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“The developing world is full of entrepreneurs and visionaries, who with access to education, equity and credit would play a key role in developing the economic situations in their countries”.
—Muhammad Yunus

From West-Centric to World-Centric Education

“reformers of global education must, along with the rest of humanity, reckon with the rise of the Global South—both as an emerging fact, as goal or ideal, and as a change of perspective.”

“In their countries, but also in the world at large”, one may add to the above quote by Yunus. Access to high quality education can and will empower the billions of people who today can only enter the global economy from a deprived and deprivileged position—and there is every reason to believe that such an empowerment of the many would benefit the world as a whole. Not only would innovation and trade be nourished; this rich tapestry of world citizens also bring their own cultures, histories and perspectives to the table; and many perspectives are required to tackle the great global challenges of climate change, global health, technological disruption, and migration. The global world, by definition, cannot be a Western one, nor a Russian or Chinese one—it must include and empower the Global South as a whole, and balance the multiplicity of human experience and cultures.

It has been argued by many that the main force of such change is education. Education can create opportunities in people’s lives, but it can also empower populations to organize and take issue with injustices and systemic failures of their own societies, spurring institutional change and bringing stability to destabilized regions.

Thus, reformers of global education must, along with the rest of humanity, reckon with the rise of the Global South—both as an emerging fact, as goal or ideal, and as a change of perspective.

One simple shift—and one that highlights the biases that have hitherto been imbedded in how we have all been educated—involves a change of wording. “The third world” and “the developing world” both imply some kind of hierarchy; the Global South emphasizes the fundamentally equality of nations and cultures. It is this sense of worthiness and equality that must reshape not only how education is organized, but also how “the great story of the world” is told and taught. The story of the world, the global narrative, cannot be a hierarchical one—if our shared goal is a rich, sustainable, peaceful, and equal world.

Reformers of global education are thus faced with a two-pronged momentous task:

• To extend the systems of education so that its access becomes virtually universal, and
• to change the narrative (the story told or implied) about human communities and their relationship to one another, from a Western-centric, to a world-centric

In this article, I focus primarily on the second part of this equation. Naturally, the two depend upon one another. Just as there should be no people—except perhaps indigenous cultures that do not take part of the global market—who are deprived of education, there should be no people who are taught, implicitly or otherwise, that their culture and heritage are less worthy, inferior, or in submission to other cultures. Such implied hierarchies cause collective trauma and collective shame, which ultimately make global peace and collaboration more difficult. Nor should the members of any culture—and this may be yet more controversial and difficult to deal with—be taught a story of the world that emphasizes, implicitly or otherwise, their own superiority and right to supremacy. If we are to avoid a future in which pompous national pride impedes human solidarity and cooperation, we must deal with issues of collective shame and the many belittlements present in everyday life. Because shame and (exaggerated) pride are sisters.

hat we suggest here is a transnational alliance between countries to reshape the narratives of the world—guiding us from more hierarchical and ethnocentric views of the world, to more equal and cosmopolitan outlooks that rhyme with the rise of Global South. This is doable, we believe, but it requires that countries escape a kind of “prisoner’s dilemma”; if the populations of country A are taught more ethnocentric views, it becomes more difficult for country B to uphold a more cosmopolitan narrative; the solidarity becomes lopsided. How can, for instance, Japanese and Chinese readings of modern history be reconciled, wounds healed, and perspectives bridged?

And mutual solidarity on a transnational level is necessary for a thriving and peaceful world.

This is not to say that populations have no use for a sense of roots, heritage and history of their own countries, traditions, and ethnicities. Yes, heritage and proud histories count. But if each person’s unique life story belongs in part to the history of their country and people, so is the history of each country and people ultimately a contribution to the history of the world and of humanity as a whole—connecting in turn to an ecological belongingness to the larger biosphere, which can itself be understood through many different lenses of the world’s cultures and religions.

And thus these histories of humanity must be balanced and brought into a harmonious whole: even the difficult parts, with histories of oppression, discrimination and violence. These are undeniably difficult—but equally vital—questions.

The rise of the Global South thus implies an entry into a truly global age—and the educational systems must adapt to this reality. This pathway can only be walked, however, hand in hand. As we argued in the Human-to-Systems Relations chapter, changing education is also about changing other systems altogether; in this case, it is equally a matter of sensitive diplomacy. What brave leaders and social innovators will rise to the task—and use the development of global education to literally rewrite world history?

Breaking the Colonial Heritage

The above outlined task would be easier if the history of the world, and many of its current realities, were not so gruesome. But they are. The global community is not only faced with a history of wars and exploitation—but also, notably, a history of colonialism. This history heaps shame on some populations and blame on others, and the response to both is often an irrational, exaggerated pride that hinders cosmopolitan reconciliation. And the blame is sometimes transmuted into a misplaced “savior complex” which inadvertently insults the dignity of those it purports to help, further feeding the cycle of shame, pride, and prejudice.

To this day, this colonial heritage continues in the form of many social and economic inequalities which are viscerally felt by people around the world, what is sometimes called the neocolonial order. It continues not only between countries (where new powers still feel that they must prioritize geopolitical security to never again be mistreated by foreign powers), but also within countries, as ethnic migrant minorities feel discriminated against and not as fully worthy citizens of their new home countries.

Our suggestion for one way out of this gridlock is to give the countries of the Global South a stake and a say in how history and social sciences are taught in the countries of the Global North—and perhaps, to some extent, vice versa (although Global South populations are already very influenced by and aware of the Global North). If Global North countries pledge to shape a part of their curricula in accordance with the guidelines of a commission including many Global South countries, the Global South can rebalance the way that history is taught, how they are seen and understood, and how they wish to be related to. They can speak directly to the whole populations of the Global North in and through the North’s own educational systems, balancing out biases and emphasizing their contributions to world history. The pledges do not have to be unrealistically comprehensive; perhaps 40 hours of taught material throughout the schooling years, including perhaps such issues as decolonialization and the histories of African, Asian and pre-Columbian civilizations, plus some general guidelines for how the specifics of the curricula are shaped. It is not an unaffordable measure.

Could such an endeavor begin to heal the wounds of the colonial heritage, creating a more equitable and multifaceted global perspective on social reality? After all, matters of healing are often matters of recognition—and to gain influence over how one is recognized. Could it help avoiding viewing some cultures as victimized, and others to blame—emphasizing instead the rich tapestry of tragic and beautiful human experience?

Big History as a Pedagogical Backbone

There is a discipline of research and history writing that has been developed by authors such as David Christian, Cynthia Stokes, Fred Speier, and Yuval Harari: Big History. It aims not only to tell the history of humanity-as-a-whole, but also the history of the cosmological universe, ecological history, and the geological history of the planet—marrying thus not only the Global South and North, East and West, tribes and civilizations, but also the natural sciences and humanities. This approach has recently gained prominence as it was endorsed and funded by Bill Gates.

There are obvious advantages to centering education as a whole around such a perspective, since it offers a holistic and unifying backbone for all that is being taught and learned within the social and natural sciences, helping young minds to parse the pieces together into a meaningful story, making the subjects more relevant and interconnected. The world, after all, does not consist of separated subjects in a curriculum.

But why am I bringing up the teaching of Big History in the context of the rise of the Global South? Well, to create a truly functional global society—and thriving members of such a society—the issue is not only to bridge and balance South and North; it is equally an issue of creating shared global narratives that help to navigate the global world itself. And here is our claim:

• The countries that invest more in a Big History education, to which global perspectives are intrinsic, will likely be at a competitive advantage over others in the global market of goods, services, and ideas.

So the reckoning with the rise of the Global South does not only entail an expansion of the reach of education combined with a balancing of South and North perspectives; it also entails, to a significant extent, a transcending of such dualities in the first place—placing a larger part of the narrative every human is equipped with on the global level.

Even if there is good reason to believe, as we will come back to on the following page, that learning Big History may put populations at a competitive advantage, a certain reluctance to reshape how history is taught is to be expected among almost all countries: the national and ethnic histories are dearly held building blocks of national cohesion, identity, and sense-making. It may feel wrong to put such sacred stories within a larger narrative of the global, the ecological, and the cosmic.

For this reason, such reformations of education can and should also be made hand-in-hand; countries could mutually pledge to shift parts of their curricula to Big History. After all, the national and ethnic stories we live by may perhaps be at least somewhat compromised with when knowing that other countries are adopting narratives that view one’s own culture and history more charitably and as an important part of a larger whole. Hence, this issue also requires strategic alliances and diplomacy at the highest level. The result could be a world population which understands itself as layered in global, transnational, national, civil society, organizational, group, and individual levels, easier cooperating across all of these. These levels or layers of social organization are illustrated in the following model:

The “7 layers of social emergence”. Please note that these don’t need to be presented as a pyramid or hierarchy, and could just as easily be viewed increasingly wide-reaching organic wholes. The top level “Global” can also be called “Planetary”.

As human beings, we are all socialized, not least through education, into these different layers: we are granted a complex individual identity; we are part of groups, such as families and movements; we learn about the existence of incorporated groups such as firms and NGOs, perhaps working for some of them; we take part of platforms and commons, such as the media landscape; we are citizens (or not) of nation states; we learn about the transnational relations between states; and we are granted some understanding of the planet and humanity-as-a-whole, the global/planetary level.

My point here is that education can help each person to identify, understand, and feel comfortable with each of these layers. As of today the transnational and global layers are still emerging. The countries that have populations who feel a native and meaningful relationship to these two layers are likely to be able to shape them in their emerging forms the most. The global layer does not only exist at summits with leaders of countries; it pervades all of the other layers. Individuals can act and think more transnationally and globally; as can movements, companies and media landscapes.

It is not difficult to see how equipping larger populations with a native sense of the transnational and global would not only make people feel more at home in an otherwise confusing world—it could also leave them better equipped to shape those emerging realities, including global governance, and make the best of their potentials.

And who is best suited to take up the most global perspectives? Is it the populations of the Global North? Perhaps not. Given the high dynamism and inventiveness of the educational sector in the Global South, and given that education is, to a greater extent, being introduced from scratch there, and given that the Global South perhaps has an even stronger thirst for new stories about reality—these countries may be best poised to take the lead as truly global natives.

Leapfrogging into the Future

An instructive example is offered by the history of education of Scandinavia, described in Lene Andersen and Tomas Björkman’s 2017 book, The Nordic Secret. Today the Scandinavian countries are known to be well “developed” by most internationally recognized measures, such as the Human Development Index, low corruption, and measures of public happiness. But a little more than a century ago, this was not the case: they were among the poorest countries in Europe (a large portion of the Swedish population migrated to America around this time due to starvation and hard times).

Educational reformers made it into an explicit goal of these countries to support the “spiritual development” of their wider populations, inviting young adults to “folk high schools”, based around the German Romantic idea of Bildung; i.e. the growth and flourishing of the whole personality by learning and experimenting with life. Such learning facilities were established around Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The authors claim that this spurred a general development of the population—including the peasant population—and that this has been the basis of how well these countries transitioned into modern life and industrialization.

In effect, the Scandinavian countries leapfrogged into a leading position in the modern world. This was a kind of “developmental” leapfrogging. They didn’t follow the paths of Britain, Germany, and France step by step. They learned from them and jumped right to a later developmental stage of their societies, cultures, and economies—creating societies that were in many ways preferable to those in continental Europe.

At the present moment in history, a similar opportunity may be presenting itself to countries that never fully entered into the modern, industrial world on fair and equal terms. As global society shifts from industrial to postindustrial, automatized, and digitized economies, it is not inconceivable that those countries that educate their populations more along the lines of these new life-conditions, emphasizing global perspectives, the quality of relationships, and inner personal growth, can perhaps leapfrog into strong positions in the world economy and its multifaceted, global culture.

The rise of the Global South may very well take place through such a leapfrogging by means of forward-looking and timely reformations of educational systems. After all, in the industrial age, you needed significant financial capital to start a factory. Today, you need a laptop, an Internet connection, an inventive mind, some new perspectives, a global outlook, a good network of collaborators, and an ability to maintain intrinsic motivation and good relationships—to create a successful startup. In many ways, this is a more democratic form of economic competition, and one where education can make an even greater difference.

When the great challenge of expanding education to deprived populations around the world is tackled, perhaps they can be granted, in that education, the tools to truly participate and lead the way into a more global and digitized society. It is thus not a question of “walking in the steps” of “developed countries”—it is about forging a new path for a new moment in history.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

“Learning is life’s most important skill.”

—Tony Buzan

The Inner Development Goals of Education

Ithas been emphasized, in my studies and elsewhere, in more ways than we can give justice to, that conventional education is too cerebral; too much focused on mental and cognitive capacities, and that it is often blind to learning goals that go beyond “left brain thinking”: the intuitive, the sense of wholeness and meaning, the creative, the playful, the experiential—the aspects associated with the “right hemisphere” of the brain (let us disregard for a moment the debate around the debate around the neurological appropriateness of this division and use it only metaphorically to get at the point).

The complexity of the modern world disconnects us, also as learners, from certain “lost ways of knowing”, ways of knowing that go beyond conceptual knowledge and have more in common with crafts and art.

So education may need a proper reintegration of the left and right hemispheres of the brain; and, in some ways, this reflects a reintegration of (presumably more reductive) Western education with the (presumably more holistic) Eastern traditions.

But if this critique is so prevalent, one is compelled to ask—in parallel to our earlier discussions—why the cerebral and dry nature of education persists with such apparent tenacity, and why it is so often disconnected from the intrinsic will to play?

A simple explanation would be that engaging the full person in a learning experience is more difficult. Once certain goals have been set, and once “what is measured” is defined, teachers and learners alike naturally retract to the lowest common denominator: what needs to be taught, what will come on the test, and how does one pass the course?

Factual knowledge can be taught and learned relatively directly—but meta-skills which involve the whole person and their experience of life, can only be taught and learned indirectly; by creating favorable conditions for the spontaneous and transformative to occur as a welcome surprise.

Meta-skills involve those qualities that cannot be pinned down to any specific set of facts or professional capacities; they involve issues of how one relates to the world, to oneself, and to other people. Meta-skills are the larger frameworks within which we use our skills, capacities, and talents; as such, they are closer to traits or properties of the person, than to knowledge.

