Redesigning Education: Educating for collaboration and resilience

A primary function of education in the challenging 21st century must be creating many opportunities for people to learn how to work together productively.

NOTE: I have always appreciated how blogging allows me to pose questions to which I don’t yet have answers. In sharing my ideas-in-progress, I hope to spark some productive dialogue with readers, so that collaboratively we can begin to imagine a way forward. Your comments are heartily welcomed!

To redesign education for the 21st century, the first step is to envision how the 21st century is likely to unfold. I am not a doomer, but anyone who is paying attention knows that there are going to be many serious challenges in the coming decades.

Climate disruption, as Naomi Klein recognized early on, is going to change everything. Deep adaptation, to borrow Jem Bendell’s term, is going to have to happen quickly, at every level and in every sector. Education, both formal and informal, has a critical role to play in helping us to adapt quickly to our rapidly changing social and environmental landscapes.

The Covid-19 pandemic provided a real-world, “this is not a drill” model of:

·      how rapidly governments and agencies can respond when necessary, finding and applying funds, guidelines and assistance;

·      how people will respond to pressure (some conforming docilely to government guidelines, others rebelling and acting out);

·      who is really “essential” to the smooth functioning of society;

·      how dominant racism, sexism, ableism, nationalism and other forms of separation still are;

·      how interdependent and connected we actually are, literally sharing air in ways that supercede shallow artificial constructions of separation;

·      how important the Internet and virtual reality have become, accelerating the development of our “hive mind”;

·       and how nevertheless dependent we still are on the needs of our biosystems, both micro and macro.

When grocery shelves went bare and toilet paper could not be found, it was a wake-up call to the reality of limits, a puncturing of the bubble of capitalism’s wet dream of “limitless growth.” The global supply chains are not infallible; meatpackers and computer chip factory workers get sick just like everyone else; and our entire globe is an interconnected domino line-up, much more vulnerable than we had realized.

But also, quite resilient. We came through the pandemic. Many lives were lost, but overall, the system withstood the shock, and most people came through with some degree of psychic buoyancy, able to take the punch and keep on going.

That resilience, as positive psychologists have been telling us for a while, is key to human success, both individual and collective. People of all ages, but especially young people, must be shown how to develop resilience in themselves, and how to create it in every sector of society. Resilience and rapid adaptation are essential in this time of accelerated planetary systems change.

Human beings have survived and thrived on this planet to the extent that we have been able to work together to overcome challenges—teamwork is a key component of human resilience. So a primary function of education in the challenging 21st century must be creating many opportunities for people to learn how to work together productively.

In current educational systems, teamwork is most often found in competitive scenarios: from sports fields to science labs, our habit has been to foster teamwork by fostering competition, creating in-groups and out-groups and a “natural” antagonism.

But contrary to Darwin’s 19th century perceptions, Nature actually works by collaboration, not competition. Stable natural systems provide abundance for all, if resources are not hoarded and accumulated for profit and power.

Yes, I am pointing to capitalism as a huge part of the problem that people of the 21st century will have to wrestle with. But communism as it has been practiced in the 20th century is not the answer either; it is too authoritarian, too hierarchical.

What if we imagined a new form of social relations based on the radical recognition of interdependence? What if, instead of planning and building for profit and growth, we built and planned for maximum resilience?

What would education look like, at every level, if its aim were to train young people not to become docile workers in the capitalist industrial machine, but to become collaborative creators of a resilient social system that recognized its profound interdependence on the natural world, and prioritized the health and wellbeing of each component of the greater Gaian system?