School systems all over the Western World seem to be in a crisis: children and youth opt out and stay at home. Choose the computer instead of the teacher. Their safe home instead of the classroom. Aloneness in their room instead of school environments. For years.

It seems like a choice, but it isn’t. It’s not a lack of intelligence or stamina, not because of boredom or laziness. It’s their bodies, their psyches, their nervous systems trying to survive in a system that has little space for sensitivity and creativity. For safety and love. For Being Human.

Our response, as parents, teachers, school leaders and politicians?

To worry incessantly about these children’s future (they are doomed if they fail their exams).

To search for whom to blame and where to find the solutions; are the parents to blame? The teachers? The politicians? The children themselves (they probably have a couple of diagnoses anyway)?

Trying hard to understand the complexity of the individual child’s situation and needs.

And do everything in our might to get them Back To School.

What if they have a very good reason to stay away?

Just for a minute, imagine this was a multinational business, suddenly seeing a remarkable percentage of customers stop buying its formerly so popular services and products. Would it fight, force, plead and drag the customers back to buy, or would it ask itself: What has changed in the world that my product needs to adapt to? How can I evolve and make a better product or service that my customer needs? How can I change my thinking so that I lead my business in a way that is adaptable to a changing world and a changing population?

I have been that mother, pushing and forcing, pleading and pulling our kids back to school. Feeling guilty for being a bad mother. Shameful for crying and shouting to get the shivering child out of bed, even if it felt so against all my values and instincts. Because that was what I thought we were supposed to do. The only sensible thing. It only made things worse. Until we realized, my husband and I, that the only sensible thing was to start listening – deeply – to the sense and the sensitivity in our child’s response to school.

We started believing in our own child’s bodily responses and needs more than we trusted in the demands and expectations from the system – from school, local and national authorities and cultural norms. When we stopped following external norms and expectations and instead started trusting ourselves and our child, we saw massive change for the better in our child. Conflict changed into inspiring, enlightening conversations and a boost of creativity and need to learn – from the inside.

I believe that our systems have become so imbalanced in their approach to children and to learning, that the original purpose of education has been lost; in Ken Robinson’s words “To enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens” (2015 s. xxii). Standardization, competition, testing, rigid rules and productivity has taken over, science and math are prioritized while art classes and time for expeditions disappear.

And our children are paying the price.

I see the massive lack of joy, thriving and absences in class as a collective symptom, not as an individual problem. I see school absence as a systemic trauma response to a world where competition, standardization and production is more important than creating safe, spacious, joyful and loving environments that stimulate the child’s uniquely wired, natural curiosity and need for learning. It is a signal for us to stop forcing, and start listening — to the child, their needs, and their creative impulses.

While what the world and our organizations, nations and needs more than anything right now is adaptability to change and creativity. Real innovation, not just multiple-choice right or wrong answers.

We do more and more to calculate the losses, find the answers, seek for complex solutions for the individual child so she can thrive again.

While we forget is that it is so much simpler. All we want, all we need is to be human. To be connected -to nature, to other humans, to the world around us, to ourselves and our own creative impulses. To have space to be ourselves. To create, manifest, come alive from the inside, do what lights us up. To love.

(I know this is all very fluffy language for the bureaucratic mind and educator, but that is just the point. Please bear with me here)

If we can create an environment where we feel safe, loved and supported – and seen, in our unique weirdness and imperfectly evolving genius, I believe our innate lust for learning will take a natural course.

Speaking of nature: Imagine our young “failures in school” through the metaphor of the young dragonfly nymphs. They are born in water and live for years as predators in muddy ponds, judged as yucky and ugly. But one day, fully fed and feeling the sun’s heat in spring, they crawl up of the muddy pond and up the nearest straw. They soak in all that heat and surrender to a natural impulse, leaning out of their old shell, into the world as a totally transformed and colorful being, letting their wings unfold and dry. Finally flying away into the air as a beautiful dragonfly.

And we are all so very different dragonflies. Our impulses, needs, joys, longings, curiosity, learning styles and expressions are so very diverse. But under the right conditions, we all have an impulse to get out of that mudhole and fly. Let us create an education that helps them find their own colors and impulse to fly, rather than pulling them out of the mudhole before they are ready.

What if we stopped focusing on our children’s absence, dragging them back to school, started really listening to their silent protest and courage to be present – to themselves? What if we started believing in that voice inside of them that knows what their souls hunger for and crave to learn and create, instead of forcing them to memorize a curriculum that gives them good grades? For whose sakes are we forcing them to learn what we believe they need to know?

In a world where changes happen quicker than we can plan, where we need radical new ways of thinking and acting in order to survive the future, how can we still insist on standardizing and regulating our children? When we know that it is just that diversity, just that creative, unique way of thinking and expressing, that created the innovations we have built our world upon.

The world needs these children and young people’s unique diversity, now.