"Generation Transition"
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BIG Questions Institute Bi-Weekly UpdateMay 22, 02024, No. 173 (Read online) "Generation Transition"Hey, In her much anticipated annual overview last month of emerging tech trends, Amy Webb suggested all of us alive today are a part of what she called "Gen T" or "Generation Transition." We are now, she said, "being forced to transform at a much faster rate than we can comprehend what is happening to us" due primarily to lightening-fast advances in artificial intelligence, wearable devices, and biotechnology. This resonates. In our work to help schools understand what's happening in this moment (to whatever extent that is possible), we frequently hear educators voicing their struggles with how to keep up, and, importantly, with how to make sure their students will be able to thrive in their futures. Many of them are wondering how relevant the current school experience really is for the children in their classrooms, many of whom may well live into the 22nd Century. It's becoming more obvious that more content and knowledge expertise is not the answer. Instead, the focus is turning even more to the skills and dispositions that we must develop to cope with change and uncertainty. One starting point is the Inner Development Goals, a non-profit, open-source initiative committed to fostering inner development towards more sustainable futures. Here's a graphic with the 23 qualities that the IDGs identify: If we are in the midst of a global transition that will leave our societies looking very, very different from today, then these goals are a good starting point. There's no question we need to develop longer-term orientations for the decisions we're making today, that we need to be able to mobilize with others to bring about the changes we need, and that perseverance and optimism will be crucial. The very creation of these goals, as a supplement to the Sustainable Development Goals, stands as an acknowledgment that material or economic growth is not enough for society to flourish. Inner development must also take place as much and as robustly as material development does. But of course, valuing these goals above more traditional ways of thinking about "success" in schools requires a huge transition in and of itself. These goals are not easy to measure in any quantitative terms. They are not worksheet-able or testable in the current ways we think about assessment. And they require adults who can bring these qualities to their own practice and be able to model them for their students. Adopting them at depth and putting them at the center of our work will not be easy. But it would be worth it. In fact, wouldn't that be a great project that would require us to develop many of those goals in the process? Onward! Will and Homa Announcing: "Building and Becoming" 2.5-Day Retreat!The BIG Questions Institute is thrilled to announce our first 2.5-day retreat for school leaders who want to engage the future in relevant and inspired ways! What We're ReadingA few links to fuel your inquiry: The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life by L.M. Sacasas "Granted, it is hard to resist the promise of ease, safety, efficiency, and convenience, particularly when many of us may already be operating with some degree of burnout and exhausted by what is demanded of us to simply get by day to day. This is the trap set for us by our existing social order. When society is built to run like a machine for the optimization of profit and productivity with little regard for the constraints inherent in the embodied human condition, then we are tempted to embrace the device paradigm as a matter of survival or because we have been conditioned by the machine and have internalized its values.
The point, to be clear, is not that you and I must cook every meal from scratch or listen only to music we make for ourselves or never use a device that may facilitate the completion of certain tasks.
The point is that we ought to resist any vision of the good life in which we are reduced to mere consumers of readily accessible digitally simulated goods or in which human flourishing is indexed solely to the sheer quantity of our techno-economic system’s outputs without reference to their kind and quality. Implicit in Apple’s ad is the idea that virtually unlimited access to such goods is the summum bonum of human existence.”
This Scientist Has the Antidote to Our Climate Delusions by David Marchese "People don’t like sacrifice. People don’t like bans. But I think there’s a way to frame that as: This is an opportunity to live a different and better life.
I don’t think consumerism is that satisfying for most people. We’re taught that we need to keep up with these trends and buy all this stuff, but it doesn’t really make us happy. Happiness levels are declining. People have fewer close friends. It’s not like the current status quo is awesome and we should be fighting to hold on to it. We just have a bunch of junk. Instead of being surrounded by beautiful, durable, repairable things that we love, we’ve got a bunch of single-use plastic garbage. Having piles of garbage everywhere is not super delightful. Having all this fossil-fuel-based plastic on every beach and in our drinking water and in our rain and in our beer and in our seafood, which is currently the case — it’s not like that’s a life I want to hold on to. Often we think about the changes that are needed, and we don’t look at both sides of the coin. We think about, This is going to be expensive, or, This is going to be inconvenient, without thinking about, Do you know how inconvenient and expensive climate change is? It is so much worse.”
Crafting the Story We Want to Live by Susan Harris MacKay and Matt Karlsen "In his essay "The Most Human Art", Scott Russell Sanders writes: “What stories at their best can do is lead our desires in new directions—away from greed, toward generosity; away from suspicion, toward sympathy; away from an obsession with material goods, toward a concern for spiritual goods."
We can choose to craft those stories.
We can craft stories that, as Rebecca Solnit has described, help us uncover a kind of courage and creativity and love that is willing to swim up out of the wreckage that lies around us now -- because people are ravenous for it. I believe that a process of co-creation with children has the potential to show us how. 10-year-old Ollie asked an important question: “What would happen if we didn’t change any of this in our own classroom - how are we going to stop it from happening in the world?” It’s so critical that we start to tell the story of school as the place where we practice writing new stories about who we are, how we are together, and the world we want to live in. Our current stories need to be re-imagined. Consider the many ways that story is being used to terrify us and, therefore, to control us. Story can just as easily be employed to help us imagine something we’d much rather be."
Learn With BQIWill We Be in Your Neighborhood?Homa and Will would love to connect at any of the upcoming events they're speaking at: June 1 - Wake County Public Schools, Cary, NC, Global and Intercultural Professional Development (Homa) June 20 - RET Retreat, Iowa State University, Ames, IA (Will) June 25-27 - Leadership Seminar for Overseas Principals, Office of Overseas Schools, U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC (Homa and Will) July 25-27 - "Building and Becoming" 2.5-Day Retreat, Atlanta International School (Homa and Will) Info and Registration August 21 - Chilliwack (BC) School District Leadership Retreat (Will) August 22 - SD67 Leadership Retreat, Penticon, BC (Will) September 3 - Nanuet (NY) School District Open Day (Will) September 6-8 - United Nations International School (UNIS), Hanoi, Vietnam Governance as Leadership Training Institute: “Charting Tomorrow - Board Governance, Big Questions and the Future of Education”(Homa) October 25-27 - Tri-Association Conference, Mexico City, MX (Homa and Will) October 31- Nov 3 - Cape Town, South Africa: Association of International Schools in Africa annual conference (Homa) WORK WITH US!Let BQI help you unlock the opportunities that are rapidly unfolding in education and the wider contexts. Everyone is talking about the challenges and the difficulties that are breaking systems and people. Leadership navigates change with fearless inquiry, futures thinking, imagination, and diverse relationships. That takes new skills, lenses, and dispositions and we are here for it. We help school communities:
Why not think about having us work with your staff, leadership team, or board on some BIG Questions worth pursuing? We're working to design healthier, more just, more relevant, and more sustainable futures for school communities. Get all the details here. Onward with hope, Homa and Will |
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BIG Questions Institute Bi-Weekly Update July 8, 02024, No. 176 (Read online) Can You Prepare for the Unimaginable? Hey, As many of you settle into your holiday (during northern hemisphere summer) around this time of year, we offer a hearty CONGRATULATIONS! You made it through another year. We’ve had the added benefit of leading and participating in a number of summer professional development experiences (like the Leadership Seminar for Overseas Principals (LSOP) already this summer, which...
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