The Oak Island (or in Swedish, Ekskäret) Foundation have proposed five such meta-skills—or what they call “transformative capabilities”—which they endeavor to support, especially in business leaders and international leaders:

• openness,
• perspective seeking, (not just perspective taking)
• sensemaking,
• inner compass, and
• compassion.

Each of these qualities can, in fact, be developed according to research cited in the Oak Island’s report. This framework was later develop into what is today the Inner Development Goals that were recently officially adopted by Costa Rica, to be implemented across their public sector.

Would the world look differently if there was a conscious and deliberate effort to help all people to develop such meta-skills via the systems of education?

And it certainly seems relevant to ask: If our environments are changing more rapidly, and economies evolve through transitions, does it not make sense to direct greater resources to cultivating meta-skills, which are useful no matter what specific skills we may need to acquire, hone, and use during our lifetimes? If meta-skills are the frameworks within which our talents are brought together and used, are they not a form of learning more likely to matter?

Traits Last Longer

The set of “transformative capacities” suggested by the Oak Island Foundation refers to meta-skills that are worthy goals, but perhaps not the most basic and fundamental ones from a strictly educational/schooling perspective. Qualities that make each person function and thrive may include:

• Good learning capacity (needs continuous training and drilling)
• Good social skills (as reflected in the Inner Development Goals)
• Self-knowledge (this can be informed, for instance, by the psychological flexibility theory—it later found its way into the Inner Development Goals)
• Positive emotions
• Strong physiology
• Good relationships
• Good health habits

All of these present viable alternatives as goals of education. Some of it has already discussed in prior articles in this series.

But I am presenting this list to make an argument: It is traits like these that are likely to be the strongest predictors of a good life. More so, perhaps, even than traits like openness and compassion (which are, naturally, also very important). It is, all things considered, possible to imagine a person that is not very open, and not very compassionate, but who still lives a happy and productive life, good for themselves, and good for others. It is more difficult to imagine a person with poor learning capacity, poor social skills, no self-knowledge to speak of, no positive emotions, a weak health and tense body, poor relationships, and poor health habits—who still thrives and is good for others. Or, vice versa, it is almost inconceivable to imagine a person who has all of these qualities, but still lives an unhappy life.

And it is not difficult to make the case that almost any subject learned in conventional schooling—save perhaps for reading, writing, and basic arithmetic in a modern society—would have a greater impact on the likelihood of a life well lived.

I do not claim that this list is final. What we seek to underscore is the way of thinking, the perspective: The traits that are undeniably useful to all people, in all walks of life, that make up the most basic building blocks of a good life should be identified—and invested in through education. Such qualities may not sound as lofty and exciting, but that does not make them any less important. They have exceedingly high likelihood of producing good results—and avoiding bad results—over the lifespan. Even the gifted poet or scientist can collapse under the weight of the difficulties of life, and while society of course depends upon there being good poets and scientists, it also depends on the general resilience of those same people.

And these basic qualities are, unsurprisingly, interrelated: strong physiology affects emotions, which affect relationships, which affect social skills, which affects self-knowledge, which affects good health and learning habits—and so on. Each of the qualities can, in turn, be cultivated and trained, not least by designing the educational systems to this end. Perhaps, then, these qualities should be made the top priority of the whole educational system. It should likely improve results on other learning goals as well, be it within arts, chemistry, or languages.

With such a stronger foundation within each person—and within the networks of people, since the quality of their relationships is included, and since the health, habits, and emotions of one affects another—the “loftier” meta-skills may also come within reach. Meta-skills are transformative; which is to say that they are demanding—they require serious inner work. A first step can and should be to create a resilient foundation for such work to be fruitful and meaningful.

Just how difficult are the meta-skills to cultivate? How can education truly entail meetings that “touch the soul” and transform our perspectives? If we are to believe one of my interviewees, John Vervaeke (professor of cognitive science) present-day cultures around the world are subject to a severe “meaning-crisis”; a collective, existential crisis pertaining to the lack of sense-making capacities in the populations. According to Vervaeke, many of the maladies that societies around the world experience are somehow related to this meaning-crisis. Religions used to offer a whole package of viewpoints and techniques to foster self-knowledge and sense-making, but today they find it difficult to fill this role. Vervaeke suggests, much in line with the Oak Island Foundation, that new structures must be invented and put into place, building on the best interdisciplinary science possible, to help people construct their own sense of meaning and direction in life.

Such work includes, as we have seen in a previous chapter, facing one’s own weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and finding ways to integrate and embody them. How could we, for instance, be compassionate and curious for new perspectives, if our inner lives are still wounded, clenched and confused?

Briefly stated, yes, cultivating meta-skills is a difficult task, and it may require some resilience, energy and effort on the parts of everyone involved. Meta-skills require transformational work, and that often includes periods of confusion and even painful work. And yet—without meta-skills like compassion and openness—how could we hope to have the capacities to not only live productive lives, but to collectively tackle the global issues of climate change and technological disruptions?

This view of education—that its main aim is to foster basic resilience, happiness, and meta-skills—of course partly contradicts the focus on making learners employable on the job market. Yet, there is reason to believe that the nature of job markets would itself be transformed if such meta-skills were successfully cultivated throughout society, and thus pervading the economy. Highly functional people with good relationships are, in the long run, also less likely to end up unemployed, burned out, or on sick-leave.

Simply: traits last longer than specific skills. So the priority should be: first, the building blocks of basic resilience; second, the meta-skills; and third, skills and knowledge. That has the highest likelihood of educating people in ways that are genuinely useful. We may even end up with more useful and specific skills and knowledge for it, as people take better charge of their lives and steer it with an inner compass. This is core to the new paradigm of education.

Learning to Learn

The odd man out in the list above is the “learning how to learn” part. It deserves a brief discussion of its own, not least because the argument here is somewhat counter-intuitive and may seem to run counter to our other arguments.

Granted that times change and job markets evolve, we must all become better at quickly and easily learning new skills. But also our ability to make sense of the world is, arguably, limited by our sheer capacity to take in, process, and organize information meaningfully. What holds people back from doing and trying new things, and thus from growing and living a full life, is often simply how daunting it is to learn an entirely new field or topic.

In conventional schooling, there is little or no emphasis on this quality or trait after the first few years. As children are socialized into the schooling system and culture they learn, of course, to read, to take notes, to sit and listen, and to do home assignments. But after this initial period, they are left to their own devices, never again actively practicing their reading speed and apprehension, their note-taking techniques, their memory techniques, their structuring capacities, and their studying techniques (how many repetitions, and so on).

Training this capacity, the capacity to learn, is not necessarily something that occurs spontaneously. In especially conscientious and diligent students, yes, but in most children and youth, never. The result is that very many struggle with getting themselves to actually do schoolwork and home assignments over the years—simply because it is draining and elicits more negative than positive emotions.

“Learning capacity” could become a school subject throughout the years, actively and deliberately drilling and repeating tasks that pertain to learning how to learn. It is, naturally, hard to imagine a more boring subject: repeating speed-reading techniques, practicing memory, going through notes, structuring work plans. The very word “drilling” makes chills go up spines—and it sounds as though all has been forgotten about making education embrace more of the intuitive and playful.

But drilling the capacity to learn may very well be a sound investment that ultimately pays off even in terms of fun and playfulness: if children are supported to do their assignments more efficiently, more time is left for play and relaxation—without a lingering guilty conscience.

However, the “learning how to learn” argument goes deeper yet. If people are empowered to learn more quickly and easily, their learning autonomy increases, i.e., learners gain more power over what they wish to learn, and learning is one of the most empowering and rewarding experiences of all. If all grow up in an information society, it almost seems callous to leave all children after age 10 on to their own devices when it comes to this core capacity. It is even a question of personal freedom or emancipation within an information society, since each person can free themselves more from what others teach or assign then, and learn from their own hearts.

This connects, in turn, to the issue of lifelong learning. If the average person has been diligently trained for years in the art of learning, they will have a higher capacity and lower resistance to learning new things and subject matters throughout their life—which, by the way, serves the meta-skills of openness, perspective seeking, and sense-making.

And then there’s the job-market argument. If job markets do indeed become more complex and volatile, it makes sense to properly equip populations with the highest possible learning capacity.

School cannot always be fun. Even if education is ultimately play, playing can need some scaffolding from time to time. A good game, or playing the piano, may also require some excruciating practice. So education should invest its “necessarily probably boring hours” judiciously. One of the best ways to invest them is, arguably, to drill student repeatedly in how to study easily and efficiently. Therefore, this capacity deserves a place as a basic building block, or meta-skill, of education.

Gender Equality, Sex, and Romance

Gender equality informs many of the Sustainable Development Goals and is an issue that pervades education, too. For girls and women, it is often about increasing the access to education, thus empowering women, combatting structural gender inequalities, stabilizing economies, serving ecological sustainability and improving chances for peace. For boys and men, educational gender equality is more about making the educational systems more adapted to their needs, as boys generally fare less well in conventional schooling than do girls, at least in terms of test scores and immediate learning results.

Here, we would like to consider another take gender equality: that it is, in many ways, a collective capacity or meta-skill of the population, and that it can be developed through education.

The most gender-equal countries in the world also have comparatively extensive programs of sexual education, which of course does not imply a causal relation in either direction. However, considering that the new paradigm of education, we have argued, can and should focus on issues of vulnerability and inner work for the sake of mental health and personal development, the closely related issues of gender, sex, and romance can hardly be avoided.

It is well established in developmental psychology that youths are in the process of establishing identities as sexual and gendered beings, and that this often includes a considerable challenge during this developmental phase—affecting how the person as a whole develops. Budding romantic relationships, or hopes of such, occupy young minds and cut into the core of what many of them are struggling with.

If the goal is for young people to establish positive gender and sexual identities, and to establish pro-social behaviors in the sexual and romantic realms, and if the goal is to create a solid basis for good relations between the genders throughout society and over the life course (which, in turn, affects the quality of family relations, the psychological basis of society)—then issues of gender, sex, and romance should also be supported through education, simply because there is no other place that reaches such a large part of the population.

Basic sexual education involves issues of biological procreation, birth prevention and basic norms concerning the autonomy of one’s own body, desires, boundaries, and sexual consent. Imparting such knowledge to young men and women help to clear confusion and establish that each person has freedom to make informed choices.

But such practices can be expanded. Insecurities and difficulties to take the perspective of the opposite sex (or other genders) can cause gender relations in whole societies to be wrought with conflict, with control of female sexuality, and with emotional wounds that play out over the lifespan, affecting the most important relationships in people’s lives.

In line with the rest of this report, it may thus be argued that a secure sexual and gender identity should be a learning goal—as well as the capacity to take the perspectives of other genders. Such knowledge is, perhaps, not best taught in class or discussed directly in the presence of classmates. But professional sexologists can and should lead workshops in safe settings, perhaps away from schools, maybe mixing students from different schools, and delve into the more difficult and sensitive matters that are otherwise left untouched—but where there is nevertheless much expertise and knowledge that the young simply never acquire.

If gender equality is to be achieved at a more real and deeper level, it must also pervade the realm of sex and courtship, as this is a major interface between the genders. A simple thought experiment underscores the importance of this point: Would we rather want that our sons and daughters live in an environment where others have confusions, insecurities, and frustrations around such issues, or in a setting in which such issues have been made visible and dealt with to the greatest possible extent?

In conclusion, even meta-skills like compassion and openness may not go deeply enough. People’s real emotions, and their personalities, are shaped by their relations, their desires, their hopes and dreams, and by their identities. Gender equality, and what it means to be masculine and feminine, is thus at the heart of the transformations of inner life. There are strong arguments for equipping young people around the world with the means to relate to an deal with such issues—sensitive as the topic may be.

What this entails is an expanded view of gender equality. It cannot be viewed in isolation from issues of gender identity, sex, romance, and family formation—and hence the goal of gender equality leads to these deeper human territories, which, incidentally, also offer pathways for improving mental health and offer a basic building block of human happiness: the art of love.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

“Can we go from f*ck the system, to love the system? In China, the latter is being explored. The problem there, of course, is that it’s a system even less worthy of our love. For a system to be loved, it must merit our love. And a social system—educational systems included—merits our love by being generative of inner thriving and dignified relationships between us, the members of the public.”

— Hanzi Freinacht (who sometimes makes up his own introductory quotes if he can’t find a suitable one)

Breaking Away from the Industrial Education System

In the previous article I discussed how human relationships can be transformed in the world of education. But all human relationships occur within larger social systems—educational relations included. How, then, could human relationships be transformed in a desirable direction without the direct involvement of the systems within which we meet, are defined, and live out our lives?

In this chapter, we bring up that age-old critique of education: that it locks down the lonely individual in an impersonal, mechanical “prison” of sorts, mutilating their personality and extinguishing their creative spark and will to learn by playing.

Naturally, there is more to education than this grim image: schools, colleges, teachers, and professors around the world all do their best to make learning engaging and driven by intrinsic motivation. And in many cases, to a certain extent, they succeed.

And yet—the resistance and critique persist, not least on a systemic level. In the following, we bring up ideas and perspectives that aim to transform these systems. One of the major challenges here is that there can be no “one solution” or one “ideal system”, given that education occurs in so varied contexts and cultures. So if I cannot conjure a solution, at least I can discuss some promising and thought-provoking ideas that may serve as general guidelines for reforming the educational systems from the old paradigm to the new.

Because we are social beings, the systems we live in don’t just shape our social environments; they shape who we are and how we act, even how we think, feel, and perceive. To transform social systems is also to transform our minds and our capacities for empathy and productive relationships. To tackle this issue, we must begin by looking at what the “systems of education” truly entail.

Education Is Not (Only) about Education

The first point here is that transforming education may not even be about education (its practices and content) primarily, but all the more about the many other systems within which it is layered: politics, democracy, public administration, business, accounting regulations, wealth redistribution, the media landscape, the tech industries, and healthcare. A similar case was made by Brent Cooper (political sociologist) when I interviewed him. He maintains that the main issues of access to quality education have to do with the economic system and how it plays out politically—and that reformers of education should look primarily to how the funding of education is organized in society. Transforming education is just as much about transforming society.

In other words, education is not an isolated system; it exists, naturally, within the larger structures of society, such as the state and its institutions, the market, and so on. It is wise not to stare solely at what education looks like to get the whole picture—but to lift one’s gaze and try to see the larger society that surrounds and affects it.

