What’s Your Passion?

Instead of asking young learners the right questions to discover what their true interests are, we deliver a state-approved, district-initiated curriculum that works for some, but doesn’t for so many others.

I watched with interest while Noeline Kirabo delivered her TED talk at the TEDWomen conference back in 2019. Kirabo started an organization called Kyusa, a Ugandan non-profit that addresses youth unemployment by empowering student dropouts to turn their passions into sustainable careers.

Kirabo tells us that there are two questions we need to ask our youth when it comes to their learning:

The first is “What is your passion?”

Kirabo shares more by saying,

“Now, when we talk about passion, one of the most common questions that people ask is, ‘What is passion? How do I even find it?’ And in the simplest definition, passion is a collection of your life experiences that give you the deepest sense of fulfillment. And to identify your passion, you need to look inward. So we use two reflective questions. The first question we ask is, ‘If you had all the time and the money in the world, what would you spend your time doing?’ It sounds like a very simple question, but many people struggle to answer this question because they’ve just never thought about it.”

“The second question we ask is, ‘What makes you happy or gives you the deepest sense of fulfillment?’ Now, you would assume that we all know what makes us happy, but it’s also interesting to note that so many people have no idea what makes them happy, because they are so busy going through the routines of life, they’ve never stopped to look inward. And so identifying the things that give us a deep sense of fulfillment and the things that gives us deep joy are thoughts that begin to direct us in the direction of our passion. And just in case you’re wondering what your answers are to those two questions, I invite you to sit with these questions later and just reflect about it.”

What is your passion?

What makes you happy?

I’m trying to remember if any of my teachers asked me these two questions. I can’t remember a time they did. Instead, they, along with almost every other teacher in our traditional school system started out the year by reviewing classroom rules, focusing on how students were supposed to act while learning.

I wonder if any teacher, save my basketball coach, knew that my passion and what made me happy was one in the same – playing basketball. But I had other passions and happiness triggers too – playing the piano, being on the acting stage, playing Santa Claus at Christmas time, singing in the school and church choir. But all those activities, including playing basketball, occurred outside of the school day. The time I spent on those activities was time I needed to find outside of learning how to read, write, and problem-solve better.

I’m guessing others who are reading this post experienced the same. And here’s the deal – it hasn’t changed much over the past 40 to 50 years. Kids are almost never asked “What’s your passion?” or “What makes you happy?” at school. And why not?

Because our traditional K-12 system has convinced itself that they know better about what should be learned during the school day, or that, if kids were asked those questions, the young learners would offer nonsensical answers – “I like to play video games,” “I like to paint houses,” “I don’t know.” So we don’t ask, and because we don’t ask we lose the opportunity to begin learning negotiations with two of the most important questions you can ask a fellow human being –