Planetary Paideia

Discussion

Zachary Stein:

"In my book, Education in a Time Between Worlds, I weave together a set of six essays on the future of education by making use of a single idea: we are living in an historical epoch when the nature of education itself is changing. We are witnessing the emergence of a planetary paideia that is polycentric, decentralised, and philosophically integral. The so-called “global village” is at risk of turning into something like a shopping mall of planetary scope, but I argue that it could instead be transformed into a planetary “school without walls.” Indeed, I think that this is a highly probable scenario.[2] This world- historical transformation in the nature of our collective paideia is going to take (and is already taking) many varied forms, but the directionality of the change is clear. The necessity of the change is also clear: I argue that there is no viable future for civilisation that does not include a radical change in the nature of our educational systems.

For example, in my book I outline a near future design-fiction scenario for educational innovation in the United States, which I discuss as “the educational hub network.” The basic idea is that school systems themselves need to be repurposed and redesigned. I suggest that each school building be transformed into an unprecedented institution that is some combination of a public library, museum, co-working centre, computer lab, and daycare. Funded to the hilt and staffed by citizen-teacher-scientists, these public and privately supported educational hubs would be the local centres of regionally decentralised pop-up classrooms, community organising, apprenticeship networks, and college and work preparation counselling. Giant schools built on the model of the factory at the turn of the last century can be gutted, remodelled, and reborn (metaphorically and literally) to create the meta-industrial one-room schoolhouses of the future. In this new form of public space dedicated to education, digital technologies will enable the formation of peer-to-peer networks of students and teachers of all ages, from all across the local region (or the world, digitally), all without coercion or compromise. What enables these safe and efficient hubs of self- organising educational configurations are fundamentally new kinds of educational technologies, which put almost unlimited knowledge in the palm of every person’s hand.

I wrote these ideas under the frame of “concrete utopian thinking,” as a kind of speculative exercise to spark the social imagination. But since publishing the book, I have been contacted by numerous people who were already working on some version of this idea.[3] It seems there is a logic to the development and evolution of the collective paideia, as innovations are taking place along certain common vectors of change. The tides are turning, to some extent, as there is a dawning awareness of just how potentially radical the possibilities are for educational initiative in our historical moment.

One of the people who resonated with my thinking about the emergence of a planetary paideia was Jonathan Rowson. He alerted me to the ongoing efforts of a growing Bildung movement, in which he and others in Europe have been independently discovering and experimenting with the kind of ideas I was writing about in my book.[4] We could both see that something was trying to emerge, something like an alliance concerning the radical changes taking place in our collective paideia. Naturally, as happens when someone from New England gets together with someone from the UK, we decided to make TEA.

This is the first of several concept papers about the scope and mission of the Transformative Education Alliance (TEA), which is an effort undertaken here at Perspectiva, in conjunction with a pan-European Bildung-education network, as well as a host of sites in North America. This series of concept papers is intended to put in place the “code” upon which TEA will run, intending only to establish the minimum set of ideas needed for the creation of an alliance. TEA will eventually come to life on the ground in communities all over the world, but the first step is to understand the work that needs to be done."

(https://systems-souls-society.com/education-is-the-metacrisis/)