Understanding education as a system often entails issues such as financing and creating enough transnational stability and agreement to sustain it. The Education Commission, under the leadership of former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, published a report in 2016, titled The Learning Generation, focusing on the importance and viability of financing education globally, making certain that countries around the world are equipped to face the disruptions of job markets that automation can bring about, bringing education to deprived populations, the importance of focusing on educating girls, and giving suggestions on budgeting—among other things.

Such issues are indeed vital, and the educational systems ultimately do remain dependent upon the efforts of international leadership and public funding. At the same time, however, it can be argued that such great, global efforts to fund and expand global education simultaneously present a perfect opportunity to reform it—so that the countless billions of dollars that are invested, are also skillfully directed towards transitioning (through eight interrelated pathways, as discussed throughout this article series) from the old paradigm of education to the new one, hopefully better suited for the demands and potentials of the Internet age.

Shared sense-making of what such systemic shifts can and should look like is a vital component of such a bold transition between the old and new paradigms. Hence the need for the present endeavor to offer a complex map of the territory, which stakeholders from across the fields may use to understand their mutual efforts, and to coordinate strategically across sectors, regions, and nations.

It is well understood by most key agents, we believe, that ensuring the future of education is both a matter of quantity (making certain there is enough of it and that it reaches all who stand to benefit) and quality (making certain the teachers are qualified, classes well equipped, and so forth). But there is less unanimity around the issue of the qualitative shift of global education: how the very nature and goals of education may need to change to best serve the world’s populations. It is only if enough key stakeholders from across the board share such a map of the territory (as I am trying to sketch a suggestion for in this ten-part series of articles), if enough of the right people in the right places, partake in this “mind-shift”, that real and sustain systemic transformation is possible.

The alternative, we should stress, may be bleak: Even if the world invests generously in the quality and quantity of global education, there may be a great rift between the reality that people are educated for and the reality that they actually come to face. If the educational systems are not sufficiently geared towards accommodating the new life conditions, issues of destabilization, ecological degradation, mental illness, and technological disruption may persist. Furthermore, if the many heartening attempts to reform education are not coordinated, they may fail due to systemic challenges and lacking understanding of other key agents.

This lands us in a position of both-and. Education must both be transformed as a part of larger, institutional and transnational shifts of society, and it must be transformed from the inside-out, even down to the quality of each personal teacher-student relationship—supported by a strategic use of technology and necessary shifts of perspectives about what education is, and what its purpose is in the first place. If global education is to be rescued from its position of mounting future shock, and if the spark of playfulness is to be saved from too mechanical pedagogy, the systems of education must be redesigned by many brave co-creators.

Skin in the Game

My second point builds upon the first one, and it has been much emphasized during the interviews that were made in preparation for this article series: If education’s future ultimately depends upon the surrounding systems, the practices of education must become better connected to these same systems—to better harmonize with them, to pick up on their changing nature and be influenced and adapted, and simply to improve learning outcomes.

It is an unfortunate effect of the conventional educational systems that they seldom—sometimes never—entail “real work”; i.e. tasks in which there are at least a minimum of external stakeholders who care about the results of any given assignment: not about the grading of the assessment. Many students go through their whole educational experience without ever quite “learning by doing”, as all school work is and remains within the boundaries of a great “as if”. This, if anything, can foster alienation in schools, and it can arguably undermine the sense of self-worth and self-efficacy of students who graduate from a long education but yet have no real world experience to show for it.

“Skin in the game” is a term that has recently gained popularity with the publishing of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2018 book with the same title. Accountability, Taleb argues, is difficult if not impossible to achieve as long as people have no skin in the game, if they don’t stand to lose directly from the consequences of their own decisions and contributions. Likewise, in education, learning to gain confidence and being held accountable, is difficult to achieve without working with real-world projects.

But within the confines of the classroom, it is almost inconceivable to see how students could do projects that are directly relevant to other stakeholders. Hence, education may increasingly need to break out of the classroom, and branch off into other fields of society: industries, healthcare, social services, environmental projects, and so forth. Chuck Pezeshki (complexity scientist, engineer) argues that his engineering students are only able to work in real companies with real stakeholders (and, often, real results for the companies) because of his own long personal history of building up the relationships with those same companies. His work highlights what may be a future professional role within education: establishing contacts to the outside world with as many and as varied agents as possible—so that learners can engage in real projects, with real stakes.

There may be other pedagogical gains from the development of such an approach: That education gains ongoing vital influences from other fields has already been mentioned, but it may also be emphasized that motivation to learn can increase. If students need specific knowledge to successfully finish their real-world projects, this can indeed place teachers in the more privileged position of being a cherished mentor for coveted skills. In short, reconnecting education to society can foster a sense of agency and initiative, rather than passive learning.

Shapes and Forms: From Class to Community Network

The third point connects, in turn, to the second one. If schools and educational settings are less organized as classrooms, and more as nodes that connect to partaking in society through projects—perhaps the schools themselves should be created with another core image or image in mind: the network.

In industrial society perhaps the underlying image of the factory, “mass producing education”, was a suitable alternative for schooling. In a network society, in which education in increasingly tech-driven and project-based, this image may need to be challenged and replaced, at least to a significant part.

The first years of education would naturally still require the networks that form to be locally based: creating schools that are, in effect, little villages with their own vibrant face-to-face communities, so vital to acquiring a sense of trust and safety. Bonnitta Roy (philosopher, background in neuroscience) goes as far as to suggest that such villages would have their own currencies, so that children could buy lunch and resources for their projects and play.  Brad Kershner has organized a “village school” in North Carolina (albeit without its own currency) and claims that—comparing with many school systems he has worked with—this is indeed a superior model for fostering healthy relationships.

But as children age and learn, they may be invited to creating more self-organized and self-governing networks of learning, based around tasks, projects, and interests—while keeping exposure to and connection with a larger schooling community.

Such networked structures of schooling may in turn harmonize well with another topic that our interviewees have brought up, among them Elke Fein (political scientist): sociocratic self-governance.

In so-called “sociocracy”, people are organized into small circles, each with their own tasks, and may decide upon how tasks should be performed through discussion until each member has given consent, “good enough for now, safe enough to try”. Such practices can disperse leadership and authority, but still lead to good management—sociocratically organized schools already exist in Austria (albeit without the network structure) where both teachers and pupils are organized in sociocratic circles. Sociocracy in schools may also offer hands-on learning for life-long participation in democratic societies: listening to others, finding common ground, discussing pros and cons, taking decisions for the common good.

What Is Being Measured?

The conventional system of measuring and grading educational results seems to have few friends among my interviewees and forward-thinking commentators. And indeed, a system can only truly be calibrated to manage that which it somehow measures. What is being left out?

One point that has been brought up is that conventional grading works opposite to the rewarding principles of “gamification”: making learning more like an entertaining game. If a video game starts with zero points, and then you work your way through treasure chests, fruits, and bonus levels, you feel enriched and that you are making progress. But grading starts with an “A” (or whichever the highest grade is) and then your work your way downwards by making mistakes or not knowing answers, and your efforts are marked with a red ink pen in the process. There are certainly issues of simple motivation-boosting techniques that could help learners to feel more motivated and positive about the experience, for instance, by simply turning grading on its head.

But the critique we hear in our interviews goes far beyond that. Zak Stein (Zachary Stein, philosopher of education) maintains that the measuring systems are themselves defunct, in effect measuring skills and capacities in too limited, and ultimately unscientific, ways. This view comes not least from his own experience, going from a underachieving dyslectic interested mainly in music, to a Harvard-educated researcher. He calls for a reformation of the measuring systems so that more just and holistic method comes to the fore: seeing how complex and intricate the independent tasks performed by the students are.

Brad Kershner agrees, through his experience working with children, that the sole focus on test results hinders the design of a truly nurturing education, because it ignores the main piece of the puzzle: the quality of relationships between teachers and pupils.

This view is echoed in related manner by Gregg Henriques (clinical psychologist, professor). He notes that the measures of qualitative variables like wellbeing, relationships, self-development, emotional maturity, and perspective-taking skills are entirely lacking: and yet, they may very well constitute the most important part of what is means to grow and learn. Introducing such measures into educational systems may require a host of measuring devices—but these are in fact already available within the discipline of psycho-metrics, and may be ready to use after some adjustments.

How would education be guided differently in its design, if the measuring systems were both more holistic, had better prediction of real-life outcomes, and included more variables pertaining to human happiness and flourishing? The mere existence of such measurements might change how agents within the educational systems view themselves and how they understand and enact their work.

Said differently, the measuring systems of education may be one of the major flaws in the current paradigm: they force teachers and students into an impersonal and distance machine of quantification. But this does not mean that grading should be abolished altogether; rather, our interviewees seem to hold, it should be reformed in a more holistic, sensitive, accurate, and relevant direction. This arguably present a great task for reformers of education.

How Silos and Egos Prevent Reform

On a last, darker, note about systems change, the interviewees that I have spoken to from the world of developing international education—working in governments and large organizations—bring up the need for greater fluidity and shared understanding among themselves. It is thus not only children and teachers who may need to reorganize and find new ways to self-govern and measure result.

Too often, our interviewees claim, sometimes with frustration, the different organizations and governments are too siloed, too isolated from one another, and they have too divergent organizational and professional interests. It could even be argued—controversial as the matter may be—that “egos” get in the way of long-term, productive cooperation. Instead, agents of change often feel gridlocked by the agents of other, but related and interconnected, fields. Even on the level of international leadership, sensing and caring human beings are trapped in the system, in the wrong human-to-system relations.

Hence, the systems of education may need not only to be reorganized from the bottom up (in the schools and universities themselves), nor only vertically (reconnecting education to other fields of society), but also from the top down: how the leadership of global education is organized and how its different branches relate to one another.

Real change to the systems of education cannot be achieved unless such siloes are broken, interests aligned, and lines of communication clearly established. This requires its own practice and strategic work at the top international level—and resources and attention can and should be directed to this end, for the benefit of all parties and for the sake of future education. A good place to start may be to discuss the overall map of shifting global education from the old paradigm to the new—and forming project-based strategic networks while working out differences by facilitated meetings until consent is granted by all participants to move ahead.

Changing the future of education is thereby—again—not about education itself, but just as much about developing the systems around (and above) the field of education itself.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

“To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground”.
— Stephen Covey

Grounding Education in Human Interaction

In a very general sense, education is a social undertaking; it is fundamentally about humans that interact in a manner that helps people to grow and to learn, building on the human capacity to play.

Every time we meet and interact with another person, there is at least some aspect of play, and through that, we change. Each change is usually small; but over time, the interactions shape our inner worlds—until we come out as citizens, as members of society, as doctors, programmers, yoga teachers, or philosophers. And some rare meetings transform us profoundly.

The question thus naturally presents itself: How can human beings meet in educational settings in ways where motivation is spurred, curiosity nurtured, participation encouraged, and emotions and needs respected and developed? To be realistic, most meetings, in most settings, don’t truly “touch us”; we are left largely unchanged. Some meetings even feel detrimental to our health and development, and some feel overly draining. Can impoverished educational interactions become fewer, and the productive ones become more commonplace? How can we make education, as it were, touch the souls of learners? To answer this, we must venture into the realm of psychology—and into the realm of inner experience, of emotions, of what development means in terms of real, felt, and embodied human relations.

But can anything new really be said on this topic? Whereas technology has changed considerably over time, inviting us to new analyses for our times, the nature of human relationships is arguably more universal and consistent across time. So if people have studied this issue already for centuries, and if every teacher has their own lifetime of experience, can we truly expect to say anything new about it?

There are indeed precursors for all of the arguments that I will make in this article. But there do indeed appear to be new “social innovations” that deserve attention and to be tried out in new contexts which today are not part and parcel of our conventional educational systems.

And it goes farther than that; our educational systems seem to perpetually have difficulties with including “the whole person” into the process. There appear to be ways in which we think, feel, and act around education that stem from habits that pertain to the “old paradigm” of education (the industrial)—and these habits can be made conscious, be challenged, and, to an extent, be replaced with habits and perspectives that would serve education better in the new emerging life conditions. It makes sense to say, thus, that there are indeed revolutions waiting to happen in the realm of educational relationships.

In the following I present a few themes that have come up in studies and interviews concerning the nature of pedagogical relationships. Each of them offers some ideas and perspectives on how education could travel the path towards becoming more listening, more human, serving the whole person.

Make Mental Health a Learning Goal

It should be an uncontroversial statement that human happiness and flourishing are key goals of all societies in the world. And nothing is more antithetical to this goal than mental health problems. WHO estimates that globally, 16% of people aged 10–19 suffer from mental health issues that significantly affect their lives. Half of all mental health problems start by age 14, most cases remaining undetected and untreated, depression being the leading problem.

Given that education is the main activity of youth, also in low- and middle-income countries where more than 80% of the world’s youth currently live, could educational systems be consciously and deliberately geared to foster mental health? Could mental health become a global learning goal? This question mirrors, in many ways, the recent trend in transnational work with development goals to emphasize IDGs—the Inner Development Goals that are now being pioneered by Costa Rica’s President, with other countries following suit.

Such an endeavor would not only aim to prevent the “damage” and “costs” (human and economic) of mental illness; it would aim to improve the conditions for mental health across the board, also going from okay to good, and from good to great, in the lives of as many people as possible.

Indeed, if education is to be humanized and centered upon the flourishing of each person, what could be a more viable goal of education than mental health? This would require active and deliberate training in skills and traits that are conducive to that end. The long-term payback of such investments could be manifold, since mental illness is associated with numerous costs and squandered potentials, whereas positive emotions and peace of mind give dividends in terms of creativity and a greater capability to cooperate—on a personal, professional, and political (or civic) level. Prevailing mental health can be understood not only to serve the individual, but to stabilize behaviors on a collective level, levelling out public overreactions to political and economic disruptions in changing times.

