But we are forgetting something that goes beyond talking and demands action - the rangatahi at the heart of our education system.

Our young people have, for the last few years, experienced the unprecedented nature of a pandemic - lockdowns with education being dished out to varying standards via Zoom and Teams.

As adults, we need to acknowledge that we're failing the next generation.

We need to act and reverse the message that being at school just isn't important.

We know there is a strong correlation between attendance and achievement.

We are now in our fourth year of accepting and sending regular messages that days spent at school are not important. A habit that started with Covid, continuing today as the new norm.

Auckland schools once again started the school year with a "please close for a week notice" from the Wellington-based head office.

When it rains, we see schools rapidly put on alert to shut schools and send students home.

And now they're faced with more disruption from strike action and work-to-rule restrictions, as teachers demonstrate frustration with their ministry.

This industrial action, compounded with schools not having the resources to operate sees whole year groups rostered home, and curriculum-based activities and events cancelled.

No wonder rangatahi are not turning up.

No-one is turning up for them.

But more importantly, what are we doing to future-proof education, our workforce, and the productivity base of Aotearoa?

For most of this century, the literacy and numeracy achievement of our young people has been declining.

We continue to have an appalling truancy problem, despite headlines suggesting otherwise.

There has been a lot of commentary around NCEA level of literacy and numeracy among our young people.

NCEA literacy and numeracy test results in a 2021 pilot highlighted a troubling disparity between decile one schools and higher-decile schools in New Zealand.

Decile-one schools had pass rates of just 2% in writing 1 and 30% in numeracy, while higher-decile schools achieved much higher pass rates.

In reading the difference between decile 1 and 10 was 24% to 85%, and in numeracy 10% compared to 78%.

Recent data from the PIRLS study on reading assessments revealed we had dropped from 13th in 2001 to 27th in 2021. Shouldn't we be leading the way not falling backwards?

This is a damning insight into our success to end poverty for generations of today's children.

Education inequalities are embedded in our system.

The root causes have been manifesting for some time: social inequity, poverty, resources, wealth, and power.

We must ensure equal access to quality education for all students regardless of their socio-economic background. Education can lift people out of poverty, but based on all the indicators, things don't look great for New Zealand's future. Continue reading

• John O'Connell is chief executive of Life Education Trust.

In a flourish of juvenile, blind confidence, we three founding hosts of "Jesuitical" (our former cohost, Olga Segura, now an editor at The National Catholic Reporter, is someone to whom we remain deeply indebted for making the first three years of the show with us) assumed that we could just turn on the microphones during our normal, daily conversations, and other people would clamour to hear what we had to say.

Dear readers and listeners: We were wrong. Those first pilot episodes were unfocused, uninteresting and, frankly, painful to listen to. You might still think the show comes across that way, but we promise you, we used to be so much worse.

To mark our five-year anniversary, we are looking back on what we have learned from our guests to help us and our listeners navigate the modern world as people of faith.

Yet we had an inkling that something was missing from the Catholic podcasting space.

We imagined there must be thousands of young people out there who were involved in campus ministry or did Jesuit Volunteer Corps or always went to the same last-chance Sunday Mass with their college friends and who now found themselves in a new city with a perhaps lacklustre parish and hungry for the Catholic community and spiritual nourishment.

Taking a page from our Jesuit colleagues, we sought to meet these theoretical young people where they were: on their smartphones.

So, to mark our five-year anniversary, we are looking back on what we have learned from our guests—Catholics and non-Catholics vastly smarter and more interesting than we are—to help us and our listeners navigate the modern world as people of faith.

Lessons About Young Catholics

Young Catholics need formal and financial support from the institutional church.
Molly Burhans, the founder of GoodLands—an organization that helps the Catholic Church leverage its landholdings to further its mission—was recently profiled in The New Yorker for her heroic efforts to fight climate change.

Ms. Burhans is a devout Catholic whose ecology is rooted in her faith. And Pope Francis has clearly made caring for our common home a priority for the church with his encyclical "Laudato Si'."

And yet, most of the support Ms. Burhans has received in her ministry has been from the secular world.

After Ms. Burhans created the first global map of the Catholic Church's landholdings, Pope Francis approved a plan for her to move to Rome and establish and run a Vatican cartography institute on a trial basis.

There was just one problem: It came with no staff and a very modest budget.

So Molly declined the offer.

She has since submitted a new proposal.

All the while, Molly continues to receive awards and offers from some of the most prestigious environmental groups in the world.

Career paths for lay vocations are not obvious.

The default view tends to include only a) academia, b) youth and young adult ministry, or, c) uh, I don't know, here's the password to our social media account. Go crazy, kid.

