Vision

Our vision is to contribute to an education that fosters maturity and wisdom, supporting (the next generation of) leaders and change-makers to ‘see us through’ the crisis roiling our world.

As we will detail below, such an education needs to:

Address our worldviews and be paradigmatically reflexive;
Foster wise and mature humans (rather than just knowledgeable experts);
Support learners how to think well, not what to think
Encourage learners to widen their ‘circles of care and compassion’;
Be trauma-sensitive and in support of healing and well-being;
Creatively use technology to scale and customise learning.

Envisioning the education of the future

Learning is at the heart of our efforts both to adapt to change and to transform our troubled world. An important question pertains to what knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values people need to constructively respond to the crisis in our world, and thrive in the (near) future.

In a world saturated with information and the human brain being outcompeted by AI, the current focus of our education systems on knowledge and cognitive skills is inadequate and outdated. Additionally, in a world roiled by crisis, devastating loss, and increasingly hostile inter-group divisions, we need wise and emotionally mature humans, more than just knowledgeable experts.

As Stein (2018) put it, “we need a new kind of grown-up.”

However, while our (higher) education institutions are educating the next generation of leaders, they’re not oriented to fostering the wise humans that can embody the leadership so urgently needed in today’s world.

An education that engages our worldviews

With our world being in crisis on many fronts, it’s often argued that we need a more transformative education. That is, an education that invites for change at the deepest level – of how individuals understand the world and themselves in it – and thus has potential for generating change in (or of) worldviews.

This means we need an education that supports learners to reflect on their worldviews, and be paradigmatically reflexive – that is, aware of (instead of blind to) the assumptions and meaning systems one is coming from.

As professor of sustainability education Stephen Sterling put it: “transformative learning invites the experience of seeing our worldview rather than seeing with our worldview, so that we can be more open to and draw upon other views and possibilities.”

Or as he puts it elsewhere, “learning within a paradigm does not change the paradigm, whereas learning that facilitates a fundamental recognition of paradigm and enables paradigmatic reconstruction is by definition transformative” (2010, p.23).

We must develop the capacities that will enable us to recreate the world-system for the betterment of humanity and the Earth. … Education must promote growth into new levels of maturity. We need a new kind of grown-up.

This is the task of education today: to confront the almost unimaginable design challenge of building an educational system that provides for the re-creation of civilisation during a world-system transition.

Zachary SteinEducation in a Time between Worlds. Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society

An education that fosters psychological maturation and wisdom

Arguably, in our contemporary world, we need wisdom more than knowledge. For understanding how we can support the cultivation of wisdom and psychological growth, we might want to look at the field of developmental psychology.

This field has been studying how humans ‘construct’ and make sense of their world for over a century. While we all make meaning in unique ways, these researchers found striking patterns in the phases the human mind can go through over the life span, observing that meaning-making can become more expansive and complex, as well as less distorted, egocentric, and reactive over time (Kegan and Lahey, 2016).

Yet there is considerable variety within any age, and people move through these phases at different speeds. Also, “many of us, if not most of us, get stuck in our evolution and do not reach the most complex peaks” (Ibid, p.60).

That is, meaning making can evolve, but this is by no means a given. As people evolve, they get better at taking the perspectives of others, take greater responsibility for their thinking and feeling, and can think further into the future (to name only some of the well-researched consequences of mental/psychological development).

This is the kind of psychological growth and personal maturation the education of the future should support and encourage.

An education that supports learners how to think, not what to think

We need an education that creates conducive conditions for people to reflect, discuss, and question their beliefs, rather than needing them to adopt certain beliefs. That is, it needs to support learners in how to think well, not in what to think. Such an education is then fundamentally democratic and non-indoctrinatory, and actually celebrates diversity of thought, rather than attempting to reduce it.

The theory of transformative learning offers a good framework for this. Its underlying assumption is that when adequate conditions are created, students will grow into more complex and inclusive understandings – in alignment with insights from developmental psychology – and thus don’t need any coercing or imposition of specific ideas or values.

Though content (knowledge, concepts, ideas) is part of almost any learning process, the emphasis in transformative learning is on the process of learning, with the aspiration to generate change in their framework of understanding and meaning-making. We do this through using the Seven-Step Learning Journey, as well as through simple yet powerful methods that strengthen innate human abilities, including perspective-taking, inquiry, and stream-of-consciousness.

The Seven-Step Learning Journey is a learning cycle useful for structuring and facilitating transformative learning. See De Witt et al., 2023. Image by Noeske Kaesler.

From a developmental perspective, real growth requires some qualitative shift, not just in knowledge, but in perspective or way of thinking. … Learning might be about increasing our stores of knowledge in the form of our thinking that already exists (in-form-ation), but growing means we need to actually change the form itself (trans-form-ation). Each moment of our development, then, is a potentially temporary form of mind that, with the right support, can become more expansive, leaving traces of the less-mature form behind like rings in a tree trunk.

Jennifer BergerIn: Changing on the Job. Developing Leaders for a Complex World.

An education that encourages the widening of one’s circles of care and compassion

Although the education of the future should be fundamentally democratic and not impose on learners what to think or believe, it can – and should – point in a direction: that is, the direction of the innate human potential for growth and maturation in the domain of meaning-making (as described by the field of developmental psychology).

That is, the education of the future should invite for a gradual expansion of one’s ‘circles of care and compassion’. Consider for example how Lawrence Kohlberg demonstrated that moral judgments develop through levels or phases that increase in complexity, depth, and integration, moving from egocentric, to ethnocentric, to world-centric, to cosmo-centric (Stein, 2019, p. 42):

… in the moral domain we begin as egocentric, only concerned about ourselves. Then we come to identify with our family or tribe at ethnocentric levels. Our circle of compassion and care expands once again as we reach world-centric levels, where we come to embrace all humanity in our moral considerations. Finally, at the cosmo-centric levels … , we identify with all sentient beings that have ever been or will be.

That is, when learning, we tend to move through sequential phases, with complex abilities building on, and including, more simple ones. This counts for the realm of human meaning making just as much as for other skills, like learning to play an instrument or ride a bike.

Such an approach positively affirms our innate human potential, assuming that anyone given adequate opportunities can grow, and move beyond more narrow (moral) beliefs (rather than seeing them as character flaws), into more expansive and inclusive ones.

Using technology to scale transformative education

The technological and online learning revolution offers great benefits and new opportunities, including dramatically improved accessibility and affordability of high-quality education. These developments therefore have profound emancipatory and transformative potential.

Simultaneously, it’s clear that learning “through screens” can entail great disadvantages that need to be carefully managed. We know for example that learning is optimized through interpersonal relationships, emotional connection, embodiment, and hands-on experiences.

We develop our learning tools aiming to harvest the benefits of technology while overcoming its drawbacks. While using video-lectures and an online platform, the heart of our approaches orient to highly interactive, live sessions (either online or on site), in which participants deeply engage with each other, using practices to generate deep learning while building human connections and understanding.