What could such educational interventions for mental health look like? A couple of empirical examples may be useful to illustrate:

1. One meta-study that reviews research on preventive and treatment-based programs in low- and middle income countries shows that schools can offer effective interventions, even for children in areas with armed conflict, with successful results. This includes peer support groups and training teachers in how to impart qualities of emotional resilience to youth and children; the strongest evidence is for preventive programs that target everyone, and that last longer and are consistent over time. Results include lowered levels of PTSD, depression, bullying, violence, and school dropouts. Similar results are available for socioeconomically deprived neighborhoods in high income countries.
2. Simple forms of preventive group therapy can make a difference. When ACT (Acceptance Commitment Therapy) and other empirically validated methods were universally applied in the northern Swedish municipality of Haparanda following 2013, depression rates among 16-year-olds went down from 9.5% to 1.5% in two years.
3. Meditation (and related practices) in schools can improve the lives of students and teachers alike, improving overall learning outcomes. Here is a summary report of results in The Atlantic: “Schools have also begun experimenting with the practice and discovering that its techniques can help its students. When a school in New Haven, Connecticut, required yoga and meditation classes three times a week for its incoming freshman, studies found that after each class, students had significantly reduced levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in their bodies. In San Francisco, schools that participated in Quiet Time, a Transcendental Meditation program, had twice as many students score proficient in English on the California Achievement Test than in similar schools where the program didn’t exist. Visitacion Valley Middle School specifically reduced suspensions by 45 percent during the program’s first year. Attendance 24 rates climbed to 98 percent, grade point averages improved, and the school recorded the highest happiness levels in San Francisco on the annual California Healthy Kids Survey. Other studies have shown that mindfulness education programs improved students’ self-control, attentiveness and respect for other classmates, enhanced the school climate, and improved teachers’ moods.”
4. Emotional intelligence can be learned, even with brief programs, and studies in physicians have shown that higher emotional intelligence are associated with lower incidence of burnout, longer careers, more positive patient-physician interactions, increased empathy, and improved communication skills.
5. Physical exercise. Just 20–30 minutes of medium intensity cardio workout per day (or even every second day) will cure and prevent depressionto an extent that equals pharmaceutical antidepressants, after six weeks. It also prevents anxiety, improves concentration, working memory, and increases the number of new connections made in the brain, hence also serving learning outcomes.

In other words, there are in fact affordable interventions that can be incorporated into educational systems that would, in tandem with each other, likely have dramatically positive effects on global mental health—and they are not only conceivable in rich countries.

Could the educational system be designed, wholesale, with the express purpose of improving mental health, using all of these interventions (or corresponding ones that prove better) and more?

Decentering the Individual and Putting Relations First

Naturally, the quality of human relationships in one’s life is a predictor of mental health (and happiness)—and mental health is, in turn, a predictor of the quality of human relationships. Hence, to truly center upon the wellbeing, thriving, and inner development of each individual, educational systems must be geared to decenter the individual, and view each learner more in terms of their relations—a global turn towards a relational pedagogy, including at least five dimensions:

• Student/pupil peer-to-peer relations(as these are instrumental to mental health across the developmental phases of childhood, youth, and young adulthood);
• teacher-student relations(as the quality of these relationships determine much of the quality of teaching and learning);
• teacher peer-to-peer relations(as the quality of these affect the teacher’s resilience and emotional foundations for empathy and motivation);
• person to nature relations(as discussed earlier, this can affect mental health), and,
• overall culture or atmosphere of schools(as the qualities of the local culture of each school can affect the prevalence of aggressive behaviors and transgressions.)

Taken together, education must create the best possible conditions for each person to establish nurturing relationships within and beyond the educational setting. In turn, as is well established in social psychology, these relationships contribute to each person’s evolving relation to the self.

Ultimately, a person’s sense of self determines who they feel themselves to be and how they view their place in the world. Mental illness, in turn, very often revolves around a wounded or confused sense of self, which is both constituted by, and reflected in, their relationships. Good relationships have also been shown to be a major protective factor against drug use and addiction.

It is only by reaching into this deeper psychological layer of what it means to be human that education can be truly transformative; hence it only is at this relational level that mental health can be achieved as a societal goal. And the means to do so is primarily by increasing the chances of enriching relationships in each person’s life.

To serve global mental health through education thus means to put in clear focus the relational nature of each learning and growing human being—developing the whole emotional and relational atmosphere within which each person plays, learns, and grows. This requires a reorientation of the educational systems towards fostering positive relationships; not least by interventions that target the inner development of all children and teachers, so that these, in turn, provide emotionally nurturing environments for one another.

Trauma and Communities of Embodiment

Many of my interviewees have emphasized—in subtle and sensitive ways that don’t easily translate into report writing—the importance of the quality of how each human being is met, heard, and recognized in the learning environment.

My interviewees have drawn on many examples: From how one becomes fully present to another person by means of cultivating one’s own inner qualities, to cultivating emotional authenticity as a teacher, to spiritual aspects of finding a purpose to learning, to using examples of community life from indigenous cultures, to co-creating local “mythologies” in which everyone has a role and all are connected to a greater whole (like nature), to establishing teacherly authority by means of showing skills and qualities that the learners wish to acquire, to cultivating the love of children as a motivating force of teaching—the list goes on.

What many of these discussions come back to is the impulse to somehow include a larger part of the person, the human being, into the process of learning, to somehow “touch the soul” of the learner. It appears, briefly put, that education is incomplete if it does not touch upon the difficult, contradicting, and vulnerable parts inside each of us. Education can teach us new skills and knowledge without delving into the deeply vulnerable (and how it manifests as tensions in our bodies), but it appears to be limited in its capacity to guide us through positive personal transformations, so that we can experience healthy and profound shifts of perspective and sense of self.

A challenge thus presents itself: To create spaces within educational life that are safe enough for at least some shared therapeutic work to occur in the learning community.

Roughly speaking, because life is difficult and wrought with contradictions, we all experience at least some level of trauma, some level of psychological wounds that fester within us. Such trauma affect our own development and negatively impact our relationships, often working from outside of our own conscious awareness.

The issue is to bring as much of this into each person’s own awareness as possible—and from there on, working with body, mind, and emotions, to integrate that trauma, healing the wounds, and turning inner insecurities and weaknesses into transformational growth; i.e. growth not of a specific kind of knowledge, but of our personality and sense of self.

However sensitive and difficult the task may be, the rewards of successfully creating practices in which trauma is recognized and integrated into the conscious personality may be great for individuals, communities, and societies around the world. Given that much expertise has already been developed in this field, could it somehow be applied within education, as a part of the goal of improving global mental health?

Educational systems may have the possibility of creating communities of embodiment, meaning that they create settings in which students practice getting in touch with the direct experience of their bodies, and work through issues and tensions that are brought about by social and emotional difficulties. This is the process of “embodiment”. This would require especially brave researchers, practitioners, and educational innovators to collaborate—because it is about including the most vulnerable, and thus the most difficult, parts of what it means to be a human: the raw, the hidden-away, the disowned, and the disembodied.

There are risks and difficulties, no doubt, in dealing with such inner work. And yet, if education is truly to serve the flowering of each person—how can these issues be avoided? If carefully coordinated with the other pathways suggested in this series of articles, I believe, however, that it may be workable—and invaluable. For one thing, it could produce more emotionally and socially balanced leaders throughout society.

Cultivating Trust: the Hard Currency of Education

What is the hardest currency of an educational relationship? Innovation anthropologist Erika Tanos suggests that it is trust, or the level of trust between teachers and students—as well as the level of trust between students, trust in the schooling environment and curriculum, the trust between personnel, and so on.

It is not difficult to see that high levels of trust are necessary for a “community of embodiment” (as suggested above) to successfully emerge. But beyond that, every learning situation builds on trust: Does the student trust that the teacher will know what is relevant for them to know? Do they trust that the home assignments they are given make sense? Do they trust they can try and fail but still be well-regarded? Do they trust the friendship and support of their peers—or must they expend much energy to avoid being scorned or excluded?

A richer environment of trust can be said to affect almost every aspect of the pedagogical relationships through which learning outcomes can be achieved. And the greater the mutual trust, the lower the costs that go into surveillance and control (which always come with psychologically detrimental side-effects, thus undermining the learning goal of good mental health). It is perhaps not an exaggeration to claim that trust is thus “the hard currency” of education; the more you have of it, the greater the leeway is to produce more deep and complex learning outcomes. Without it, learning outcomes can only be relatively superficial—and, again, often at the expense of mental health.

But trust, incidentally, cannot be artificially created: It can only be earned in and through relationships. In turn, the prevalence of trust in educational settings feeds into the overall trust between members of society, thus affecting how well society functions at large, as has been shown by political scientists.

Trust has at least four dimension: trusting in the competence of one another, the reliability of one another, the goodwill of one another, and that one’s interests are aligned. Cultivating trust in educational settings must engage in explicit practices to foster each of these four dimensions.

A possibility could be to shape teacher educations so that they include knowledge of the science of trust—and how it is cultivated and maintained. Trust has many direct and practical uses. For instance, a good teacher can invoke confidence by putting greater faith (and trust) in a student than the student had in themselves, spurring them to achieve beyond their previously self-assessed capacity—thus stimulating growth in their sense of self.

Trust, in turn, may be seen as a prerequisite for creating a greater sense of safety in learning environments. As levels of anxiety and social stress go down, when “fight or flight” modes in the brain are tuned down, the willingness to play—and thus to learn—increases.

An investment in trust is an investment in safety, is an investment in play, is an investment in growth. Trust requires efforts and thus resources. Could we imagine a global alliance for increasing the levels of trust in education?

Through my studies, I have come to believe that it is indeed meaningful and useful to consider how human-to-human relations can be transformed in the world of education, in turn transforming the emotional and deeply personal qualities of all members of our global, interconnected society.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

“Technology is not neutral. We’re inside of what we make, and it’s inside of us. We’re living in a world of connections—and it matters which ones get made and unmade”.

—Donna Haraway

Turning the Tide from Disruption to Educational Potential

Itwould be a bleak reality if technology offered only challenges and disruptions to education that somehow need to be accounted for. Yet more numerous are the voices that stress the potentials for improving—or rewiring—education in the 21st century, by the use of technology.

But there is little reason to believe that such improvements to education will happen merely as the result of the introduction of new technologies. Rather, they are likely to occur chiefly through synergies between the worlds of tech and education.

The rationale for such a strategic partnership is not difficult to see: tech industries are interested in tech-savvy workers and consumers; governments and supporters of education are interested in using tech to enrich learning in its widest sense.

Very likely, within decades, education can and will be entirely transformed by the use of new technologies. Early adopters will likely have an advantage over others. This path is, however, far from straightforward. It can be shaped in many different ways, and not only by the innovations and business interests of the tech and ed-tech (educational technology) industries, but just as much by how the education sector itself adapts, innovates, and builds alliances with tech. And while this is a dynamic that is hard to predict, it can certainly be shaped—or, at the very least, education can be designed more or less well to materialize technological potentials.

Educational design, on an institutional level, can thus affect the outcomes of technology. Some outcomes may be more desirable than others, or preferable in different ways, or have unwanted or unexpected side-effects. It is thus important to see what the main potentials are, so that they may be balanced and navigated. And, of course, they can be more or less well coordinated with the other seven pathways that are explored in this series of articles. It is time that this debate takes a front seat in educational design.

Big Data and AI to Solve the Problem of Scaling

Despite the best efforts over the last century, the educational systems are almost unanimously criticized by all observers as being too dry, too mechanical, too bland, too focused on quantitative results and measures (more on this last point later). They all say that children are playful and curious, but that schooling and education, at least partly, kill that spark. Univocally, commentators ask for a more humanized, sensitive, and person-centric form of education—but from thereon, unsurprisingly, the ideas and analyses begin to differ.

The question thus presents itself:

• If almost all commentators, educational science scholars, teachers, school principals, philosophers and psychologists of education agree that a more alive and engaging form of schooling and education are needed—why does the conventional schooling system persist?

This is an important question. Different answers to this question are possible, but here we would like to offer a simple, but strong explanation: Education faces a problem of scaling. It is no secret that individual students have different talents, interests, needs, and ways of learning. Yet, if you put children together in a class, and classes together in a school, and schools unified under one nationally defined curriculum, you are forced to design education for the average (or median) student. Individual teachers can make some adjustments to their different pupils, but most of them will after all attend the same lessons, use the same teaching materials, and do the same tests. Schooling systems can allow for some student autonomy, but even this is limited—not all classes can be electable, and too much autonomy without guidance can lose some of the scaffolding and support that conventional teaching offers.

It has even been compellingly argued by neuroscientist Erik Hoel, in his Substack article “Why we stopped making Einsteins”, that the geniuses of past generations all had one thing in common: growing up with personal tutoring. He lays out the unpopular argument that the life conditions of aristocracy, where scaling was simply not a problem, had a pedagogy so superior that it shifted the average learning results by two standard deviations. Said otherwise, 98% of pupils who receive personal tutoring have better results than pupils of conventional schooling—likely because they can use their time more efficiently and engage in an active dialogue of learning with a knowledgeable teacher. Teaching, in such settings, is much better tailored to the individual pupil.

In other words, whatever sensitivities, critiques, and skills may emerge through educational research, philosophy and practical experience, these all face the problem of scaling; when they are scaled up and used in a wider frame, they lose precision and context-sensitivity; they lose sight of the singular learning individual—and the relations of that unique person.

The very fact that education is designed for the many implies that it can never fully accommodate the uniqueness of all; because each person and their context is unique. This is one way of understanding why, again, in spite of an almost ubiquitous sense that education is too mechanical, education is and remains just that: too mechanical.

One bold idea that I have discussed with my interviewees is that AI and Big Data could be used in service of individualizing—and thereby sensitizing and humanizing—education. Imagine if a significant part of students’ progress would be stored (Big Data, this would result in enormous amounts of information) and if AI technology would then analyze these data and continuously improve algorithms that tailor unique learning programs for children, according to what is statistically most likely to yield results such as more time spent studying, better learning results, more flow states, lower stress levels and pressure, and greater general wellbeing and happiness. As Erik Hoel writes and references in his article:

Recent research has shown the two-sigma effect of tutoring using AI tutors compared to traditional online courses. Perhaps in the future once could imagine personalized AI governesses and AI tutors. But by then, will we even need human geniuses?

Through their engagement in studies, learners would hone their own algorithms, making them better and better at predicting favorable outcomes, while still feeding data into the overall system that would become better at predicting what pieces of information and what tasks could be offered to each person at each moment, adjusting the pace of learning, the preferred sources of information, and preferred learning styles.

