Confronting Education in a Time of Chaos, Complexity, and Collapse: A Manifesto
“‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.
’So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”
Over the last few years, I’ve been immersing myself in readings, research, and conversations about the “metacrisis,” the many challenges that humanity faces as we enter the second quarter of the 21st Century. The growing consensus of those who track and think deeply about the complex changes the world is going through right now is that we are entering a very tenuous phase of life on this planet. The climate catastrophe is just getting started. Biodiversity is declining, as is the general health of the planet as well as the millions of species of life that inhabit it. We are increasingly disconnected from one another and Nature in general. And the window for “fixing” our problems to avoid the most profound impacts is closing quickly.
Engaging in these spaces and discussions about our near future has been extremely difficult. As the title of this piece suggests, complexity, chaos, and collapse are in the offing. And yet, what I’ve learned has also been both fascinating and compelling. It’s taken me to places that I haven’t necessarily wanted to go, creating a great deal of discomfort and sadness as well as inspiration and curiosity. It has changed almost everything about how I orient my existence in the world at this moment.
In that vein, this journey has also helped me clarify the work I want to do as I begin to wind down my career of over 40 years in education. In short, it is to create serious, supportive spaces and experiences for those who are ready to grapple with these complex and difficult new realities, to help build our collective capacity for honesty, courage, and resilience, and to imagine together what we might do to prepare our students and ourselves for the difficult times coming at us.
What Do We Believe?
That work can’t be done in a vacuum, however. It requires a clear articulation on the part of all of us of what exactly we believe about our current situation, especially in the face of so much uncertainty and disruption. Personally, it feels more important than ever to be clear about what I believe, to share those beliefs transparently, and to act in coherence with those beliefs. What do I believe about the state of the world right now? About the institution of education and schooling? About what kind of future is emerging? And how do I act accordingly?
“The vast majority of school communities around the world have been turning away from, ignoring, and/or actively denying the harsh realities of this moment.”
I think it’s important for each of us as individuals to grapple with these questions, but I’d argue it’s equally if not more important right now for organizations to do so as well, school communities in particular. To put it bluntly, the vast majority of school communities around the world have been turning away from, ignoring, and/or actively denying the harsh realities of this moment. They have lacked the courage to fully unpack and interrogate the implications of these new realities on their legacy systems and practices. In doing so, they are leaving our students ill-prepared not just to negotiate what’s coming, but to be equipped to mitigate the impacts. Full stop.
So, I’ve written this personal manifesto for three reasons. First, to help me clarify my own thinking in this moment of such upheaval and confusion. Second, to serve as a model for other individuals and institutions to frame and share their own belief statements should they choose to do so. (And I hope many of you will.) And finally, to serve as a guiding document for ongoing discussions with small cohorts of “future serious” educators throughout the year. (More details on that here.)
I’ve framed this manifesto in the broad context of “education,” meaning all of those institutions and individuals who are engaged in helping our children be prepared for the future that awaits them. This, of course, means almost everyone, but I’m particularly interested in reaching those who work in traditional schools (as we know them in the Global North) as well as the parents of children in those schools and others in their communities. As much as education as we currently know it has contributed and continues to contribute to our challenges, the ways in which we choose to redefine education will be key to forging a healthy, relevant, and just response to collapse that feels more imminent each day. While living through this time will be difficult, it can also be an opportunity for us to rediscover what really matters in our lives: our relationships, beauty, purpose, and the deep care and love for one another and for all the living things that sustain our lives on this planet. This will be crucial to any chance of thriving in the future.
Feel What You Feel
I’m guessing for most of you reading, a certain level of privilege has done much to shield you from many of the negative impacts of collapse that are already occurring, as it has for me. Therefore, you may find these beliefs both difficult and distressing. These ideas may bring up a number of different emotions in you, as they have in me. You may also disagree with some or many of the conclusions that I’ve come to about the state of the world, the state of education, and our collective prospects for the future. None of that is a bad thing. In fact, I urge you to use those difficult feelings or disagreements as an invitation to go deeper into these ideas. My aim here is to share where I have arrived for now, and to provoke you into thinking about your own beliefs and to examine the stances through which you do your work with the children you serve.
These ideas may be original in their phrasing, but they are the product of thousands of hours of conversations and reading of texts of various types that have informed my understanding of the world over the past few years. These profound voices include but are not limited to Vanessa Andreotti, Dougald Hine, Jonathan Rowson, Daniel Schmactenberger, Margaret Wheatley, Indy Johar, Bayo Akomolafe, Zac Stein, Julian Bleeker, Ruha Benjamin, adrienne maree brown, Roman Krznaric, Rebecca Solnit, Nate Hagens, Phoebe Tickell, Anya Kamenetz, Benjamin Freud, Rob Hopkins, Anand Giridharadas, Tyson Yunkaporta, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Carol Sanford, Janine Benyus, Ginie Servant-Miklos, and Seth Goldenburg. I thank them all for pushing my thinking and for their willingness to let questions, not answers, guide their work. And by the way, no AI writing tools were used in this process.
As always, your thoughts and reactions are welcomed. (I’ve created this Padlet for your reflections.) But even more, I would love to read and share your belief statements about the world, education and schooling, and the future. To “stay with the trouble” and to be as effective as we can be at collectively learning our way through what comes next, we need both clarity of purpose and a shared understanding of our predicament. I’m hoping what follows might be a useful instigation in that work.
