Technolandy

I love Will’s views on education – was greatly inspired by an earlier book of his, Why School? and the look at how a platform like Minecraft might be better at engaging, motivating and encouraging learning than most classrooms and schools. And to end 2024, he came up with A Manifesto on “Confronting Education In a Time of Complexity, Chaos, and Collapse… and I love me some dystopian fiction… not so much for non-fiction… but I’ve had some time to read and re-read it (as I mindfully misread that step that ‘good readers do: re-read’ as not words, but whole collections!)  and best of all, you can get your own copy here: https://futureserious.school/manifestoedu/

First off, I do feel there is a lot of good background work that can be done by exploring some of the writings of Sir Ken Robinson and Greta Thunberg – Sir Ken has had some pointed ideas about what the pros and cons of this experiment called school have been and Greta has done something I did not think would gain traction – raise awareness of how climate change has gone beyond ‘normal’ trends should be. 

Love the opening reference to The Fellowship of the Ring – wishing it (this) was not happening in our time, but we have to decide what to do with the time given us…

SO… we are are well into the 21st Century – enough that I am even looking at what the skills may be needed for the 22nd Century learner, though I hope it is future generations running with making things better and not me… But we are going through some varied changes that we need to be aware of:

The climate catastrophe

Biodiversity declines

Human disconnection (though not new, just a more focused – people have always been isolated, but now they can be isolated in different ways where it can feel like connections… and sometimes it is..)

Harsh recognition: the vast majority of school communities around the world have been turning away from, ignoring and/or actively denying the harsh realities of the moment. (Me: even I point out that we can’t expect banning cell phone is going to result in desired positive use…. But it is easier!)

Love the three reasons for the manifesto:

1. to clarify thinking
2. to serve as a model for the reader(s) own belief statement, and
3. to introduce discussions for ‘future serious’ educators (cohort 1 was not well timed for me… may be able to connect to the next… if the Canadian $ improves…)

And love the provocation that the shares are likely to to lead the reader to disagree – as an invitation to dig deeper into topics or solidify your own bias/beliefs

Belief 1: We are living in a time between worlds. Driven to the bring by unsustainable narrative of “progress”, traditional institutions and ways of living on the planet are collapsing; their replacements are emergent.

Me: definitely seen this through some narratives in recent elections (NOT just the US one) where politicians would pay lip service to the climate/environment being important, but the economy (fracking) needed to be dealt with first… definitely a turnoff to this voter… 

Will mentions “democracies are in retreat” and this definitely lines up with other articles I’ve seen that are a little to close to what happened a century ago when ‘voters’ seem more interested in single rule than usual… Both with youth: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/genz-dictatorship-survey-jordan-peterson-b2686927.html as well as with older voters who seem to be against ‘progress’ – it makes me laugh that people want to fight being ‘woke’ when the opposite would be to be unconscious/asleep to the world changing around us… 

And I’m glad Will points out that many challenges ‘stem from our addiction to the narrative of “success”’ as this is a key point we are working on in our building (disclosure: I am part of our districts online school that is a Provincial Online Learning School – that is a hybrid of at-home learners with some on-site experiences over three main campuses and various satellites around the province) – ought we not redefine what “success” is for our learners, not based on previously used ‘standards’ that were used as a measurement scale… but without much of an equity scan being used on them until it was just assumed that they were unchangeable… and represented learning success…

But I know changing expectations is tricky – I still have educators and non-educators saying (wishing) that it would be nice to ‘know’ what skills every graduate has upon completion of k-12… I just know that has never been the case… so why start now? And recent ‘traditions’ have not been looking great – with bio diversity decreasing, and millions of animal/plant species projected to go extinct – esp if climate change remains on track for the next 50 years….

…and new technology is making it more and more difficult to discern fact from fiction; lies from truth. And with AI being still so ‘young’ (but immersive in so much so quickly) this is only going to increase the need to focus on the competencies of critical and creative thinking more than ever! And the trends are all accelerating and ‘long term consequences’ are being even challenging to ‘see’ – much easier to ignore… 

Appreciate Will’s view on social media – how a ‘town square’ mindset (so many great edchats on twitter…) have narrowed into very specific mindsets – with hate groups gaining a surprising (to me) amount of traction and support. 

“Schools as we know them were created for a time that no longer exists”

Traditional routes to “success” are turning out to be less and less viable – especially as we see how robotics and AI shift from augmenting work to replacing workers… 

And I am starting to give more consideration to Willow thinking (And Gus Speth, dean of Forest & Environmental Studies at Yale) which is that once we may have hoped that problems/issues would lead to a spiritual and cultural transformation… but we may actually need collapse to bring authentic change about… earthquakes and fracking are just correlation, not causation, right??