This would open up for an educational system in which students branch off in a complex manner, while still being connected to a certain overall curriculum, each having their own version and appropriate user interface of that curriculum. Such a system could also match students for projects, optimizing for good relations and productive co-creative endeavors. The role of the teacher could, as many have envisioned in different forms, thus take on a more guiding and mentoring form. The teacher would certainly not be obsoleted—the AI could not fill the need for human connection, for many outdoor activities, and so on. Rather; the teacher could focus and specialize more on these competencies, while spending less time giving lessons to students who are alienated, bored, or overwhelmed. Teachers could likewise access data in the system and get a clearer overview of the real needs and wants of students.

If this sounds utopian, it’s probably because it is. Naturally, there can and will be problems and unexpected side-effects of such a daring endeavor: a dystopian future of education in which learners are isolated by their screens. But given that AI and Big Data are likely to transform society—and education with it—does it not make sense to think of how it can be made to humanize, rather than dehumanize and further mechanize, education? If intelligently and carefully applied, AI and Big Data could even reduce the sheer amount of screen-time that youths are exposed to—by effectively inspiring to taking part in tasks and projects that lie outside of the virtual realm. If that’s what it is optimized to be doing.

Perhaps, after all, the many hours spent online today may be a sign that children and youths are alienated in today’s schooling systems. Maybe, then, technology can be leveraged to win back some of the youth’s attention span, from entertainment, to a more entertaining and individualized education?

Modelling Reality

Another development of ed-tech that is being discussed has to do with making learning more experiential by means of offering tools in which different realities can be modelled in virtual worlds. In physics, many of the simpler formulas can easily fit into graphically attractive programs which would let students play around with input variables and try to see different outcomes. But it doesn’t have to stop there; chemistry, biology (particularly ecology and systems cycles)—and to some extent social science can all be modelled and played with in a similar manner, for instance, by modelling different ballot systems for democracy, or by modelling feedback loops in economic interactions, thus understanding how the basics of economic growth and trade function.

This could serve to let children pick up more intuitive understandings of what otherwise all-too-easily becomes just a dry formula that one forgets after taking the exam. Narratives are important to understanding—but so are playing and modelling for at least a modicum of lived experience and own creativity. Not only can this kind of ed-tech be used to enhance learning of important subjects; it can also train capacities of problem-solving, since there can be problems that need to be addressed through learning-by-doing in a multivariate (but predefined and limited) virtual setting.

Another aspect of such modelling-driven learning is that it offers a useful venue for introducing two important skills: computation and complexity thinking (or systems thinking, an integral part of ecological relatedness). Starting with computation, there is an inherent risk in societies so technologically advanced as today, that the majority of the population develop a great distance towards the technologies which nevertheless comprise so much of our everyday life experience. Hence, it makes sense that at least a simple literacy of computation and programming should be introduced—into an admittedly already too crowded curriculum. Now, if there is virtual modelling in subject after subject, this implies at least some very simple forms of programming, which then intuitively guides young minds to an understanding of the information technology around us.

When it comes to understanding complexity and systems—which we have already mentioned as an important aspect of developing environmental relatedness—the modelling systems can introduce, in subject after subject, the basics of such thinking: feedback loops, stable equilibria, sensitive initial conditions, the difference between non-linear and linear systems, closed and open systems, emergence of new properties, and so on. Such tools can then accessibly and intuitively be learned by large portions of the population, who are then guided to not only think in such terms within each subject matter, but use these same tools to make connections and innovations across the subjects.

In other words, used correctly, there is reason to believe that ed-tech can do more than increase the access to education (with impressive projects like Khan Academy, the many MOOCs and so on). Ed-tech, if allied with renewed practices of conventional education, can upgrade the cognitive functioning of whole populations, making each person more apt at grasping, sensing, and navigating in an increasingly complex world—all while humanizing education and making it suit each person better. The value gained by such advances can truly be immeasurable.

There are many more possibilities—the issue is to get practical and strategical about materializing them, and this must happen not only in the tech startup world, but in a broad alliance among key stakeholders taking a lead in the world of global education.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

“Modernity is disruptive, and I endorse that.”
— Emmanuel Macron

How Schooling Was Future-Shocked

Alvin Toffler’s old term “future shock ” ever applied to anything, it should be to education under the emerging Internet society. Every aspect of life is being transformed by technology with stupendous speed—so how can large and rigid institutions like education possible develop and adapt in tune? How can they not be “future shocked”—i.e., taken by surprise by unexpected winds of change?

Technological disruption is when the introduction of new innovations and technologies change the circumstances so that existing companies and institutions are suddenly ill-equipped to function as they did, even if the technological advance was, in and of itself, something “good”. The market can be disrupted. Governance can be disrupted.

And education can be disrupted. Let’s look at an example. Less than a generation ago, the average youth in the United States spent no time on the Internet. Zero hours.

Today, they spend about 9 hours online—on average; a large percentage thus spend more. That is about the same as the time spent on sleep; leaving about 6 hours of waking offline activities per day. And we haven’t yet counted the time it takes to have meals, which is about an hour. Discounting weekends, the average 15-year-old in the same country spends about 7 hours and 30 minutes a day on education, including going to class.

If you do the math, at least a part of the education activity overlaps with being online. A part of this may be explained by online studying. But a large part—and as teachers in many countries can attest—is simply explained by the fact that the youth are online during class and while studying, doing other things altogether. In a very concrete sense, connected mobile devices disrupt learning in the classroom, competing for the same attention span as the teacher. This development occurred quite inconspicuously; it snuck up on populations around the world; and today it dominates the lives of so many people, young ones especially. Different stances have been taken towards this development.

Emmanuel Macron, the French President, while embracing disruption in the above quote, apparently did not embrace disrupted classrooms—and banned the use of cellphones in French schools in 2017.

Around the world, systems of education are being “future shocked”. How can and should education respond and adapt?

The Price for Cyber Life

The disharmonies created by the pressures of new emerging technologies—and the informational revolution in particular—are not limited to disturbances of the classroom. Indeed, in a profound manner, the ground is shifting in ways that carry far beyond educational settings; but they ripple back into the classroom and learning situations.

In this article, I want to focus on possible solutions, but let us begin with a brief diagnostics of the situation. Note, however, that all of these issues are still being debated and interpreted in different manners.

• Attention hijack. The average smartphone user (in the U.S.) unlocks the device 150 times a day, according to one study. Given that it takes about half a minuteto regain attention in traffic after using a phone, this amounts to over one full hour of lost or lowered attention per day.
• Smartphones affect cognitive functioning? Although direct empirical evidence of effects of cognition and intelligence were still inconclusive in 2017, it is well known that IQ levels in younger populations in developed countries have started going down (after going up each generation during the last century). According to some observers, this may be linked to the increased use of media. One recent influential studyclaims to conclude that this is not due to genetic effects (that higher IQ people have fewer children than lower IQ people), but to environmental effects (something has changed in people’s way of life). If smartphones affect cognitive functioning, this naturally affects education and learning.
• Health effects (mental and physical) of increased media use. American Psychological Association (APA) claims: “Excessive media use in children has been associated with a number of undesirable health outcomes, such as reduced sleep, increased obesity, and language and social emotional delays”.
• Information overload. The average amount of information that people with Internet connections access and are exposed to has increased dramatically, which is potentially highly empowering. But information takes energy and time to process, and can thereby causestress, anxiety, distraction, and confusion. Case in point, there are many theories and opposing views on this topic, too, with further research needed in experimental psychology and cognitive science.
• The growth of digital underclasses. In the “attention economy”, the ability to grab, keep, and harness the attention of others creates a highly unequal distribution of where our attention flows, with many people always relegated to being onlookers, the so-called “consumtariat” (those who only “consume” what others produce in the attention economy). This fosters new forms of class structures.
• Digital divides. The classical discussions of “digital divide” concerns issues of groups in society that have less access to and knowledge of digital technology. Today, another form of digital divide is increasing: For instance, in the U.S., Hispanic and black children spend about 13 hours in front of screens (watching more TV, playing video games, social media etc.), with obvious negative effects upon psychical and mental health as well as psycho-social development. The relationship to information and IT also reinforces (informational) inequalities.
• Polarization and information bubbles. Through social media, self-selection of where time and attention are directed, and reinforcing algorithms, people are separated into media bubbles, so that worldviews drift apart and become more antagonistic to each other. This reinforces not only conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific movements like “flat earth”, but also political polarization, leading to lowering levels of trust across political divides.
• Privacy and cyber security.A large number of new issues of privacy and cyber security become relevant as societies are digitized; from international cyberattacks, to covert mass-surveillance by intelligence agencies, to third-party manipulation of elections, to personal information gathering, to individual hacking of users and “phishing”, to “grooming” of children by sexual predators, to criminality on the “dark web”.
• Platform capitalism. As major platforms take central positions in the information economy, a limited number of companies acquire undue influence as they are both businesses with particular interests, and platforms of infrastructure which others rely upon; centralizing power and resources in the hands of a few global giants.
• Destabilization and rioting. As the Arab Spring and its aftermath clearly showed, online activism through social media can both serve democratic movements, and become a tool of out-of-control rioting and bullying, inciting violence and ethnic conflict as the recent developments in Myanmar is a sad testament to. This can destabilize whole countries and economies. Similarly, terrorist movement can use social media for recruiting new members, as the case of ISIS clearly showed. Migration flows likewise become more difficult for states to control, since information about border controls can spread quickly through mobile devices, as was displayed clearly during the 2015 European refugee crisis resulting from the Syrian war.
• Changing job markets and automation. Nobody knows exactly how and to what extent the labor markets of the coming decades will be transformed—but the consensus is that significant and deep structural changes will occur. This is disruptive in at least two ways: a generation of young, for instance, may expect to become truck drivers like their parents, only to face the onslaught of the full automation—self-driving vehicles. Investments and expectations may be betrayed on a massive scale. Even programmers may face automation by AI. This can make labor cheaper in service markets, creating vast populations below middle-class standards. The second form of disruption lies in the uncertainty of such prognoses; it becomes more difficult for individuals, states, and companies to invest long-term in skills and education.
• Recurring disruptions of the economy. Even as globalization of goods and people has recently slowed significantly, information flows freely in most countries, as does innovation—and disruptive development continues to accelerate along with the pace of life in general, as arguedby the sociologist Hartmut Rosa.

The list could be made longer—the disruptions of technology are more numerous, vast, and complex than any bullet-list. But these are some widely recognized themes. Taken together, these disruptions can and will shake the foundations of educational institutions around the world. Some of our interviewees, from cyberphilosopher Alexander Bard, to IT magnate Jim Rutt, have expressed the more extreme belief that conventional educational systems will be marginalized and deemed irrelevant by the populations most prone to be successful and innovative in the information age, effectively creating a brain drain from these, as innovators and creatives rely more directly upon web-based and experiential learning.

The business analyst and education-tech entrepreneur Scott Galloway predicts that colleges will soon start to struggle to retain their students, being pressed by attractive online education opportunities offered at lower prices. In other words, the technological shifts pose a challenge not only to the quality and content of education, or to its purpose, but even to the perceived relevance, legitimacy and long-term funding of educational institutions around the world.

If the educational systems fail to adapt to the premises that new technologies bring, this can create a major glitch between the knowledge, skills, personalities, and worldviews that people develop, and the actualities of the world we inhabit. The costs in terms of human suffering—and, indeed, squandered human potential—can be inconceivably large.

As things stand, the educational systems around the world do not have fully developed mechanisms for continuously updating how education is done in the face of technological disruptions.

And, indeed, this is the crux of the matter: The second pathway from the old paradigm of education to the new paradigm involves an active, deliberate, and coordinated effort to make the educational systems not only adapt to the advent of existing technologies, but making them adaptable (and self-adapting) to future disruptions.

One of our interviewees, serial entrepreneur and author Tomas Björkman, refers to the acronym VUCA when describing the development of global society: It is increasingly Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous.

The question naturally presents itself, if we are failing the young generation—and the generations to follow—by insufficiently gearing the educational systems for this kind of future? What could be more confusing and detrimental to human needs of security, stability, and meaning-making, than leaving a whole generation to a world that is more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous than they were prepared for, or made to expect?

Acquaintance with the Future

It is not a far-fetched guess that privileged transnational groups who are more in touch with the dynamics of the emerging world economy will be more prone than others to send their children to future-oriented schools and educational settings. These equip student with understandings, tools, habits, networks, and worldviews to thrive and innovate in the tech-driven world. Small sub-groups of relatively privileged children around the world will thus acquire “acquaintance with the future”, learning to feel playful and curious rather than overwhelmed in times that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

Awecademy, a futuristic venue of education seated in Dubai and Vancouver, offers learning in everything from cryptocurrencies, to understanding exponentiality, to AI and automation, to leveraging networks and social media, to space travel, to tools for self-improvement—based on learning-by-doing projects aiming to improve the world, spurring the sense of agency and initiative in students. The very fact that there is a market for such education underscores that there is a rising demand among the tech-native families that is not being met by conventional schooling systems (which again underscores that the educational systems are under pressure from more modular and decentralized forms of learning).

But access to such “future education” remains rather exclusive. This should likely reinforce a new transnational class structure, related less to wealth and holdings, and more to knowledge, social/professional networks, and access to information technology. As middle class jobs are being pressured by automation, the world divides more into those with a close, native relationship to technology and the financial networks around it—and people in the service sector, supporting the lifestyles of these smaller groups.

The question presents itself: Could better “acquaintance with the future” become a staple of global education? Could populations be educated in ways that prepare them for the complexities and potentials of the Internet Age?

And, indeed—as discussed later in this series of articles—could developing countries leapfrog into stronger positions in the world economy by cultivating such practices? In a sense, could the access to the future be made more inclusive and democratic?

This can and would require concerted efforts by agents at the state level, corporate agents, NGOs, and civil society. But it is not unconceivable.

Future Knowledge on the Curriculum

Whereas curricula in schools are already crowded, and the art is to remove and slim rather than to add and thicken, perhaps it is a conceivable goal that all subjects in school should be tasked with serving future acquaintance. In social science, perhaps it makes sense to understand social networks and the dynamics of disruption and cryptocurrencies; in biology, to understand the debates on genetic engineering and CRISPR technology; in history, to study the arches of increasing complexity and former periods of transition and crisis.

