A reflection prompted by Rhonda Broussard and One Good Question
“Are we educating our young people to become our peers?” That was the question I found most intriguing when Rhonda Broussard posed it during her recent talk with us. It’s deceptively simple – but sit with it for a moment and you start to feel its edges. Rhonda is the author of One Good Question: How countries prepare youth to lead, and the book is built around exactly that spirit: not answers, but questions worth asking.
My first instinct was to connect it to something I’ve been writing about for some time: learner agency, and the shift in ownership of learning that great teaching requires. When we talk about agency, we’re really talking about gradually shifting the ownership of learning – moving students from dependence toward independence, from being the recipients of learning to the architects of it. That’s not so different from what Rhonda is pointing at.
But her question goes somewhere deeper than pedagogy. It challenges the fundamental structure of how we think about young people. Our education systems – and if we’re honest, many of our homes too – are built on hierarchy. Adults know. Children learn. Teachers lead. Students follow. These aren’t malicious arrangements; they often serve genuine purposes. But they can quietly train young people in something we don’t intend: that their job is to comply, not to contribute.
When students internalise that lesson well enough, we sometimes mistake it for success.
I want to be careful here, because I suspect some readers will hear “educating students to become peers” and feel a familiar anxiety – the fear that taking this seriously means abdicating responsibility. That classrooms become rudderless. That homes lose structure. That if we treat children as future peers, we somehow stop being the adults in the room.
That’s not what this means. A surgeon mentoring a resident doesn’t stop being the more experienced practitioner. A journalist guiding a cadet doesn’t pretend expertise doesn’t matter. What shifts is the orientation – are we working toward a relationship of mutual respect and eventual equality, or are we simply maintaining hierarchy for its own sake?
In teaching, this changes things in practical ways. It asks us whether we’re building students’ capacity to question, to direct their own inquiry, to own their learning – or whether we’re building their capacity to perform compliance. It asks whether the power we hold in classrooms is being used to prepare students for independence, or to preserve our own authority.
The same question lands differently at home. Parents (and grand-parents!) who hold their role lightly – who can imagine their child as a future adult they’ll admire, argue with, learn from – tend to parent with that destination in mind. The hierarchy doesn’t disappear; it just has somewhere to go.
After all, our students will become our peers. They will sit on councils and boards, write policy, run organisations, raise children of their own. Some of them will one day make decisions that affect us. The only question is whether we prepared them for that – or just for the next assessment.
Rhonda’s book is a gift to anyone willing to ask the question honestly. I’d encourage you to read it, and to sit with the discomfort it stirs. That’s usually where the most important thinking begins.
