Rethinking Education

In our earlier Seeds workshop, we talked about how our education system emphasizes certain directions, like business and technology, and seems to devalue things like the arts. The feeling in that group discussion was that we are being groomed for a specific analytical way of operating in this world, and that our emotional and creative intelligence is being stifled. 

Why do you think there is so much emphasis on technology as the driver of progress, and not, for example, the arts, which obviously bring a lot of richness to our lives? How did our values become so one-sided?

The substitution of religion with science was the start of these dimensions being deemed as non-essential and irrational.

They imposed a certain way of being in the world as “the only truth”, then the people who would not follow this (those who thought there were other ways of knowing the world) were called witches. They were connecting with nature, or they used herbs to connect spiritually. It was easy to label these people as “crazy” or “stupid”. So, all the other ways of living were kind of cut down, carefully cut away to make “this” nice tree grow in “that” direction. 

Julia Watson would say that a “technology towards progress” mythology was created, taking the dimensions of previous civilizations away. We deemed them as “primitive” and removed spiritual connection from our lives. 

She also talks about the diet that changed chemically, preventing us from reaching a certain kind of spiritual level. We don’t ingest the same substances that used to connect us.

But I think by cutting out this spiritual way of engaging with reality, it comes back in some other way. All the conspiracy theories, like the “No Vax” movement for example —  they are just ways to restore spiritual ways of connecting. Since they are pressed down, they resurface in different ways. So, the conspiracy theory is like going back to thinking in a magical world. 

In the end, even if you’re repressed there is a need to relate with this bigger perspective, and we cannot escape that.

So, if “technology towards progress” is a myth, how do we rewrite our story and change our future trajectory?

It’s about education. The style of education is setting us up for this much more logical, very scientific approach. You have to be a real outlier if you want to go in another direction. 

Yes, if you want to be creative, go into the arts in any way, you find out after that there’s no place for you in “our system”. And then we look around and we say, “Are we happy?” We have all these apps that are causing all kinds of issues. We have climate change. We have economic imbalance…

This is also what Reon Brand says. There are two lines, consumerism and happiness. Until the 80s, these lines were going together, and people were heading towards a decent standard of living. After the 80s, the happiness line goes down and the consumer line goes up.

So, there is a progression through the Maslow hierarchy of needs, but at some point, consumerism doesn’t make us happier because we lose connection with each other.

We outsource care by paying taxes so that someone else can take care of where we live, and then we miss the chance to be with each other and take care of each other. There used to be a regenerative economy, in which people gave back to the planet more than what they took. They sorted things out much better than us. And now, we have to find a technological way to do the same thing, which is impossible, and which requires the same amount of attention.

In the educational environment, there are more screens coming into the classroom and less actual teachers and less direct contact between teacher and student. And somehow, that is supposed to be better. Why? It seems like a lot of nonsense.

It’s nonsense. A lot of created “comfort” is not really comfortable if I have to keep thinking of small things. For example, you enter a room, there is an automatic light that turns on. Did we invent this just to relieve me from pushing a button? In the workspace, if I don’t want to have light, I have to get a ladder and put a sticker on the ceiling to block the sensor. This is much more work than just pressing a button. And this is a system that can break. It brings a total new economy of maintenance to everything.

It’s like the myth of progress is just there to keep us busy.

We can’t just exist. We can’t just be happy that the world is functioning — it rains, food is produced, we gather it, we live. We have to find ways to busy ourselves.

Busy ourselves “to make life easier”.

Yeah, it’s a contradiction. Life is not easy. It’s just getting more and more complicated.

Of course, there are some benefits — some technologies are also saving lives — and now we’re getting more into the topic of technology and behavior.

Of course. This kind of conversation always goes everywhere because things are all connected.

But I think we need education that makes us sit together again, gather together again, find those spaces in which relationships are shared in space and not just in sterile communication.

I think the question is: does technology really make our lives easier, and does it make us happier? Or are we just adding more tasks to our list every day, tasks that take time away from having true connection with the people around us?

I always come back to impact. How do we make impact? If these systems aren’t working, how do we change them?

This is something I do in Italy with kids in the summer camps that I‘ve run for many years. We create this kind of undisciplined disciplinarity where you can show people that they’re learning something at school, but also their society is connected to their culture. So, we introduce other ways of living in other countries or make them realize that a lot of the concepts in our society are specific to us.

We learn in a way that makes us think that things are not changeable. But certain things we think of as “normal” were born in a specific context, different from the one that we have now.

For example, we created private property 300 years ago. At that time, there were 10 million or 100 million people living on this planet. In that age, maybe private property made sense. Now there are 8 billion. How can we all claim one square meter of land? We don’t have space for everyone, so does private property still make sense? How can we unpack all these big given concepts of our education?

And how do you do that exactly, like in these summer camps? How does it work in practice?

The summer community is interesting because we have all these methodologies for work building. Kids from age 8 to 15 attend. They have two weeks, and they’re all introduced to a fake society that we come up with. One is a community of 300 people living on an island in the Pacific Ocean that is controlled by a matriarchal state where the woman is in control. They receive a brief, and then every day for the first week, they have to work on one pillar of the society. So, education, work, the political system, how decision-making works… Every day is 50 years in the story of that society, and at the end of each day, they have to come up with three actions that modify the course of history a bit. They do that for one week, and then in the second week there are games relating to crises that are happening in the world. And these affect this society differently because, for example, they don’t have an industrial system or because they didn’t develop a medical system. These crises put them in antagonistic or competitive or collaborative relationships with each other.  