As of today, countries still lack concerted action plans for sensitizing the subjects in school to issues of future society. The everyday life of schooling and education is far removed from the frontiers of technology and changes in society. Despite the best efforts of teachers and students around the world, what is implicitly studied and taught, it can be argued, is a more static, and less dynamic, worldview.

Perhaps a good place to start is to build a high-level community of knowledge across countries; an alliance that shares the best practices and research on how topics and skills—such as those within Awecademy—could be made widely available. Acquaintance with the future could become intrinsic to what it means to get an education. This shift may require its own national commissions to oversee its development, and these may need to draw their expertise from a combination of the educational world, and from within the tech hubs themselves—from the natives of global info tech.

If alliances between tech and the education sector grow stronger, the tech industry could be incentivized and inspired to work more strategically towards educational goals, for instance, by breaking off from the “maximize user time spent on the media”, towards optimizations of user interfaces for improved learning outcomes. This could include such features as an “in school” mode for mobile devices, which would aim to limit distraction—making mobile devices present and incorporated in schools, without necessitating bans like the one in France. The possibilities are many, but without the right high-level alliances, it is difficult to see how they could emerge.

Could a network of such commissions be created around the world? Could they be aligned with other agents of information, technology and accelerating development? Could they identify the major disruptors—and work strategically to turn confusing problems into creative opportunities? In turn, would this help populations around the world to manage their lives in a stranger world, to settle in and thrive in the times ahead? Perhaps, even, to feel at home, turning disruptions into potentials?

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

“All things share the same breath—the beast, the tree, the man. The air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.”

—Chief Seattle

Keeping the Gretas in School

As the Greta Thunberg movement of school strikes has put on display, the young generation around the world worries about their future in terms of ecological sustainability and the possible collapse of ecosystems and societies. It is not a farfetched question to ask:

• What might education and schooling look like if students of life were to feel that going to school (or other corresponding outlets of education), rather than striking, was the best way to activate oneself for a sustainable and ecologically rich future?

Viewed from this perspective, the very emergence and persistence of the Greta Thunberg-inspired movements highlight a weakness in the educational systems: Besides a general alienation felt towards schooling, the strikes suggest that education does not seem to sufficiently and effectively harness concern with climate change and related issues of ecological sustainability.

On the flipside, this is not only a challenge; it is also an opportunity. If ecological concern has been shown to energize and inspire youth to learning, innovation, self-organization, and action—couldn’t this be harnessed as a significant force for learning and engagement in the educational process? Can ecological concern be meaningfully directed into playful creativity and intrinsic motivation to learn and to grow?

Arguably, the most ecologically apt educational systems will have an advantage to motivate the young to learn. It may also equip them with skills and understanding that are increasingly useful in times of increasing ecological strain—as both populations and economic output continue to grow.

Awareness, Knowledge, and Connectedness 

In other words, an awareness of ecological issues has taken hold in significant parts of the young generation, but this awareness, while arguably generated both within and outside of the educational systems, is not being met in a way that creates an experience of being meaningfully engaged to issues of environmental concern.

This offers a major challenge to educational systems and cultures around the world: Can the youth come to feel that education expands and deepens the ecological awareness, equipping them with relevant and useful knowledge on environmental issues, while fostering a real, felt, and embodied connectedness to nature and the biosphere?

• Ecological awareness here means “having a sense of real risks and implications to the environment of our everyday lives, of our economies, and of human civilization at large—9 and in turn how the biosphere both enables and limits the growth of our societies”. This is not an issue of either-or; awareness can grow in different ways, affecting consumption patterns, values, career choices and perspectives on almost all other issues.
• Knowledge of environmental issues here means “understanding the nature of ecosystems, the climate, and environmental degradation, as well as knowing and evaluating different ways to effectively, and practically, contribute to a sustainable future”. This includes, of course, how issues of sustainability can be found in and across the subjects studied.
• Connectedness to nature here means “having a positive, emotional, and embodied sense of being part of nature, being capable of enjoying natural beauty, and feeling belonging and solidarity with the biosphere and biotopes within which diverse human societies thrive”.

These three dimensions—awareness, knowledge, and connectedness—together make up what we here refer to as “ecological relatedness”; i.e. how nature and ecology are related to in our lives and culture. This relationship can be more or less conducive to sustainable behaviors and societies—as well as to human happiness and flourishing. Education can and should thus give rich opportunities for students to cultivate their ecological relatedness.

Ecological relatedness is, in turn, dependent upon how we relate to ourselves, to one another, to society, and reality at large. As we will discuss in other “pathways to a new education paradigm” in this report, this has to do with how we are socialized into our roles in society, and how our personalities, relationships and sense of self are cultivated in and through education.

The Two-Way Street of Environment and Education

Education undoubtedly affects how the ecological sustainability is achieved around the world; populations that are ecologically aware, knowledgeable on environmental issues, and feel intimately connected to the biosphere are, it can be assumed, better equipped to create a sustainable civilization.

But there is growing evidence that a clean and healthy environment also seems to affect the outcomes of learning. Consider the following:

• Air pollution affects learning outcomes (and health) negatively, not least as children are more vulnerable to its negative effects, a 2011 study from the US found. The same effect has been observed in a 2013 study from Chile. This should, in turn, be linked to the fact that, in California, it has been shown that black and Latino populations on average breathe in 40% more air pollution than white peers.
• Climate change may affect learning in the tropics negatively, due simply to increased heat, a 2019 study argues.
• Unstable ecological circumstances can disrupt and disturb education in many ways, not least by extreme weather.

The connections are many: via pollution, the quality of nutrition, the disruptions of a destabilized climate, to the access to clean and beautiful natural environments which facilitate physical and cognitive development as well as offering spaces for outdoor schooling—taken together, there can be little doubt that the environment affects education and its quality.

In other words, cultivating ecological relatedness in education can help the environment, and a clean environment can help education—or, vice versa, an impoverished way of relating to the environment can harm it, and a disturbed environment will inevitably affect education negatively. With this point clearly in view, we may look closer at the dimensions of this relatedness: awareness, knowledge, and connection.

Growing Ecological Awareness

On a very general level, the awareness of the seriousness and priority of environmental issues grows with levels of education—in one study, in 27 out of 29 studied countries, people with higher education were shown to be more concerned about the environment.

More educated populations care more about the environment. (Also, Filipinos really care, regardless of level of education.)

In other words, simply educating the population seems to increase ecological awareness and environmental concern. However, having attitudes of environmental concern does not in and of itself necessarily translate to environmentally friendly lifestyles, leading to e.g. a lower personal carbon footprint.

The content and design of education also affect ecological awareness. Because awareness concerns issues such as attitudes and habits and a general sense and understanding of ecology, this can be made a theme throughout education, starting with the more concrete issues even at kindergarten.

One teacher, representing the organization Echo-Schools, suggests: Teach children about the three R’s: reduce waste, reuse resources, and recycle materials.

• Organize tree planting days at school and tell children why trees are important to the environment.
• Encourage children to switch off all appliances and lights when not in use.
• Ensure taps are closed properly after you have used them and use water sparingly.

Such simple and concrete steps can be expanded upon into wider concerns in pace with the maturing and developing minds of students. The curriculums of countries can strategically be designed to, step by step, make environmental awareness into an integral part of what it means to be educated, including attitudes towards consumption, at-home behaviors, public spaces, and the priority and purpose of addressing environmental issues.

Greta Thunberg and other youths learn most of their environmental science and climate forecasts not from school, but over the Internet and of their own accord. Although this may invoke intrinsic motivation and independent learning, it would make sense to explore how the educational system could cater to, scaffold, and productively expand upon this knowledge.

Ecological literacy may

• begin with botanical learning and zoology, in earlier years,
• moving towards learning the science of ecology in middle years (a science that, despite its complex feedback cycles, is surprisingly easy to learn the basics of) and,
• in later years, introducing a general systems thinking (which exists in many forms), including concepts such as feedback cycles, equilibrium, and emergence—and how such concepts apply across the sciences, from the study of flows in physics, to the dynamics of chemical systems, to biological self-regulation, to social systems and societies, and the interactions between said fields.

Many of the experts I interviewed to research this article series have emphasized the importance of breaking away from underlying assumptions within the educational system that have to do with the worldview associated with mechanics—and towards one based more on complexity science. It is argued, by many if not most of our interviewees in various ways, that this can affect how people intuit reality, nature and even themselves.

Some form of “systems thinking” is also useful in all walks of life; it should thus not only be taught at advanced university seminars on chaos theory. Learning the basics of systems thinking doesn’t have to be complicated; it can be learned in intuitive ways through play, analogy and own experience.

Maybe that would keep Greta in school?

Nurturing Connectedness

Yet, even knowledge and awareness are not enough. Our interviewees—and the scientific literature on sustainable behavior — agree that being intellectually aware of environmental concern and scientifically understanding does not seem to translate to sustainable behavior, or environmental sensitivity and care. Rather, this is an issue of emotional connection, combined with knowledge; and that is gained by direct and embodied experiences of the natural world, “outdoor education” and “nature education”.

Even watching nature documentaries that display the beauty of different biotopes does not change this sense of connectedness (even if it can make you a bit happier). You need your own, direct experience of nature. It would surprise few that “children should be out in nature”; but this may also require the acquisition of skills to appreciate, master and enjoy such experiences, and this may require some training and guidance. Time spent in such environments appears to also support not only mental health (the number one health problem in youths, globally), but also motor and physical development (as more muscle groups are used in uneven surroundings, the exposure to trees can activate the immune system, etc).

To thrive in any environment may require sufficient exposure and a bit of support. Modern society, in its current guise around the world, has numerous advantages over the days of old. But it does disconnect us from nature. Here, indigenous communities around the world have something to offer, something we can all learn from, and which we can invite into our educational systems—this has been a recurring theme that our interviewees have brought up.

This needs to be studied and applied—and connected to issues of how the self grows, and which mythologies we are brought up with, i.e. which meaning-making stories we are told about the world and our place in it. But which countries, NGOs, and networks would take on such a sensitive and difficult task, as to learn from indigenous communities—and translate these ingredients into the socialization and education of children and youth in modern life?

Here is a role for the indigenous communities around the world (such as pioneered by the Amazon Sacred Headwaters initiative); one that, apparently, may be necessary for civilization to thrive and survive—and for people to feel happy and at home in the world. Connectedness to nature, in turn, connects back to the issue of access to fresh natural environments, and it connects to the other pathways: to relate to nature, we must also learn to relate to one another and ourselves—as well as to technology, this strange child of nature to which we turn in the following article.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

“Culture arises and unfolds in and as play”.

— Johan Huizinga, Dutch historian 1872–1945

A Time Between Worlds

Zak Stein (philosopher of education) has famously noted that our educational system is stuck in “a time between worlds”. It’s a time that has begun to shed the Modern educational frameworks, but no Protopian or Metamodern framework has emerged to fill the void.

(“Metamodern” can mean either the society beyond modernity, or the time between modernity or what comes after, depending on who you ask. I discuss this here.)

There is today the opportunity to shape the development of Global Education for the next decade—right at the nexus in world history when:

• the Global Southmatches the Global North in a large variety of ways;
• the East and Westtruly meet and integrate as a Global society with several centers; and
• the world transitions into the Internet Age; a society dominated by information technology, robotics, AI, with a corresponding series of global risk factors ranging from technological disruptions to climate change to pandemics and large flows of displaced refugees and other
  threats to human rights.

It takes no leap of the imagination to see that the education of the world’s diverse populations can and will decide the fate of nations, the global community, and humanity at large. The responsibility—and creative potential—to get education right even extends beyond our current humanity, as effects
of our choices today inevitably cascade into future generations and the biosphere.

This series of nine articles is based upon extensive research into the farther reaches of the landscapes of global education. What is on the horizon? What are prominent, brave and creative thinkers and practitioners thinking, saying and doing? And what can be done?

This Article Series: A Map of a Paradigm

How do we tip the scales of educational realities for a Protopian outcome at a planetary scale?

We are leaving the old world behind—industrial and dominated by Western powers—for a world that is postindustrial, digitized, and truly global. This means that we are also leaving one view of education in the past and welcoming another; a new paradigm of education.

What, then, is a useful map of education’s frontiers, anno 2022? My answer: A paradigm map.

A paradigm is not the same as an “idea”, or even as “values”. A paradigm is a large pattern of interconnected and mutually reinforcing ideas, presuppositions, and values—and the pattern is partly invisible to all who think according to that paradigm.

The reason that we focus on creating a map of the paradigm, is that we, through our research and experience, have come to believe that in order to substantially transform and develop education, one has to understand and address the paradigm itself.

Here is how our argument goes:

• There are several different fields of education, each with their own key thinkers, agents, and innovators.
• If you create a major reform or innovation within any one field, the underlying assumptions and practices of all the remaining fields will work against the change you wish to achieve because they still function according to the old paradigm.
• Only through concerted efforts that are meaningfully coordinated across the different fields can the overall spell of the old paradigm be broken; throwing the systems and culture of education into a new orbit—as it were, “escaping the gravity” of the old paradigm.

The map presented here consists of eight pathways, each within a separate field, through which education can—and, we have reason to argue, as you will see—should be transformed at all levels of society.

But the eight pathways are not arbitrary. They make up, we argue, a larger, interconnected whole. I have come to believe that these eight pathways must be successfully understood, developed and coordinated by key agents in the world. I hope that you are such an agent and that these ideas may be of service in your work.

A Planetary Definition of “Education”

Before we go on to the eight pathways, let us begin with the basics: What, if anything, is education?

My contention is that education, in the strictest and primordial sense, is play.

Within the animal realm, cubs, kittens, chicks, and little monkeys, all play. Children of homo sapiens, left to their own devices, play. The behavioral explanation for this may be the inherent joy of playing, the intrinsic motivation of performing a task for its own reward. The evolutionary purpose of this same reward (the reason nature has selected for it), however, is that something is learned, and that something increases the chances of survival.