Unless we figure out how to incorporate young, lay Catholics and their talents and passions more fully into the formal structures of the church, the church is going to experience "brain drain" of people like Molly Burhans and so many others.

"I would have no self-respect, honestly, if I had stayed working for the Catholic Church as long as I had with the amount of resources I've had."

Young people are leaving the church—but it is not for the reasons you think.
A bunch of people with gray hair sit in the parish hall listening to a speaker.

Inevitably, someone raises their hand during the Q. and A. session and bemoans the fact that young people just are not interested in church anymore, that their adult child has drifted away, and they do not know what to do about it.

Luckily, the Springtide Research Institute, whose executive director, Josh Packard, spoke with us, is looking for the answers.

The institute is devoted to studying young people's feelings toward religion.

They found that a young adult who had five adults who cared about them was far less likely to engage in high-risk behaviour.

The same principal could help to connect young people to the church.

"[Millennials are] not leaving the church.

They were not raised in it to begin with.

They don't have anything to leave, but instead, they're going to be building things. And they're going to be doing that with the bits and pieces and fragments of the institutional lives that have been left behind for them." - Josh Packard, Episode 172, March 12, 2021

Stop putting young adult Catholics at the "kids table."
In 2018, over 300 young people from all over the world went to the Vatican to help prepare the meeting of the Synod of Bishops on young people.

One of those delegates, Katie Prejean McGrady, had spent a lot of time working with young people in the church as a speaker, writer, youth minister and high school theology teacher. (Katie now hosts a daily radio show on Sirius XM).

We talked to Katie about what it was like to dialogue with bishops about youth and young adult ministry, and what changes she wanted to see in how the church welcomes young people.

"A lot of times young people are relegated to the cheap seats, when it comes to Catholicism.

"They're either the problem to be solved, they're the kids that made a mess in the parish hall or they're the ones that can clean up after the adult gathering….

"They're just kind of put into this separate category rather than [being recognized as] an active part of the life of the church.

"I hate the term ‘youth Mass.'

"It's Mass—and young people just happen to be engaged more in the work of the liturgy. But why can't that happen at the 9 a.m. Mass?" - Katie Prejean McGrady, Episode 75, Sept. 14, 2018 Continue reading

• Ashley McKinless and Zac Davis

Christian reawakening to the Jewishness of Jesus began in the late nineteenth century but received greater attention as Christians devoted increased attention to Jews and Judaism in light of the Shoah.

From the 1960s onwards, a desire for reconciliation with, and greater understanding of, Judaism became commonplace, epitomised by Vatican II and the publication of Nostra Aetate in 1965.

Nearly all Christian studies now take the Jewishness of Jesus seriously, but what is less well known is the work of Jewish scholars who similarly have re-awoken to the fact that Judaism nurtured Jesus the Jew.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, David Flusser and Géza Vermes, both of whom built on the pioneering work of a small number of Jewish scholars in the early twentieth century (notably Martin Buber, Joseph Klausner and Claude Montefiore), have been followed by three new Jewish scholars - Shmuley Boteach, Daniel Boyarin and Amy-Jill Levine.

While Flusser portrayed Jesus as a charismatic figure whose teaching demonstrated an extraordinary sense of mission, Vermes depicted Jesus as a Galilean Hasid and holy man.

For both, Jesus was a charismatic teacher, healer and prophet. Vermes in particular has had the greater impact, demonstrated by the title of his first book, Jesus the Jew, which in 1973 seemed revolutionary but now is taken for granted in New Testament scholarship. Continue reading.

Source: The Tablet

Image: Rockland411

The star of television show "Two and a Half Men" said this not to be self-deprecating or to beat up on himself, but to drive home the point that failure is a part of life — and one that can prompt profound "aha" moments.

"You see, you have to take a risk to be a magnificent failure. The most successful people I know in the world are magnificent failures," he said.

Kutcher was originally slated to give a much lighter talk — on the things he learned working as a dishwasher, a butcher and a deli employee on his way to becoming an actor and producer.

But he says that, as he sat down to write his talk, it didn't feel completely honest. Continue reading.

TED is a nonprofit devoted to 'ideas worth spreading', which it does through conferences, speeches and videos. TEDYouth took place on 16 November with the theme, The Spark.

Source: TED Blog

Image: TED/Ryan Lash

People have suspected that play helps children learn, but until recently there was little research that showed this or explained why it might be true. In my lab at the University of California at Berkeley, we've been trying to explain how very young children can learn so much so quickly, and we've developed a new scientific approach to children's learning.

Where does pretending come in? It relates to what philosophers call "counterfactual" thinking, like Einstein wondering what would happen if a train went at the speed of light. Read more

Sources

• Smithsonian.com
• Image: eHow