A New Year’s Manifesto

Happy New Year!

Will Richardson just released something he is calling “A Manifesto” titled “Confronting Education In a Time of Complexity, Chaos, and Collapse.” Richardson was a public school educator for over two decades before he began questioning current practices within our K-12 public school system. An author calling for a different and more creative vision of what our learning system might look like, he is a kindred spirit to ABPTL, although I’ve been critical of Will in the past because of his insistence to work with the traditional school systems around the world while trying to implement a change from school-centered to learner-centered models.

In “Confronting Education In a Time of Complexity, Chaos, and Collapse,” Richardson shares seven beliefs with the intent to provoke discussions with small cohorts of “future serious” educators and others. Here are the seven beliefs:

“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.”

…

“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.)”

“None of our current difficulties will be resolved until we focus on the root causes that stern from our increasing separation from one another and from Nature. In other words, the truly transformative changes we need to ameliorate our challenges and to aspire to a better future will only occur if we are willing to look inward and transform ourselves first.”

…

“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.”

“The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report for 2024 lists the top 10 challenges we face in the next two years and in the next 10:

2 Years

Misinformation and disinformation

Extreme weather events

Societal polarization

Cyber insecurity

Interstate armed conflict

Lack of economic opportunity

Inflation

Involuntary migration

Economic downturn

Pollution

10 Years

Extreme weather events

Critical changes to Earth systems

Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse

Natural resource shortages

Misinformation and disinformation

Adverse outcomes of AI technologies

Involuntary migration

Cyber insecurity

Societal polarization

Pollution”

“It’s important to ask where does relevant learning about risks such as societal polarization, cyber insecurity, involuntary migration, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and adverse outcomes of AI technologies (and the others) show up in the typical school experience?”

…

“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 complicit in amplifying the disconnects and thus the challenges we currently face.”

…

“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?’”

“As we move further into this ‘in-between’ time which promises to be deeply complete and chaotic, what is the purpose of bringing together children and adults in a place we call ‘school’?”

“It’s arguable that we need a wholesale rethinking of the ways in which adults and children come together to do ‘education’ as well as what the intended outcomes of that experience are. As mentioned above, traditional ‘success’ outcomes are increasingly unhealthy both for our students and for the planet. The knowledge we impart to children is increasingly irrelevant or unuseful. The experiences we create are incoherent and disconnected from the way kids naturally learn. While there is still great value in the relationships that can be nurtured among adult teachers and students. It’s increasingly hard to defend the ways we’ve conceived and carried out the ‘education’ part of school.”

…

“An education must now center 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.”

…

“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.”

“While the work ahead of us is not so much to fix the ‘problems’ as it is to first fix ourselves, there is no question that being able to imagine and embody a world that we want to live in is an important part of the work. We need to articulate aspirational, ‘irresistible” futures for ourselves and for our children that we literally yearn for in ways that motivate us to actually achieve them.”

…

Our current traditional education inputs (or what we spend time learning and working on) aren’t even close to the outputs now essential for our survival as earth dwellers.

In other words, we aren’t working on what we should be working on when it comes to what young learners need to be able to do when it comes to becoming smarter and stronger for this world.

And these conditions are far, far more impactful for young leaners who are black, brown, and poor.

I applaud Will Richardson for his insight and his ability to summarize the challenge in front of us in such a succinct manner. But, as with most writers contemplating what schools should look like moving forward, Richardson falls short with his remedy.

I’m sorry, but convening small cohorts of “future serious” educators and others to provoke discussions just isn’t what is needed right now – unless this “manifesto” is just simply a way to introduce a new funding stream for Richardson’s professional development enterprise (which I don’t think is the case).

No, what is needed – sooner than later – is a new learning system. Let’s start with those kids and families in the worst schools and then build from there. Time is wasting, and like most problems facing us today, we might already be too late.

Happy New Year.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. SVB