RELEVANT EDUCATION MANIFESTO
This is what we believe. Join us in our mission to make all education relevant.
Join us in leading change so that every learner is world-ready.
It can be done. And you are the solution. It's time.
EDUCATION IS AT A CROSSROADS
Many students don’t see what they’re being taught as having much to do with the life they want to lead and the contributions they want to make in society.
This leads to disengagement, a severe sense of disconnect, and persistent school dropout rates.
Rather than inspiring excitement and curiosity, traditional education is the only place where people celebrate when the experience they already paid for is canceled.
For students who persist, young people often graduate at a disadvantage. They’re burdened with debt, still unsure of their career direction, and they find their degree doesn’t truly prepare them for what society wants.
And it gets worse.
Many alumni are unemployed or underemployed finding themselves ill-prepared for the challenges of the modern world. Working in menial jobs, they are not in alignment with who they are, what they are doing professionally, and the impact they want to make in the world.
Only 26% of U.S. working adults strongly agree their education was relevant to their work and day-to-day life. Confidence in educational institutions is rapidly declining and reputations are suffering.
Depression, mental health concerns, and job dissatisfaction continue to skyrocket.
This causes our global skills gap to widen. America alone has over 3 million jobs that remain unfilled. Our talent pipeline and economic competitiveness continue to decrease. We are on the precipice of economic turmoil.
People think these are discrete problems, and they try to solve each one separately. But these are not separate problems. They are all symptoms of a single, deeper root cause: A broken education system that continues to march towards irrelevance.
MAKING ALL EDUCATION RELEVANT
Today, much of our education system is outdated and irrelevant. That includes many of the subjects being taught, as well as the style and methods used.
Relevance is the difference between mattering and not mattering.
To make education relevant for students, you need to make it relevant for teachers and administrators, for the local community, and for society. You need an entire educational ecosystem, running on relevance and mattering.
We believe in giving students an education that matters to them and to the world.
We need institutions that help students better identify who they are, what’s important to them, and what society most wants from them. One that teaches them skills and helps them launch.
We believe in giving students a competitive advantage.
Imagine a different kind of school. One based on relevancy and meaning.
A school that graduates students who are in demand. These graduates wouldn’t have to fish around for meaning, skills, and ability. They’d bring meaning, skills, and ability to the jobs they took or businesses they started or causes they championed.
We believe in giving students a life of greater direction, preparedness, and meaning.
EDUCATION COUNTS, BUT SKILLS COUNT MORE
We know over 60% of jobs have a strong element of sales. But we don’t teach sales in school. And there are many such examples. Financial literacy, entrepreneurship, asynchronous project management tools, work ethic, generative AI, and countless viable subjects are often absent from our curriculum.
By the year 2030, 85% of our jobs will be completely new. They’ve yet to be invented. Yet much of our required cannon was structured two generations ago.
We believe in readying students for tomorrow. The real tomorrow. Not an industrial aged tomorrow that hasn’t existed for a century and a half.
We believe in disrupting how schools organize their time.
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We believe in disrupting the language we use in our institutions.
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We believe it is time to remove adult convenience and replace it with student learning.
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We believe it is time to disrupt the less-than-optimal education system we have inherited.
WORLD READINESS
Catapult is for people who want to push boundaries and reinvent education. We’re bringing together top educators and school employees as a way of revitalizing the educational system around relevance and meaning. We serve as professional development for educators, and cultural relevancy development for institutions.
A handful of people can’t change a culture single handedly. But a handful of people can build allies and start moving the culture towards a tipping point.
Catapult launched in 2022, and thousands of educators have participated in our relevancy experience.
This is about getting students, not just college-ready, not just career-ready, but world-ready. It’s about teaching students, and ourselves, to be agile and able to create new value, based on the uncharted territory in front of us.
This is about replacing the goal from being ready for the test and completing, to being ready for the world and thriving.
It’s about blurring the walls of our classrooms, and upping everyone’s game when it comes to educational relevance.
MINDSETS
Educators were trained to prepare students for a world that was fixed. We were taught that learning takes place inside the classroom. As educators, we evaluate whether a student learned or not by looking at their grades and degrees, but those things don’t have much to do with life achievement.
The conventional answer is to develop a few new innovative pathways, add new courses, or grant fund boutique pilot programs. But those don’t serve most learners. They help the status quo to persist.
Society is changing so fast, we need to change our fixed-mindset approach more quickly into a growth-mindset in order to remain relevant - and to ensure our students are relevant upon graduation.
We believe we must let go of our old ways. We are killing ourselves by holding on. We must reinvent our models.
It’s time to give students more than just knowledge, a grade, or a credential.
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We recognize that the Prussian model of education that America adopted was explicitly about breaking one’s spirit and ambition. It's time to break free from the constraints of this outdated model and embrace a new approach to education that prioritizes relevance, empowerment, and innovation.
We believe a new goal requires a new mindset.
METRICS
To redefine the goal; to give them a competitive advantage. We must bring companies and the community into the classroom, and bring our classrooms out into the world, so students are really trained and prepared when they come out. So there’s no skill gap at all.
We believe a new goal requires new metrics.
What matters is what’s measured, and we’re measuring the wrong things. We can no longer afford to focus on the wrong goal.
What should education be measuring today? A student’s development of self, of meaningful skills, and worldly accomplishment. Education’s new goal should be customized learning, so a student gets help in discovering how to be their best self.
ACCELERATING CHANGE
We are often constrained by antiquated policies and outdated approaches. And normally, organizational change takes a long time. With a sense of urgency, many educators get impatient when student-centered change is slow. And it is a heavy lift to implement change all by yourself.
Thankfully, you are not alone.
Catapult created a new, research-based approach to advancing institutional culture forward at scale, leveraging the best speakers who have changed perspectives and catalyzed action.
All Catapult speakers are educational disruptors. They are mission-driven. They have an insider advantage, with an outside perspective. They know our organizational positives as well as its landmines.
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They motivate and mobilize. They reframe and resurrect. They challenge and support.
They effectively orchestrate and advance institutional change. Catapult speakers want what’s best for our students, for our economy, and for every educator battling alongside us in the trenches.
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Coupled with tactical Playbooks, synchronous coaching, and a virtual community of like-minded game-changers, we are pushing the goalpost back beyond commencement day; far into a student’s future. Together, we are getting schools to see students, not as cogs in a machine, not as vessels to fill seats, but as multidimensional humans with an unfulfilled potential.
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And our model works.
We chose the name “Catapult,” because the ideas we teach about educational relevancy work fast and travel far.
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This isn’t a program.
It’s a movement.
IT’S TIME
The challenges facing education today are significant, but so too are the opportunities. We understand that the cavalry isn’t coming to save us. Together, we need to help lift our institutions out of irrelevance.
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We believe in the educational system and the impact individual educators can make when we stand together. By reimagining education as a dynamic, relevant, and empowering experience, we can transform not just individual lives, but society as a whole.
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Join us in our mission to make all education relevant.
Join us in leading change so that every learner is world-ready.
It can be done. And you are the solution.