Thanks for reading,
Will
Belief 1: We are living in a time between worlds. Driven to the brink by an unsustainable narrative of “progress,” traditional institutions and ways of living on the planet are collapsing; their replacements are emergent.
Collapse has already happened to billions of long-suffering people around the world, but it’s now starting to become increasingly apparent in more developed parts as well. As change speeds up, and as our challenges become more existential, long-held narratives that frame progress and success are beginning to break, especially as they apply to economics, media, politics, and the environment.
Democracies are in retreat. Devastation due to catastrophic climate events are on the rise. By some estimates, biodiversity on the planet decreased by over 70% between 1970 and 2020, and another six million animal and plant species are projected to go extinct, according to some estimates, due to climate change over the next 50 years. Economic disparities are growing. The physical, mental, and emotional health of people in developed countries is getting worse year over year. Fast-advancing new communication technologies are making it increasingly difficult to discern fact from fiction, and lies from truth. Trust in institutions worldwide is at all-time lows. Importantly, none of these trends are abating; in fact, all are accelerating.
To be blunt, many of these challenges stem from our addiction to a narrative of “success” that has been perpetuated over centuries, one that centers on economic growth and the accrual of individual wealth and power with little regard for the impacts on others and on the planet. It’s a narrative of violence and extraction, one that is arguably coming to an end as we are reaching the limits of the natural resources required to sustain it.
In addition, many of these challenges stem from our inability to gauge the longer-term consequences of the “solutions” we have employed in the past. In “Development in Progress,” Daniel Schmachtenberger of the Consilience Project writes:
“The vast majority of the most consequential and difficult problems we face—climate change, nuclear war, species extinction—are the unintended outcomes of humans attempting to solve other problems. For many of our greatest problems, at some point in the past we designed technical solutions to address them, and in the time since the solutions have had other effects that we either did not predict or did not mitigate sufficiently in advance. The problems the world faces today are not caused by our inability to achieve our goals—they are a direct result of our success. They are a result of how destructive we are in the pursuit of our goals.”
Social media is a powerful example of this. I was among those early on who cheered the potential for connection, for “town square” conversations, for creating and sharing and learning in networks. We didn’t foresee the problems with online addiction, bullying, the spread of mis- and disinformation, and the negative effects on teen’s self-image (among other ill effects.). Yes, we are still more connected, and those original affordances to learn and share still exist, but the costs have been greater than I think most of us early adopters anticipated.
Not Fit For Purpose
“Schools as we know them were created for a time that no longer exists.”
Arguably, as they are tied to this conception of “progress” as well, our narratives of education are also on the brink of collapse. Schools as we know them were created for a time that no longer exists, a time when knowledge, information, technologies, and teachers were scarce. Today, all of those things are accessible in abundance via the Internet. In addition, long trusted paths to “success” via higher education are becoming less and less viable. The idea that the primary aim of education is to train the next generation of workers to grow the global economy is now being confronted by the urgent need to develop skills and dispositions that prepare students to navigate increasing complexity as well as restore and regenerate an ailing planet. And finally, new and emergent technologies driven by artificial intelligence are redefining what it means to write, to read, and to be functionally literate.
In this way, schools and our conception of education are increasingly not fit for purpose. As Zac Stein writes in Education in a Time Between Worlds:
“Schools have been built largely to control and channel populations, disseminate what counts as 'official knowledge,' and socialize new generations into particular economic and social structures. Broadly speaking, national school systems are not and never have been predominantly 'for the people'; schools are and have been predominantly for the existing national economy and social system. When social systems are in periods of rapid transformation the role of schools becomes contradictory. They teach knowledge that is no longer relevant, socialize individuals into roles that no longer exist, and provide the mindsets needed to continue ways of life that are rapidly disappearing.” (85)
Those few educational institutions that recognize their “in-between-ness” are now engaging in the difficult work of identifying and hospicing systems and practices that no longer serve their communities, and they are actively seeking to birth emergent new ways of working in the world that are more relevant, just, healthy, and regenerative to meet the many challenges on the horizon. The unfortunate reality, however, is that most schools are nowhere near acknowledging the new realities and challenges of a world in profound transition. And even if they are acknowledged, many governments and societies are creating roadblocks to any real transformational change. Just tweaking the status quo is the safer response.
I’ll admit here that my own sense of impending collapse is fueled by my growing lack of belief in the abilities and determination of our collective humanity to solve these problems. As Gus Speth, former dean of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies at Yale, said:
“I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy… to deal with those issues we need a spiritual and cultural transformation—and we scientists do not know how to do that.”
I’m not sure any of us do. Frankly, it may actually take collapse to bring that about.
Click here to read the other six beliefs explored in the manifesto.
Will Richardson has spent over 40 years in education, the last 20 of which have focused on sparking global conversations around educational change in response to the growing challenges and opportunities that these complex times present. He has written six books (including Corwin Press's 2010 "Book of the Year," and worked with schools in over 25 countries on six continents. He is the co-founder of the Big Questions Institute, and you can stay abreast of the implications of "chaos, complexity, and collapse" as it relates to education at his Substack newsletter.