Belief 2: Challenges like climate collapse, mis- and disinformation, state conflicts, political dysfunction, increasing inequity, and others are not “problems to be solved” by politics, technology or even education; they are symptoms of much larger relational disconnects with one another and with all living things in nature. (The “metacrisis” or the set of root problems behind all our major crises).

Noting that our usual (traditional?) assumptions no longer hold. Ecology/environmental matters are having an impact on everything.

Love getting uncomfortable with Will making one comparison of schools to prisons (In US lifelong prisoners get, on average, more time outside than school children do) knowing there are many… many other comparisons that can be made. And is it surprising when we see the planet struggling (wild fires) our own wellness is also in decline? 

And then there is the mixed tape that is social media & mental health – where many who cannot find community in real life (Johann Hari) will go online to find connection and resources and supports; while the social media and AI technologies are hurting mental health… true on both sides – much as some medicines work well for others and are horrible for others… there is no 

Love the share of Indy Johar noting that reality doesn’t like to see the entangled wholes and prefers to keep issues separate. And that economic growth (and material expansion) needs to come first before we can regard environmental impacts… and LOVE the push to return to the Indigenous Ways of Living that looks at “seven generations” being considered in decision making (what happens to the children born much later on…

And schools still focus on individual success (In Canada, schools get ‘a’ Governor General award recipient… and even discussions of school awards being more of a ‘descriptor’ than a ‘best of’ for recipients gets frowny faces in my direction…)  It’s also why I am trying to shift my own language for post-graduation being ‘how do you want to live’ rather than ‘what job do you hope to get’… 

Just heard a comment about our school during a meeting earlier today when writing this: our school does an amazing job looking at each story to show every one can be a success!

Belief 3: Right now, education is not “in conversation” with these new realities. In fact, the way education (and other institutions) is responding to the ‘crisis’ is the crisis. 

Top Global Risk:

2 years: misinformation; extreme weather; societal polariziation; cyber security

10 years: extreme weather; critical change to earth systems; biodiversity loss; natural resource shortages (there is a saying – the next war will be for water…)

Amongst others… many other… risks

Consider (especially in the politics of 2025) involuntary migration [which gets spun at times as choices]. Discuss.

Knowing that often in most traditional schools, topics are addressed lightly because of politics…. 

And serendipitously another article rethinking success from the business world popped up: https://apple.news/A6cd2FawpQ9uhtGMqn9EBeg where “raw talent and personality beat credentials”…

But as Will points out – our denials can be infectious (check out Vanessa Andreotti: Hospicing Modernity); our denial of systemic violence; limits of the planet’ entanglement’ depth and magnitude of problems; that some systemic discrimination pieces should stay because they are ‘fun’… (mine, maybe not Andreatti’s…) – our ongoing experience of “we’ve always done it this way” is only perpetuating the crises. 

We need to start with a starting point… any starting point – even if it’s something small – we would like people 30 years from now note that what we are doing today was helpful… and adding these topics into the graduation pathways,…. 

Belief 4: In addition, education is contributing to our collective challenges by denying the inherent incoherence and larger negative impact of its own legacy practices. In these ways, education is implicit in amplifying the disconnects and thus the challenges we currently face.

Admitting it’s not just ‘education’ in denial. We need to expand our own understanding and transmission of “learning” to be more than limitations of grades/classes and go beyond the interdisciplinary nature of the world… more generative thinking (it’s not just AI that does that…!) How are we (as a school industry) helping our young people get prepared to inherit custodialiship of our planet? 

Which brings us back to what the narrow emphasis of “success” is… (I think the phrase being used in the US of “drill, baby, drill” at a time when more fossil fuels than ever are being excavated but the affects are being ignored because of the importance of economy over other factors… which so often then further exasperates ongoing issues by causing over scheduling, overworking, and at times overwhelming everyone… 

“Many current practices and pedagogies act in direct opposition to the ways in which humans actually learn” and this is what makes us put pressure on students to ‘succeed’ in one easily measurable way otherwise being seen as being ‘soft’ – as a negative, though those ‘soft skills’ are often so essential for success in life. And even though we know that there are harms in pushing “high performance” schools continue to reinforce these risky behaviours anyways…. When looking at  the ‘conditions for deep and powerful learning’ words and descriptors that come out are “safe, fun, relevant, passion, challenging, etc’ not ‘sit in rows, set periods of time no matter if learning takes longer/shorter, single subject focus, offer a carrot or a stick…”

Belief 5: It’s clear that traditional approaches and practices of education are no longer fit for purpose. Yet, we cannot fundamentally “reimagine education” until we deeply interrogate the “why” of education and schooling for liminal, complex times. We must ask, and honestly answer, the question “What is school for now?”

