ASCD Launches The Learning Compact Renewed

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 23, 2020

Contact: Alexa Epitropoulos

ALEXANDRIA, VA— ASCD is pleased to announce the official release of The Learning Compact Renewed: Whole Child for the Whole World.

For more than a decade, ASCD has advocated for a whole child approach to education: one that ensures that every child is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. ASCD formally launched its Whole Child approach in the 2007 publication The Learning Compact Redefined: A Call to Action. Since then, the organization has been a leading voice in moving education systems away from a one-size-fits-all approach to education to one that focuses on students' physical, social, emotional, mental, and cognitive growth.

This publication, The Learning Compact Renewed: Whole Child for the Whole World, echoes our commitment to a focus on the whole child and also declares that our children, youth, students must see themselves as active members of the world in which they live.

Leading authors and voices were invited to contribute to the publication to outline the need for a renewed focus on a child-centered approach to education in a global environment, including Esther Care, Peter DeWitt, Ross Hall, Andy Hargreaves, Pak Tee Ng, Jim Playfoot, Russell Quaglia, Gabriel Rshaid, Dennis Shirley, Rebecca Winthrop, and Yong Zhao, as well as Whole Child Commission cochairs Stephanie Pace Marshall and Hugh B. Price.

As schools and educators face one of their greatest challenges in serving and supporting students during the COVID-19 crisis, it's more important than ever to develop education systems that focus on the needs of the whole child. The Learning Compact Renewed: Whole Child for the Whole World outlines steps that educators, communities, and decisionmakers can take to ensure that our students are knowledgeable, emotionally and physically healthy, civically inspired, engaged in the arts, prepared for work and economic self sufficiency, and ready for the world beyond formal schooling.

"In 2007, ASCD declared that that our education system should serve the whole child. In this second decade of the whole child, we declare that a fundamental part of educating the whole child asks education systems and communities to ensure that all children see themselves as makers and shapers of the world they will inherit," ASCD Senior Director of Global Outreach Sean Slade said. "It is about helping each child recognize that they are part of, and inextricably connected with, the rest of the world."

Download The Learning Compact Renewed: Whole Child for the Whole World. Find out more about the ASCD Whole Child approach to education, including the ASCD Whole Child Network^TM.