Act
At the heart of hope lies agency – the belief that one’s actions can influence outcomes. When students develop a sense of agency, they are more likely to persist in the face of challenges, care about the work they do, and see themselves as active participants in shaping their futures. This is a sure antidote for ‘garbage time’ thinking. But agency doesn’t develop by chance. It must be intentionally nurtured through the ways we design learning and structure our schools. This is something I’ve taken the time to outline in more detail in the book I co-authored titled Agency By Design: An Educator’s Playbook.
Supporting agency means giving students real opportunities to make choices that matter – just like my experience in Form Two. This could involve co-designing aspects of the curriculum, where students have input into the topics they explore or the ways they demonstrate their learning. It might look like enabling students to lead meaningful projects – whether that’s proposing improvements to school life, launching sustainability initiatives, or addressing a community need. For this to work, we must provide appropriate scaffolding: access to mentors, resources, and feedback that help students bring their ideas to life.
When students see that their efforts result in real impact—when they witness a garden they designed take root, a campaign they launched gain momentum, or a prototype they built solve a problem – they begin to internalize the belief that their actions matter. That belief is the essence of agency, and the foundation of hope.
Curriculum that Connects
If education is to be truly hope-building, then it must connect meaningfully to the lived experiences of learners. Too often, curriculum is delivered in a way that feels distant from students’ realities—abstract, decontextualised, or focused solely on future assessments. When this happens, students struggle to see relevance, and learning risks becoming a passive exercise.
To counter this, we need to be intentional about designing curriculum that bridges the gap between academic knowledge and the world students inhabit in the way Mr Brown did for me. This means rooting learning in authentic, real-world contexts and inviting students to engage with the issues that shape their communities and the wider world. It could involve anchoring a science unit in local environmental concerns, integrating social studies with current events that students care about, or exploring mathematics through problems related to everyday life.
Just as importantly, we need to make space for students to bring their own identities, interests, and questions into the learning process. What they care about should be part of what we teach. When students see their culture, language, aspirations, and experiences reflected in the classroom, they are more likely to feel that school is a place where they belong—and where their learning has purpose.
What Might You Do?
There have been books written about this sort of thing – but here are a few thoughts that I’ve been pondering that might be helpful…
Start by reframing conversations within your school community. When reviewing curriculum plans, classroom practices, or strategic goals, ask: How does what we teach build hope? This simple but powerful question can shift the focus from compliance and content coverage to purpose and possibility. It encourages a deeper look at whether learning is helping students see meaningful futures and believe in their ability to shape them.
Next, take a close look at how student voice is currently operating in your school. Are students genuinely involved in shaping their learning experiences, or are they simply responding to choices pre-determined by adults? Consider ways to increase their agency—through co-designing projects, contributing to school decisions, or leading initiatives that matter to them. Agency must be cultivated through real opportunities, not just rhetoric.
Then, consider where and how your school might look outward. Are there opportunities to partner with community organisations, businesses, or individuals working in fields that address emerging global challenges? Creating authentic links between students and the wider world can expand their understanding of what’s possible—and introduce them to roles and pathways they may never have imagined.
And don’t underestimate the power of starting small. Choose one class, one unit, or one project and experiment with giving students more ownership. Invite them to help shape the inquiry, identify problems they care about, or pitch solutions to real audiences. These early steps can be seeds for a larger cultural shift toward hope-driven, agency-rich learning.
Toward a Culture of Hope Building
I firmly believe that we must not think of hope as a vague ideal or a luxury for better times. It is a necessary condition for meaningful learning, and it must be cultivated with intent. As educators, we have a powerful role to play in shaping the environments, relationships, and experiences that allow young people to imagine possibilities and believe they can make a difference. By designing learning that honours agency, by expanding our thinking around pathways, and by connecting curriculum to the realities and aspirations of students’ lives, we can reframe education not as something to endure, but as something that builds futures. In a world that can feel increasingly uncertain, let us be relentless in our commitment to make schools places where hope takes root—and grows.
[1] Snyder, R (2022) Hope Theory: Rainbows in the Mind Psychological Inquiry Vol. 13, No. 4 (2002), pp. 249-275 (27 pages) Published By: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
