CREATING BETTER FUTURES:FROM WORLDVIEWS TO A BETTER WORLD

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

your philosophy ] i.e., philosophy (or learning) in general.

If I have a fond memory of my mother’s wisdom it is this quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet she frequently used in our daily conversations. She had much more of a literary context to her take on the world than my father, whose reality was grounded in practice and his lived traumatic experience as a soldier in North Africa and Italy in WW2. I think my mother’s use of this quote might be framed by the words “dreamt of”, since it seems that Hamlet is pointing out how little even the most educated people can explain. In general terms he is talking about the limitations of human thought. And, there is no doubt that this is surfacing more into our collective consciousness, as we progress through the serious impacts of Covid -19.
This is also exemplified in a new book written by a close friend and colleague Rolf Jucker, who is the Director of Silviva-an environmental education charity in Switzerland. The title of his book is Time to Live Complexity: Reflections on science, self-illusions, religion, democracy, and education for the future.
The book explores this critical question: Why the crave for easy answers is at the root of our problems? It argues, persuasively that education for a viable future has never been more important than in our era of fake news, self-illusions, corporate dominance, and Fridays for future. By reflecting on several decades of theory and practice in education for sustainability his book focuses on the most important issues we need to address, if we are to succeed in creating a fair, open, just, equitable and environmentally sustainable world. We need to clarify how we can arrive at a sound understanding of reality, which belief-systems and ideologies impede this understanding and which issues need to be addressed as a matter of urgency (such as the reinvention of democracy and overpopulation). By applying the conclusions drawn on education itself, the author forces educational practitioners to reflect self-critically on their practices and increase the quality and efficacy of their interventions for a better world.

In a review of the book, I highlighted how timely it was in exploring the relationship between intelligence and rationality. Why is this so important? Because, humanity is facing an existential crisis; a pending Armageddon which threatens our very existence on planet earth because of our unsustainable lifestyles. And, yet humanity has so far failed to respond to this threat at scale and with urgency. Rolf Jucker frames this book from the standpoint of future proofing our education systems, so that current and future generations might learn and so create a more sustainable future- for all life on earth. Its premise originates from the fact that intelligence and rationality are far from perfectly correlated. Indeed, the book argues that we are beset by a huge array of false news, self-illusion, echo chambers, myths and stories which makes how our beliefs map onto the actual structure of the world(reality) increasingly difficult for us to make rational, evidence based and logical decisions. This cognitive dissonance between intelligence and rational beliefs and action is a major issue for education and learning for a sustainable future. The book explores how intelligence can be a tool for both propaganda and truth -seeking based on the ground-breaking work of Kahneman and Tversky. Most cognitive scientists now divide our thinking into two categories: system I, intuitive, automatic, fast thinking that may be prey to unconscious biases; and system 2,slow,more analytical, deliberative thinking. System 1 thinking is now considered to be the reason why people do stupid things!

It reinforces one of the real issues humanity faces around both an ancient and more recent skirmish about world views-or paradigms between the objectivists, who think that truth is a very simple matter of matching a statement against facts-something known to be true-and the other side- the subjectivists, who think that what count as facts depend on who you are, where you are from and often in what era you live in. Ideas about paradigms are very slippery-some authors ague that if you think you have it clear, then you have not got it all! We owe much to our current understanding of paradigms to Thomas Kuhn-a historian of science. He revolutionised our understanding of science by pointing out the critical distinction between Normal Science and Revolutionary Science. The first grows by gradual accretion over time and the second is more unpredictable and transformative; examples include the discoveries of Galileo, Einstein and more recently James Lovelock and the Gaia hypothesis. Kuhn’s insights gained traction in Europe where there was a tradition in favour of alternative theories of knowledge. In the USA and to some extent the UK there was an ignorance and persistent anti-paradigm empiricist(objectivist)paradigm! Why is this important ? Because the anomalies of paradigms reflect our basic belief systems and because these can significantly underpin our cognition and perceptions of reality. Kuhn’s categorisation of two types of science are more than just descriptions of baby steps and giant steps in our understanding, they are much more radical than that. They reinforce the idea that we make giant breakthroughs in our reorientation of reality but more fundamentally we alter what counts as reality. And, another great irony is that the thinking skills explored by Kahneman’s Nobel Prize winning work are still neglected in most of the well-known assessments of cognitive ability.