Voices for the Future: The Potential for Education to Strengthen Democracy

A Conversation with Transformational Educator Gerard Senehi

Voices for the Future is a podcast series that I co-host with my collaborator Anodea Judith.

The next program is Thursday, January 19 at 7pm Eastern with the transformational educator Gerard Senehi and is entitled The Potential for Education to Strengthen Democracy.

You can attend for free on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82056059902

Gerard Senehi is inspired by a sense of possibilities and the potential of bringing inner aspects of our humanity to the foreground in education. After graduating from Amherst College, he taught science and art, and saw science as a way to “teach” curiosity and art as a way to spark creativity. 

With a firm belief that education could do more to better prepare students for life and support the development of their humanity, he went on to complete a Master’s Degree in Education at the University of Massachusetts. Not finding many outlets to pursue his interest, he entered a quest to find answers to big life questions for himself. 

After years of full immersion in understanding life and our role in it, he returned to education to pursue a vision for supporting students on their life journey, and in 2013 he founded the nonprofit Open Future Institute with his wife, Francesca. 

They worked closely with educators and students to co-create the QUESTion Project, a semester long daily class for high school students, with a structured and engaging curriculum. The class supports students with some of the most important human and life questions that are at the foundation of building a life of purpose. 

Their long term vision is not only to impact students around the world, but to expand the role of education, so students formally have a space to explore who they are, understand life, and define their direction in life.

Gerard recognizes that through an education that helps students to understand themselves better and allows them to explore their own purpose and define their direction in life, it can help create more engaged and civic minded citizens capable of thinking critically not only about themselves, but also about democracy and what it would take to make democracy work for all, and not just a select few.

From its humble beginnings in one high school in the South Bronx in New York City, the QUESTion Project is now taught in over a dozen schools in New York City and Los Angeles, in the process engaging with thousands of students. The schools that the program focuses on are in the highest poverty, lowest income areas of their respective cities.

The QUESTion Project has been so successful in its mission that they have attracted major funding from the Fetzer Institute, which said in granting funding, "Fetzer is drawn to this work in how it allows young people to explore the deep questions of life together in ways that expand a sense of meaning, purpose, and possibility."  

This conversation with Gerard Senehi will help you to understand how the leaders of tomorrow are being educated in a way that helps give them deeper insight into the way our world works, the problems we face, and potential solutions.