What is the purpose of bringing together children and adults in a place called ‘school’… Kinda like report cards – can ‘it’ be fixed to do something it is not systemically designed to do? I once thought I could create a better report card… until I needed to shift to a portfolio methodology… because report cards cannot communicate learning the way many of us would prefer. Perhaps we (gulp!) need to rethink the idea of fixing schooling and instead look at something parallel instead…? Start with redefining ‘success’ and working backwards from there? Zac Stein offers a framing of ‘being in transition ’and confronting the almost unimaginable design challenge (though design thinking does support having many iterations…) of building an education system that provides for a re-creation of civilization… ‘ <— not a small task/challenge/wonder. 

Explore: BPL – Big Picture Learning Schools… schools that are “breaking new ground and reframing how we think of the school experience…” 

Ps I love the continuation of Will’s much earlier ponder: Why School?

Or perhaps a ‘reimagination’ of ‘school… education…’ imagineering the next permeation of ’learning’.

Belief 6: An education must now centre on preparing our children (and ourselves) emotionally, physically , and spiritually to navigate complexity, chaos, and collapse, and to place a deep emphasis on repairing our relationships with one another and with all living things. 

I appreciate the acknowledgment that there have always been changes… but the decades of denial, ignoring, indifference, et al are at a time of great consequence… and at a time where it is increasingly difficult to arrive at ‘shared beliefs’ around these topics AND what is going on in school learning! 

Realities need to be faced, not wished away. 

Skills, literactes, and dispositions needed now are different that what was needed in other iterations of this experiment we call ‘schooling’. If we take a design thinking lens and shine it on education… (might be time to more mindfully flex back into the ‘iterate’ stage…) Knowing that reframing the goals of education is going to be very challenging and truly embracing ‘getting comfortable being uncomfortable’. 

Belief 7: To have any chance of overcoming our many crises and reaching the aspirational futures we want to live in, we need to imagine harder together. Much harder.

I have always liked the term ‘imagineer’ from Disney. I think education needs more imagineers.

But the system definitely prefers ‘compliance within the school box’ rather than pushing imagination of/for/as/with education… 

And building future-oriented cultures in communities… and schools… is still a ‘growth area’. <— this is definitely making me do some synthesis and reflection on our school and district strategic plans… and reinforcing another reason why I won’t be doing any 5 year plans for myself anytime soon…. 

Appreciate the acknowledgment that there is a lot of silence in schools. Especially around negative parts of our society/system – systemic discrimination; violence; hidden costs – literal and metaphorical; can all make things feel hopeless and lead to anger.  

Will continues to live up to his reputation as a change leader in education… and while this is not a ‘traditional’ book that I share on the first schools ay of the month… this manifesto nicely led into another share of his:

12 questions ebook: https://bigquestions-institute.kit.com/1cb9905f9e

Also forces some thinking… 

The teasers (because I have already written too much):

1. What is sacred in education and is working so well that it ought not be touched/changed/edited in designing education for PURPOSE.

2. What is learning? Are we in alignment?

3. Where is the power? In the sense of ‘agency’ who created the ‘standards’ we always point to when looking at things like ‘reading at grade level’??

4. Why do we ___? Cuz it worked for us? It’s what we’ve always done?? Do we look and share the ‘why’ with learners enough?

5. Who is unheard? Is there a voice for the voiceless? Who needs an ally? What happens when a voice wants to be overruled (recently I shared how a small minority shared a complaint about a recent rule change about not having things on screens/projectors at lunch – some parents, for good reasons, wanted less screen/food connection time, but… some with eating issues shared to me that they use screens to: a) distract themselves to actually eat and b) distract their paranoia to convince their anxieties that others aren’t watching them eat, they’re watching the screen… so a small minority of students vs empowered parents… 

6. Are we literate? All the literacies! And as for reading specifically – I am blogging on two ideas: if reading it’s important, how do we model it (daily) OR maybe this fad of ‘reading’ has reached its apex and we should truly get ‘back to basics’ and focus more on the oral/aural skills that worked for millennia, not just a few centuries…

7. Are we OK? How is our individual and collective well being (and channeling Johann Hari… if it is good, why are so many turning to screens/online?)

8. Are we connected? Beyond ‘home is where the wifi connects automatically)

9. What is your story? Narratives matter.  Take time to listen.

10. What is success? I sense a phd in this question… 

11. What is your legacy? How is what you doing going to be felt 7 generations from now?

12. What’s next? Are you designing for the future?

Looking forward to sharing these with staff and community in upcoming months! (Also love that Why School? Has influenced a couple teachers recently with some work being done by letting kids explore Minecraft! Read more Will!