Education, learning, arts and culture — joyfully creative and mobilizing
All our institutions need a fresh (re)take. Education, arts and culture are no exception.
Conventional academic education is (mostly) seriously out of sync with real needs for ongoing lifelong learning and meaningful contribution across all domains of society. The Industrial Age fragmented and commoditized education, limiting its scope and potential value. Learning can and must flow naturally and by design, via a much wider spectrum for young people starting their life journeys and encompassing all generations at every life stage.
Arts and culture are also commoditized and often seen as peripheral and discretionary. Yet arts and culture tap our individual and collective spirit. They hold promising pulsating potential to reach, connect, inspire and educate people anywhere and everywhere — locally and globally around the world.
Arts and culture make us feel. They evoke. They bring things to life in visceral ways. They connect us — meaningfully.
Music, film, dance, arts and crafts — any and all forms — touch us deeply and inspire our own creative life force.
We draw from, (re)connect and celebrate our Indigenous roots, all wisdom traditions, and rich, colourful heritage — wherever we’re rooted and relating in the world.
The work and contributions of creative educators and creative living and learning are typically under-valued.
And yet, they’re integral to adaptive living (human) system transformation and flourishing. They hold the power and potential to put civil and care into our human civilization trajectory.
They connect, translate, amplify and activate.
They can help to model deeper layers of adaptive systemic social change, essential to regenerative capacity, over time.
Education and arts and culture cut across all unstitutional collaborative commons work, underlying our framing for vibrant living lab coalitions and initiatives and Living Operating System purpose. There are many of us, with gifts differing, working diligently to widen these pathways.
The art of the possible springs to life when we seed, nurture and embed creative learning experiences and opportunities within and across all domains.
‘Modernity’ and ‘development’ are killing livelihoods that are ways of life, and replacing them with dreary, deadening jobs … ‘deadlihoods.’ We need to redefine and re-invent ‘work’ that is integrated with leisure and pleasure. ~ Ashish Kohari
Transforming education toward learning ecosystems in society encompasses many elements:
⚛️ Learning, knowledge and transcontextual insights to navigate systemic change
⚛️ Integrating learning as embodied, practical, experiential and accessible ongoing aspects of life and work
⚛️ Learning-in-action as a life-long evolutionary human (consciousness) development process
⚛️ Learning across the generations, cultures and at all life stages and cycles
⚛️ Community-based learning that builds a deep (reframed) sense of belonging and relational connectedness
⚛️ New, inspired curriculums with field experience that foster integrative, transdisciplinary living systems thinking and grounded application in real contexts
⚛️ (Un)learning, re-skilling and adapting, with practical resilience-building life skills and experience applicable to all aspects of life, work, roles and relationships, needed in our changing lives, communities and society
⚛️ Reciprocal multigenerational mentorship
Arts and Culture that widen our lens, inspiring social change through catalytic multimodal, multi-sensorial activation strategies and activities include:
⚛️ Building awareness and inviting active engagement in important social issues
⚛️ Generating novel, creative ideas and approaches for addressing complex systemic issues
⚛️ Evoking creative inspiration within communities
⚛️ Helping to integrate arts and culture into the mainstream fabric of our societies
⚛️ Bringing social change to life by tapping the human creative spirit and capacities
⚛️ Supporting local artists, venues and events that display, present, promote and share culturally creative social impact work and experiences
⚛️ Honouring, inviting and celebrating all manner of Indigenous wisdom and traditions — with deep humility and a spirit of reciprocity, partnership and learning
⚛️ Bringing art (and aesthetics and beauty) to people and place (access)
⚛️ Medium as message and creative expression
⚛️ Supporting multi-cultural diversity and living the values of equity, inclusion, belonging and justice
Education and learning and arts and culture potentially enliven integrated holistic multimodal ways of being, relating and knowing — bringing more left and right brain balance to everything. They’re integral to sparking a lifelong curiosity to learn — extending reach, inspiring, developing capabilities and mobilizing social change.
Interbecoming co-intelligent is an ongoing humbling (un)learning and (co)learning journey that transcends tired old boxed-in classrooms and disciplines. As we come to terms with our inherent messy humanness and mutual vulnerability, we’re better equipped, with gifts differing, to navigate complexity wisely and well, in the roughly right direction in the roughly right ways.
Imagine a world where this kind of learning was widely accessible, encouraged, valued and funded — interwoven as part of the living fabric of communities and societies dedicated to the flourishing of people and planet.
We welcome people whose creative work embodies and embeds learning, art, culture, spirituality, inspiration and innovation — to engage, participate, contribute and lead in a variety of ways.
Spirited emergent work and play are the life blood of movement making — inspiring new stories, joyful resilience, and a (reframed) sense of belonging, with people everywhere and anywhere moving in little and big ways.
Billions of stories that need sharing and hearing are surfacing, and billions more await. Stories can amplify individual and collective learning and our capacity to (un)learn. This is also about making space in our lives to birth multitudes of new life-affirming pathways and stories.
Cultural creatives, progressive learning modalities and holistic approaches are increasingly moving beyond the fringes and margins.
The regenerative (r)evolution is manifesting in many forms — a dance of emergence and strategy.
Bring it on!
‘Being unstitutional’ is simply a metaphor..a symbol…an alchemical invitation. It can help us let go of patterns that don’t serve. Perhaps…over time…we can restore and support reasonable balance in society — enriched through education, learning, arts and culture.
‘Being unstitutional’ embraces a wide variety of adaptive ways to unstitutionalize the institutions and conventions that really aren’t working….that aren’t serving. This is about opening portals and possibilities — inviting us to reimagine, enable and restore life-affirming pathways.
This also calls for important — not easy — hospicing work, to help deal with and accept some necessary endings and making space for new beginnings.
Can we reinvent and reconfigure our institutions that nurture creative lifelong learning, co-intelligence and ways of being?
Manish Jain of Ecoversities conversing with Amit Paul in this August 2024 World of Wisdom podcast, beautifully unpacks and explores viable widening pathways toward inspired individual, interconnected and interdependent (un)learning journeys. Alternatives to Education and reclaiming learning and knowledge. Well worth tuning in. This quote is one small pearl.
“The most important paper I give out is a roll of toilet paper to our graduates, telling them: If you can learn to deal with your own shit, you will have a happy life.” ~ Manish Jain
*This article was updated September 2024, reflecting additional perspectives and ongoing action research, as we continue to observe, listen, assimilate, curate and adapt — a learning journey for us all.
Unstitution was birthed as a collective creative commons and nested ecosystem. We (co-)catalyze and support collaborative communities, initiatives and coalitions where people from across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and walks-of-life work together on mission critical issues. From readiness through to regenerative progress — moving beyond polarization — is how we roll. The links embedded throughout this article are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. Each article is a fractal-like glimpse into the unstitutional ethos. They reflect a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens — anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn. Many of our posts and perspectives also pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
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