At least two of my interviewees (interviews done as preparation for this article series as a part of former but unpublished work), Peter Gärdenfors (cognitive scientist) and Alexander Bard (cyber philosopher), have both emphasized that play, in many ways, is a kind of imitation, whereby learning is achieved. Species that depend on more learning for their survival have longer periods of childhood, growth and learning. Play is also a way to form bonds, upon which collaboration and relationships can be built.

Non-adulthood—i.e. childhood and youth—is defined by growth; the growth of faculties to feed, procreate and protect. This growth is both of the physical body and of skills that ultimately always depend upon the use of that same body. Play gives way to work, work being different from play in that it serves the purpose of acquiring resources, such as food and shelter.

In humans, culture constitutes patterns of knowledge that are inherited over generations. This includes such cultural technologies as spoken language, writing, and arithmetic. These technologies, in turn, cannot be learned only by spontaneous imitation and play. The play must somehow be organized and systematized, so that its outcomes of learning will resonate with culture.

Education, then, is the naturally occurring tendency to play, albeit extended into a more systematized realm of culture; it is play connected to a larger whole. Education guides play—sometimes at the expense of oppressing its spontaneous expressions, sometimes by successfully harnessing the will to play and bewondered curiosity we all harbor—and shapes it into culture.

Primary education introduces the playing child into the culture of a civilization. Secondary education bridges the child into adult participation within a larger cultural context. Higher education and research ideally marry the curios child within the adult—still learning—to the farther reaches of civilization’s knowledge; within a few years, after the Masters level, the adult can do their own ground research, producing knowledge hitherto unknown by anyone; expanding upon the realm of culture.

So, the child grows into culture and adulthood, the adult grows as a person and in knowledge and experience, and culture itself grows as a result of the creative spark—the inner child—of adults. But education, all of our studies and experts unanimously agree, risks extinguishing the inner spark, suffocating the natural playfulness of the child. And yet, our economies and our very civilization can only adapt if there are minds and hearts at play, if people and their cultures truly grow. How, then, can education be redefined to better harness play, and thus serve creativity and growth?

In starkly changing environments, growth is a necessary condition not only for thriving and flourishing; it is necessary for survival. Humanity, then, is presented with a seemingly strange conundrum: Play, or perish!

I invite you to consider a near future time when “the survival of the playful” is the order of the day. Which nations will stimulate their children into the best learning practices, using which ideas and technologies? Which first movers will spark childlike curiosity in their growing adult populations? Where—and how—will a multifaceted continued adult development flourish throughout the lifespan, so that populations may best handle the complex issues of our time? Which cultures and regions will spur growth and thus shape global civilization, contributing to its survival? Only by rescuing playfulness can we survive and thrive;

education is play;
play is growth;
growth is survival.

From the Old to the New Paradigm of Education

“The old paradigm” of education builds upon a lot of ideas that were creative and progressive a century ago, and ebbs and flows of different understandings of learning and education have come and gone over the decades. Some have emphasized the growth of children through stages of learning, others have emphasized that knowledge is relational and contextual, and that learners are shaped by their environments. Some have emphasized empowering weak and marginalized populations, others have emphasized the creative spark of the few and especially talented.

Yet, none of these were truly invented to tackle a society that is global, transnational, multicultural, post-industrial, and thoroughly digitized—these being changes that have arrived with such speed and force that they have left educational institutions in a state of future shock, i.e., they have not been able to adapt accordingly.

A simple analogy for seeing how education has been resistant to change and development is offered by Justin Van Fleet (Director of the Global Business Coalition for Education): Compare a hospital of today to a hospital a century ago; it is quite different. Compare a school of today to that of a century ago, and they are quite alike.

Schools, and education at large, have proven more difficult to develop than our systems of medical care—despite the earnest efforts to experiment with forms of education around the world.

Thus, there is still to be invented “a new paradigm of education” to suit these new life conditions. The many interrelated and underlying suppositions of “the old paradigm” are still to be unearthed and properly challenged at scale.

Indeed, the efforts to do so have been many—and not always futile—but the old paradigm persists. In this series of articles, I attempt to offer yet another, hopefully not futile, attempt. One that could establish and stabilize what I call a Metamodern and/or Protopian society (which are terms that I and others use to describe desirable potential futures).

The Eight Pathways to Protopian Planetary Education

The aim thus presents itself to the global community: To find a pathway from the old to the new paradigm of education. Unsurprisingly, we find, this path is a complex one, and it thus includes eight different pathways, each of which can and should be successfully coordinated with the others. The eight pathways are:

1. Ecological Relatedness. Since so many of the shared global challenges are of an ecological nature, climate change being only one such aspect, the education of the future must somehow reconnect human beings to the biosphere, both through new knowledge and through new forms of experience of ourselves as part of nature.
2. Technological Disruption. Since technology and information change the life-conditions so dramatically, the educational systems must take into account how technology not only brings new potential, but also new sources of harm and disruption, and it must seek to counter and work around these challenges.
3. Technological Potential. But technology does, naturally, not only offer challenges; it also offers untapped potentials. Thinkers and innovators around the world are working to leverage the potential of information technology—and algorithms—to reinvent the tools of education, which in turn makes possible new forms of schooling and learning.
4. Human-to-Human Relations.In our interviews we have put a lot of emphasis on sensitive, holistic, and subtle experts on personal growth and relationships; these emphasize learnings from the human potential movement, from intimate experience with relational work, from indigenous cultures, and even from spiritual and emotional healing practices. How can trust and teacherly authority be cultivated and leveraged to support play, education, and personal growth?
5. Human-to-System Relations.But human educational relations always arise in the context of how education is organized. We have found few defenders of the classical pulpit teaching styles, and many engaging and promising examples of different ways in which schooling and education can be organized—more in line, perhaps, with the emergent life conditions of the Internet age. This involves, not least, to foster closer interconnections between education and the worlds of healthcare, governance, and business.
6. Meta-Skills.There are also challenges to the curriculum; what should children learn, and how can people be best prepared for life-long learning, adaptation and growth through adulthood? In a global environment that is more complex, and in which disruptions and potentials occur with increasing frequency, it is more difficult to predict the exact skills and bodies of knowledge that people will need and benefit from. Hence, an emphasis on “meta-skills” becomes more important; i.e., identifying and prioritizing the cultivation of those traits that provide the greatest dividends to individuals and societies.
7. The Rise of the Global South. The old paradigm of education has been, to a significant degree, shaped by the dominant powers of the 20th century. From a postcolonial perspective, this can be viewed as distorting the view of the world, focusing too much on Western culture and history, depriving many populations of their due recognition as contributors global society. Those who can see a more multipolar world, relate to it, and apply a more global perspective, will undoubtedly be at an advantage. There is also reason to believe that countries of the Global South may be, in many ways, better placed to redefine education and reap the benefits of being first movers.
8. Education on the Move.Large populations are displaced in waves of migration, meaning that citizens fall between the cracks of state structures, and that many children are left without proper education while growing up in refugee camps or on the move. It is a global challenge for all countries to fill these gaps and to use the best of technology to reach these populations with educational resources, so that they can more easily join and be integrated into communities and economies around the world.

No single country, organization or group can by themselves master all of these pathways; different networks will need to take the lead on each of them. And they do, arguably, depend on each other.

In an afterword to this series, I labor to present interconnections between the eight pathways. I offer my own best attempt at a synthesis: a holistic vision of the field of education, an early map of the new paradigm of education—one that is infused with Metamodern sensibilities and conducive to Protopian societies.

I invite you to critically assess this map, and then use it as a backdrop for your own strategy in building alliances and communities of knowledge that will reinvent global education.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

Would you say that life has become more or less “civilized” as societies have evolved? Let us consider only the last few decades of cultural shifts to get a handle on this question. Michel Foucault famously wrote Madness and Civilization. Norbert Elias identified the Civilizing Process. Where do we stand on how civilization and madness evolve today? I would claim that we need an updated version of these theories, one in tune with the advent of Internet Society:

• Digital Madness, that drives forth a…
• Pornographic Civilization.

Let us get into the weeds of this updated diagnosis of our time and let us begin to consider what can be done about it.

Civilization Found—Innocence Lost

“as society ‘advances’, people and their values become less barbaric, more universal and abstract, but also more XXX-rated, more pornographic in every (sexual an non-sexual) sense of the word.”

On the one hand, we can observe obvious signs of what the older generations can only recognize as a kind of cultural decay: pop culture has become cynical and crude with popstars like Billie Eilish glorifying suicide for young people or Lana Del Rey romanticizing infidelity and daddy issues; children increasingly exposed to, misinformed by, and traumatized by online (sexual) pornography which itself draws wider and wider swathes of the population into some kind of prostitution (which also spreads to more and more young people); sexual debuts creeping to lower ages and especially young girls increasingly being pressured to partake in harmful sexual activities; hard drugs being the stuff of casual conversations of middleclass 13-year-olds, and that’s when they’re not talking about sex and carrying knives (real story, that one, overheard on a local bus in a “nice” neighborhood); the average kid spending 8+ hours by a screen each day and the activities there becoming increasingly based on addictive dopamine hits with apps like TikTok and Snapchat; more and more of us trying psychedelics and other drugs, bought from criminal gangs; celebrities and Netflix shows casually showing and joking about hard drug use and death by drugs; realistic, violent computer games; de facto decreases of people’s real competence and skills, including a reversal of the average IQ scores in developed countries; attention spans, even among adults, dropping like lead balloons; weaker and less motorically developed bodies in the average population; the spread of online conspiracy theories of savage and sadistically imaginative detail…

Cultural decay, right? There’s no other word for it.

Well, on the other hand, consider all of the following: the all but absolute collapse of norms that held it to be normal and healthy to beat children; the reduction of brawls and fistfights as part of growing up and being a young man or out in the nightclubs; the shift from an exceedingly homophobic society to the almost unanimous unacceptance of homophobia; the shift from extreme racism and white supremacy towards firmly established anti-racist norms and serious taboos against racist jargon; the establishment of feminism and gender equality as normal and justified; the extreme increase of environmental awareness; the rise of concern with animal welfare, animal rights, and veganism or at least vegetarianism; the collapse of ideals of authoritarian leaders in organizations and the embracing of egalitarian organizational cultures; the increased resistance to war and the view of it as inherently barbaric and outdated; the vastly increased tendency to learn from religions and spiritual traditions other than one’s own; the rise of liberal, open-ended pedagogy where each person is expected to find their own path and learn critical thinking rather than parrot a fixed curriculum; the de-stigmatization of going to the therapist or otherwise having mental health issues; the shift away from indoor smoking and beer drinking during work hours; the much more solid traffic safety regulations that literally save thousands of lives; teen pregnancies down sharply; alcohol consumption down sharply; on it goes…

Well—so there is another word for it, after all: Cultural progress. Right?

So, which one is it, then? Are we evolving into a more refined and civilized culture, or is there widespread cultural decay?

Consider the following examples:

• In the 1950s, the most action-packed scenes were to be found in black and white western films. The violence was not particularly graphic and consisted of little more than the occasional fistfight and someone raising their hand to the chest and falling over pretending to have been shot. Not much blood. Today there is no end to the gory details with massive amount of splattered blood, guts and brains and carefully choreographed gun- and martial arts fights. Torture and rape are no infrequent occurrences either.
  The people of the 50s would probably have been shocked and felt sick to their stomach were they to watch an action or horror movie from today. The people of the 21st century, on the other hand, tend to be appalled by the way Native Americans are portrayed as brutal savages and merely cannon fodder for the white male hero and the way in which women merely serve the role as someone for the hero to save in a in a typical western movie from the 50s.
• Two generations ago, it didn’t get much wilder than Tarzan and Batman (in color, if you were lucky) comics if you were a 12-year old boy. Today, boys that age typically play ultra violent videogames about killing soldiers or zombies (or zombie soldiers!) with super photorealistic graphics. (The games of today look so realistic that they are often mistaken for real-life footage. Whether by mistake or design, images from video games are shown in TV-news again, and again).
  Yet, safety measures for children have increased extensively since the 1950s. Back in the day, children could buy fire works, cigarettes and Lawn Darts™ (which were practically small, potentially lethal throwing spears!). Today, few parents allow their children to ride a bike without a helmet—and that’s only if they live in a quiet rural area or a suburb without too much traffic.
• If you were a young man coming of age in the 1950s, it’s likely that the most arousing images you could get your hand on was lingerie commercials or similar. Today, by the age of 14, most boys, and many girls too, have already been through Pornhub’s vast archives and acquainted themselves with everything from vanilla sex, to gang bangs, BDSM, and gagging.
  At the same time, contraception is widely available and today’s teens tend to be well informed when it comes to preventing STDs and unwanted pregnancies. Two generations ago, girls were much more likely to become pregnant out of ignorance and people were less likely to seek treatment for STDs out of shame.

And we can go on. You can even hear drug addicts talking nostalgically about the good old days before Fentanyl, how innocent the world felt when it was just pure heroin out there on the market. At the same time, drug addiction has never been less stigmatized, and designated areas for drug consumption have even been made available in many cities around the world with clean needles, nurses and other necessities.

On the one hand, things that were taken as self-evident just a brief few decades ago are today viewed as nothing short of medieval. On the other hand, things that were entirely unthinkable and viewed as excessively vulgar just a brief moment ago are today being touted as edgy and cool to very young audiences and participants.

Decay or progress? The answer to this conundrum is perhaps simpler than it seems.

But let us first put aside the two “dumb” answers to the question. One is the conservative (or reactionary) one: “It’s not progress at all! If it weren’t for all those anti-racists, feminists, and vegans, our culture would still maintain its moral fiber and common decency”. It’s a popular answer, of course, but it has very little merit. It’s well known, for instance, that the Bible Belt has the highest consumption of pornography in the Unites States, that the Catholic Church is a cesspool of debauchery, that gender inequality is linked to lower marital satisfaction, that higher empathy is linked to caring more about social justice and the environment, etc. So, no, it’s not that if we simply stopped all of those “progressive” developments from occurring, we would also have a more decent and respectable society.

The other dumb answer is to simply deny just how vulgar, cynical, weird, confusing, and out-rightly pornographic our society is indeed becoming. Despite the measures of quantitative progress (higher global GDP and so on), it is undeniably true that we are, globally, on a sharp downwards spiral in terms of mental health and that young people are hurting: The Mental State of the World Survey, spanning across 20 countries, recently revealed that in the age group 18–24, as much as 44% of the population are in the “clinical/at risk” category in terms of mental health—as compared to 6% for those 65 and older. Between these extremes, there is a steady downwards staircase: the younger the cohort, the more compromised their mental health. It’s the opposite of a stairway to heaven.

