Foreword

Summary

Stephen Sterling is a friend of long standing going back to our collaboration in a Schumacher College course in the early 1990s. He is also one of the clearest thinkers and most prolific scholars working in field of education policy and pedagogy. Among other things, we share the conviction that ecological disorder reflects a prior deficiency in how we think, what we think about, and consequently how we live in a mind-boggling, complex ecosphere with feedback loops, leads and lags, and long gaps between cause and effect. All of which makes the work of improving minds central to teachers at every level of education and in virtually every discipline. The awareness that we live within an ecological community calls for humility, restraint, and reverence, traits not often associated with the industrial/technological mindset. But the stakes are higher now and the time for change shorter than we could see in the early 1990s. To wit.

In the summer of 2023, ocean temperatures near Miami hit 38.3°C and set record highs in the North Atlantic. Phoenix, Arizona recorded thirty consecutive days over 43.3°C; temperatures in the Persian Gulf and parts of India reached 50°C. Storms, fires, and rainfall broke records worldwide. The Earth is warmer than ever recorded and likely warmer than any time in the past million years. Beyond some point, rising temperatures will cause cascading systemic failures. We were warned as far back as the 1950s and with increasing frequency ever since but oblivious to danger we sped past all the warning signs in order to keep economic growth going, the profits rising, and wealth accumulating. James Lovelock once cautioned of a time when all our controls would fail leaving us as helpless as passengers on a boat with a stalled engine on the Niagara River just above the falls. Are we there? Hard to say. But it is a very good time to think about many things including that mysterious thing called thinking and how it might be improved to better the odds of our being around for the long haul.

One way or another all societies educate their young. Some by acculturation – hanging out with adults and seeing how things are done. Others, by formal schooling. Either way the question to the young has always been “what will you make of yourself?”