Metacrisis
Education is the Metacrisis: “There are a large number of crises drawing increasing amounts of public attention, such as the ecological, economic, immigration, geopolitical, and energy crises. But there is also an invisible crisis unfolding within our own minds and cultures that is getting much less attention. This is the metacrisis, which has to do with how humans understand themselves and the world. It is a generalised educational crisis involving a set of related psychological dynamics; systems and societies are in trouble, but it is the psyche—the human dimension—that is in the direst of straits.”[1]
Transformative Educational Alliance
Education is the Metacrisis was written in 2022 to outline the intellectual foundations of the Transformative Educational Alliance (TEA).
This project arose partly as a response to philosopher Thomas Metzinger's argument that climate collapse "clearly seems to exceed the present cognitive and emotional abilities of the species". Recasting our ecological challenges with an educational imperative to fashion and facilitate the emergence of such abilities at scale, the TEA initiative was therefore about institution building and collaboration around the kinds of education that really matter. [2][3]
Transformative Education
Transformative education (used here as a loose translation of the German, Bildung) has long been a term associated with advocacy (and sometimes prophesy) for a form of education that undertakes to transform individual sense-making and capabilities (i.e., development, not mere learning) within contexts of political and cultural engagement. This is the transformation of self and worldview, in community, in service of the world, and carried out on the scale of society itself though a publicly supported infrastructure. Such a vision was one of the dignities of modernity left to us by the Romantics and Idealists. This history will concern us in later writings.
The point here is the basic code for “transformation” being written into TEA is as follows:
- Individual transformations of sense-making and capability, done in the context of political and cultural engagement, with an understanding of the four-fold metacrisis and the role of education in a time of planetary transformation.
This can be contrasted with the code written into modern public education, which is something like this:
- Individual transformations of sense-making and capability, done in the context of abstract work that is isolated from the rest of politics and culture, undertaken with an understanding of the needs of the nation-state and the role of human capital in the economy.
Transformative Action Un/Learning
The Planetary Knowledge Commons
Paideia is a Greek term which is the etymological root for words such as encyclopedia and Wikipedia. The word has a range of connotations, but largely has to do with the raising of youth and the intergenerational transmission of virtues, knowledge, and skill... Education is prior to politics and thus prior to civilisation. Education—the praxis that is our paideia—is the “deep code” of both. Changes in the shape and nature of our collective paideia are more radical than, and ultimately the cause of, any and all political revolutions.[4]
For the radical pedagogy of the Black Panther Party, rooted in Food Sovereignty and the link between nutrition and education, see: Free Breakfast For Children
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.”
The construction, regeneration, and transformation of this "school without walls" or Knowledge Commons is central to the Climate Wiki project.
Sources
- ↑ https://systems-souls-society.com/education-is-the-metacrisis/
- ↑ Thomas Metzinger, Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty, 2014
- ↑ https://systems-souls-society.com/education-is-the-metacrisis/
- ↑ https://systems-souls-society.com/education-is-the-metacrisis/