Sometimes during the first two or three days, you see that people are acting as they would in their daily lives, and then they understand, “OK this is another society”. They start to abandon the thinking we are given that tells us we cannot change. They learn that there are also other ways of being in society that don’t rely on that given construct, so it’s a very interesting experience.

When I created this, no one expected people would have the attention to stay two hours every day talking about this, but in the end they did. Sometimes we have all these assumptions, like people won’t pick things up, especially kids. But in these spaces they don’t have phones, so they have all the time to be present, and then they are with 100 other people so the only social interactions they have are the ones in front of them in that moment. And by being together for two weeks you create this little society where other kinds of dynamics are happening.

That’s really interesting. I wonder how this kind of approach combines with our standard education, because I guess you still need to learn concrete subjects as an educational foundation.

Of course, but on the other side there is also a need for another kind of non-institutional education. They call it “convivial education” where what you care about determines what you learn. Instead of an “expert” authority determining the direction, let people find their own agency.

So, you think everyone will have that? I think it’s not obvious for most people. For example, when I was a kid I knew from a very young age that I wanted to go to art school, and then it was just about finding the path. But most people go into school with no idea what interests them, where they want to go, or what drives them.

It’s difficult because you don’t know what all the options are. In the Netherlands, from a relatively young age, you can define your curriculum. So, if you’re not interested in math, you won’t do math. You shape your own direction. On the other hand, I also like the Italian system where everybody is forced to do everything, because you don’t necessarily know if you like something until you try it to a certain level. It’s not a song you listen to for a couple seconds and say, “I don’t like it”. Yeah, but you never tried it. You need to engage with it a bit of a longer to understand if it’s something that brings you somewhere or it’s something that’s interesting to you. Ideally, it’s a combo of semi-structured education.

They need some kind of structure to discover what interests them in the first place, right?

Yes, but nowadays, if you see “the structure” we give kids, it looks like a total mess filled with anxiety and related diseases like ADHD caused by using devices. It’s creating the same kind of confusion as having no structure at all.

Also, are kids retaining what they are being taught? Being forced to talk about things is not the same as learning. If you only learn information for the purpose of writing it down, you forget it after three days. Having someone teach you something doesn’t mean you learned it. So, I don’t know if this structure really helps or not.

We switched from a world in which it was important to know things to a world in which it was important to know where to find things to a world where finding things is not even important anymore because there is an AI chat bot that finds everything for you.

I believe you cannot really create or innovate without your own ideas because you cannot relate to knowledge that is outside of your own body.

But if you give a kid an organized space in which they can think for themselves, they can discover what level of direction they need. They need relations not directions. They need to have somebody that is few steps ahead in life to open the door.

The French philosopher, Jacques Rancière, says the “ignorant schoolmaster” ought to be the true teacher. You should be ignorant about what we are teaching because if not, the questions that you’re asking are rhetorical. So, the teacher is asking, “What is 1 + 1?” and you will say, “2”. The teacher already knew that it’s 2.

That’s kind of how the Seeds workshops work. There is a very general question, and if I am leading it, I am intentionally trying not to lead the conversation in any specific direction. I make contributions, but I learn much more than what I contribute. I am never considering myself like a teacher, more like a facilitator.

In the education we have nowadays, there is a missing sense of core responsibility. The idea is like, you tell me all the notions that you have, and I will take them and put them in my pocket. That is not true learning. It doesn’t prepare a person for a world in which there is nobody telling you what to do, and so education prepares people to be executors.

It was invented in connection with the industrial revolution. Kids were going to the factory, and they were not really effective. So, they taught kids to be more effective in their work, and then they went to the factory, and they were good workers. But this system reiterates this capitalistic way of being in the world.

And now we try asking education to deal with the challenges of capitalism, but it is itself a structure of capitalism.

For example, climate change, we knew from the 70s that this was an issue, and we completely understand everything about it, but understanding doesn’t mean you do something about it. 

So, we come back again to “change”. How do we change the systems that aren’t working?

There is this dimension of touching the belly of people, you know, to make them feel something that then creates the agency to actually solve things.

If we look at populists on the right, they are very good at addressing “the belly”, but the left is not picking up on it. The left should also do that because we need to go to the level of “feeling” to actually create change.

In terms of education, there is a need to move from simply rational, logical ways of thinking to embodied emotions and to give the kinds of tools that help us to feel that complexity, reconnecting to a sort of instinct that has been misplaced.

We need to go back to that kind of state where we feel that we can grasp a situation without a complete understanding of it because we are not going to solve problems by trying to understand them. That was what we tried to do for many years, but we need to act, and acting is based on instincts, bypassing this rationale linear process.

The tricky thing I usually say is that we need to switch from “making sense” to “making senses”. We need to transform something that we understand into something that we grasp but through a non-rational approach. Sometimes complexity is not something you can understand — you can just feel it.