It’s not just me; when I was a 13-year-old in a middle class suburb, talk of knives and hard drugs were just not part of the mix. A cultural pornographization really has occurred, and it all but indisputably affects the mental health of the young.

What, then, is the better explanation? It’s that cultural evolution simultaneously drives forth two interrelated processes of transformation:

• More civilized, universal, and non-violent values.
• Innocence lost, a more penetrating and revealing gaze and imagination, including a more disenchanting and critical viewpoint.

Simply put, as society “advances”, people and their values become less barbaric, more universal and abstract, but also more XXX-rated, more pornographic in every (sexual an non-sexual) sense of the word. As such, even if society escapes the ecological dead-ends of modernity, we are headed both towards a cute and idyllic future of softer and more inclusive values (take the bike-path to the vegan café run by a now fully respected minority!), and towards a rawer and more cynical culture (sit down in the same café and discuss psychedelic deconstructions of reality, the inescapable unfairness of life, the profound meaninglessness of most jobs, and the rarity of relief of sexual ecstacy).

The social logic behind this is that the two cultural properties—universal values and a penetrating, revealing, critical gaze—are both generated by the same variable: the degree of mediation of society.

Exploding prevalence of solarpunk visions on the left; rising mainstreaming of BDSM on the right—two sides of the same coin?

By “the degree of mediation of society” I mean the sheer amount and variety of thoughts, messages, images, symbols, and other information that are being sent and received throughout society (in our case, planetary civilization).

Digital society produces more information in a few days than all of human history prior to the advent of the Internet. This means that there is always an immense abundance of information vying for attention—and to gain more attention, a meme must recombine what has hitherto been communicated in a manner that carries forth an element of surprise. You get simulacra of simulacra of simulacra, to speak with the terms of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. If people have already said A, B, and C, you can make a whole career out of saying D. And so, everyone scrambles to figure out how to say what follows from A, B, and C. That propels a rapid and powerful cultural evolution towards universality (if you’ve said “free all slaves”, and the Dalai Lama says “all sentient beings”, I’ll add “free all non-human animal slaves”, and so forth)…

… and it produces pornographization (if ABBA was racy in the 1970s by wearing wide, colorful pants, popstars in the 1980s started showing more skin, until Rihanna, the idol of every little schoolgirl, starts singing about how BDSM excites her, and Billy Eilish finally declares that she, the musical and cultural child genius, is the bad guy, not those older creepy guys out there, Lana Del Rey singing nostalgic farewell hymns to an America who’s innocence is lost… all of which is of course matched with, well, unimaginable amounts of literal porn—i.e. more and more extreme images of all kinds, anything that stands out by being more explicit, more real, more raw, more revealing, from weird and degrading sex to social realist reality soaps). You even have a combination of the two tendencies in the kind of critical theory popularized by intellectuals like Slavoj Žižek, which penetrates the perversion and all-too-human patheticness of us all, manifested as capitalist society. And, of course, Žižek makes his own movies, all about revealing other movies. Increasingly revealingly detailed news and journalism do a similar thing to our people in power and positions of prestige. Behavioral science and the social sciences make short notice of the rest of us: we’re revealed in our all-but-dignified gore and grime.

The emperor is not only naked. He’s downright see-through. You can watch the emperor’s skeleton, his whole wardrobe, when he’s taking a dump, and so forth. It’s the meta-naked, X-rayed emperor, and everyone competes to be the pointing kid in H.C. Andersen’s iconic tale. Or that’s the point we’re heading towards. Surveillance capitalism or China’s social credit system are just extensions of this same tendency.

To remake the point as simply as possible: Our grand-grandmother was fairly barbaric, but also quite endearingly innocent, as compared to people today. She was all for beating children with a belt (or a slipper if in a good mood or she couldn’t find the belt), she warned us of the child-abducting gypsies, she thought everything in life was about getting more food, including the pet rabbit that she viewed as a piece of potential pâté and did everything in her power to fatten for the same reason. But her “sins” amounted to reading romance novels and fawning over a game show host in a nice suit. Her entertainment was the circus, literally.

And she was, despite having lived a tougher life, relatively mentally stable and emotionally healthier than most of us. She could be relied upon.

As society complexifies and shifts in “effective value meme” (we go from traditional values, to modern ones, to postmodern ones, and perhaps on to metamodern ones), we become more civilized, less violent, less bigoted, but also less innocent. Where does this leave the minds of younger generations?

The Best of Potentials—in the Worst of Worlds

“Not only are you always stuck as an observer to other people pushing the (pornographic) boundaries; you are at a far distance from all that truly matters, from all “real relevance”.”

I have long maintained that the “metamodern mind” is one that marries irony to sincerity, in so-called “sincere irony”. Hence, the metamodern mind is one that labors to straddle the paradox of 1) wide-eyed and uncompromising belief in idealism, and 2) “innocence lost”, coexisting in one culture, in one social network, in one person, in one situation.

This splitting-of-the-mind-into-two-increasingly-mutually-distant-realities could, in a perfect world, offer the ultimate dialectic for human growth. I say “dialectic” because one side would drive the other: the progress of civilized and ethically considerate behavior would allow for greater playfulness of the carnal and “Freudian” sides of existence (while sanitizing our shared everyday life to the extent that people would long increasingly for transgression and the raw); the play with further spiraling revelations, critiques, and perversions would allow for a solid psychological basis of a hyper-civilized society by means of deep embodiment and catharsis as well as increased transparency, inescapably radical honesty, and the mutually applicable self-knowledge that grows from recognizing the vulnerabilities of our naked and darker selves.

Hence, if considered under ideal bio-socio-psychological conditions, there could hardly be a better dynamic (or dialectic) for spurring the growth, maturity, and even reliability of the human spirit and thus of harmonious human relations. Think about it: From one side, our minds are always pushed to critique our current assumptions, always towards more encompassing and complex perspectives on life—towards “higher”, more universally valid values. From the other side, we are ever exposed to something that challenges and pushes us; pushes our buttons, calls forth our fascination or disgust, and lets us get in touch with our ever-present carnal, politically incorrect, and “Freudian” psychological undergrounds. Again, this can lead to sex positivity (or some more sophisticated life-affirming form of eroticism), to the release of tensions and taboos, to the breaking of prejudice, to emotional catharsis or healing, to self-knowledge, to embodiment of emotions, to spiritual exploration. Together the twain are braided into a way of life that is neither cruel nor lackluster.

Now, that’s in an ideal case scenario. The world we know, last I checked, is not perfect.

What happens instead is that children, and youths, and young adults, and even future-shocked older generations, all land into the brave new digital world like a face on concrete. The sight is not a pretty one.

People, often those with little or no education, fall into so-called online “rabbit holes” and end up believing the Earth is flat, that the American Democratic Party is run by pedophile, child-sacrificing Satanists and other absurd conspiracy theories. Young disillusioned Muslim men from Western Europe become radicalized on online fora and end up joining ISIS—and their white and equally disillusioned counterparts end up joining various far-right terrorist organizations, or at the very least gloat at harm to women in incel clubs. And older people end up obsessing about immigrants, reading article after article about how awful the world has become, spending countless hours arguing with strangers on Facebook instead of doing something nice with their grandchildren. And we have loads of young women obsessing about all the perfect images on Instagram and starving themselves to live up to the ultrathin ideals of the supermodel. And then there are the boys, lost to online porn and video game addictions, stunting their physical and emotional development. There are even the so-called “iPad babies” who get withdrawal symptoms when screens are taken away. And so on, and so on.

It’s much like with the Industrial Revolution. When Britain as the first country in the world industrialized, it didn’t have any countermeasures to combat the many ills of industrialization such as hazardous work conditions, social exploitation, child labor, unhygienic living conditions etc. The result was a significant drop in average life span and severe social unrest for the first quarter century of the Industrial Revolution. When France, Germany and the rest of Europe were to industrialize, following the British example, they wisely put measures in place to counter many of the unforeseen negative consequences that had been observed in Britain. The difference with the Digital Revolution today, however, is that it’s a global phenomenon hitting all parts of the world with the same impact at once. We don’t know which countermeasures to put in place before it’s already to late.

The mechanism that drives the ubiquitous decay of mental health as society “progresses” is thus fairly easy to explain, or at least to offer a strong hypothesis for. On the one hand, young and immature minds are simply scandalized and over-heated by stark, revealing imagery and language. Young people are misinformed, hyper-stimulated, addicted, obsessed, self-disgusted by “too much too soon”—and yet, very understandably, they cannot keep themselves away. Indeed, to impress their teenage peers, they need to appear to be casually familiar with stark and weird images and ideas. This, of course, distorts the view of adulthood and sexual relations, among other things. But most of all, it simply overloads the still-developing psychology of the young minds of our age. It’s traumatizing for eleven-year-olds to watch a woman being drugged and sexually abused in a pornographic movie. It does not bring about “growth”; it simply interrupts the innocent gaze of the child, landing him/her in a kind of “adult mind” but one which still lacks all of the emotional, intellectual, and practical capacities of adulthood. The child is stuck in a limbo, in a time between worlds; a place of utter loneliness and helplessness. And from there on, it becomes easy for digital predators—commercial, sexual, or cult-like ones—to target them.

We needn’t consider the other age categories; suffice to say that ours is a planetary society with the hitherto greatest potentials for inner growth, and yet with perhaps the worst conditions for it.

And then add the other factor: the universalization of values—the increasing abstraction of what is ethically considered, included, coordinated within human action. If the child is stunted in her inner growth due to the traumas of an over-explicit, over-revealing, hyper-pornographic, media-saturated hyperreality, how can she then muster the genuine emotional capacities to match such lofty ideals as acceptance of peoples of all creeds and cultures, the caring for the wretched in distant lands, the caring for weird people and the mentally disabled, for non-human animals, for environmental and ecological entities, future generations, and for inner development of love and compassion?

Just as she/he is over-exposed to downright debauchery, the child of today is equally exposed to an ethics too high-minded, abstract, and confusing for her/his developmental psychology to fathom and genuinely embody. At least this will be the tragic case for the vast majority of children growing up today: They will oscillate between trying to identify with these higher values and force themselves to feel and to think what is beyond their cognitive scope and emotional capacity, often pretending to feel, or posturing to seem good enough—and rebelling against these same values in a reactionary rage that will appear to strike as lightning from clear-blue heavens. Trouble in paradise is always double the trouble.

This dynamic feeds the very same sense of helplessness. Not only are you always stuck as an observer to other people pushing the (pornographic) boundaries; you are at a far distance from all that truly matters, from all “real relevance”. You feel insignificant. As I said, this is the opposite of a stairway to heaven.

Squeezed from both sides, from darkness and light alike, the young mind deteriorates on a planetary and civilizational scale—as we have seen in the statistics, and as we see in the lives around us. If we deign to look, we can see it within ourselves, too.

To Counteract Madness, Don’t Fight It—Follow It!

“The farther we slide into a “hyperreal” and mediated society, the greater our need to grow the capacities for introspection, self-awareness, and connection to our genuine emotions.”

The answer, then, is to help people—across generations, but especially among the young—to develop a more “metamodern” mind. This is a psychology that is differently structured than the modern “individual self”.

Ladies and gents, esteemed non-binaries; heroes and anti-heroes—if it is true that we have cornered ourselves into a cultural spiral where innocence is lost, I call upon you to save the innocence of the world! Before it is too late. Because only that innocence can, in turn, save the world.

We are right to lose the childlike political “innocence” that marks the liberal mainstream mind: “As long as I didn’t make a bad political decision, I’m not to blame, I’m not responsible”. If you have read my book The Listening Society, you may remember my death sentence to the so-called liberal innocent. We must all grow up to feel responsible for society-as-a-whole, yes. But the innocence of the child, and of the child within each of us, must be kept out of harm’s way: The capacity to feel, to care, to learn, to grow, to play, to love.

How, then, can the metamodern mind—and its accompanying embodiment and emotional development—be cultivated within the population? How can innocence be saved so that it can dance through the dialectic between the darkness and light of life that was outlined above?

The first answer is that clarifying this diagnosis of our time is crucial, so that we may together invent a thousand answers. We need to rethink the role of digital media, of digital identity and nudging, of incentive structures, of informational architectures, of democratized algorithms, of user interfaces, of market regulations, of education and schooling, of an expansion of individual rights to “dividual rights” and so forth. And, of course, we need to cultivate institutions of governance and self-organization that are at all capable of grasping such issues—which today, alas, do no exist.

The second answer, and perhaps the more profound one, is that we must invest in what I have termed “the listening society”. We must have a society that matches the psychological pressures of hyperreality and the equal inner pressure that results from the extension of universal ethics with structures that support our capacity to reach inwards, to self-observe, to connect to the child within, and to listen to that child in the midst of the noise of so many, so seductive distractions.

In brief, we must cultivate our shared capacity for mental health, for emotional nourishment, and for spiritual attainment. This often means selecting a wide range of very simple practices of self-development and making certain that the opportunities and cues to practice them are as ubiquitous as the distractions.

Said otherwise, I suggest that we update the dialect between:

• Civilizational Progress and
• Innocence Lost,

with…

• Support of Inner Growth.

The farther we slide into a “hyperreal” and mediated society, the greater our need to grow the capacities for introspection, self-awareness, and connection to our genuine emotions. If and when we connect to our primordial innocence, the better we can manage the onslaught of stark images and messages, and the better we can find an embodied grounding for our increasingly abstract, universal, and complex values and ideals. This inner nourishment is, I have come to believe, the missing piece of this puzzle. Thus, it is also the way to reverse the trend towards rising levels of anxiety experienced around the world.

Our civilization is driving towards madness—and it’s a fair guess that, soon enough, madness will be driving civilization. That drive will be nasty, brutish, and short.

To avoid this trajectory, we must follow where madness takes us—into the depths of our interconnected psyches. We must cultivate the institutions capable of supporting us so that we neither fall into denial of our darker realities, nor into blindness of our higher ethical potentials—institutions that pace that development in lockstep with our development as human beings.

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Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.