What it Means to be Human: Why We Need this Conversation Now

We need ‘Circular Education for a Circular Economy’ to face the challenges and crises we have created.

The publication of What it Means to be Human: Bildung traditions from around the globe, past, present, and future occurs in 2024 against a background in which many believe the world as we know it is coming to an end. Terms like metacrisis, polycrisis, collapse, the Sixth Great Extinction event, Moloch, and the Anthropocene all speak to a world unstuck from previous moorings and headed toward the edge of — nothing good.

If anything hopeful is seen against this darkening backdrop, it’s usually education. Somehow — details are usually quite sketchy on this — better education will guide and empower youth for a better future. Will it? It’s possible. By general consensus, homo sapiens has adapted to any number of environments from prehistory to the present day. It’s just conceivable we might adapt to this environment also. Education must surely have some role to play. But if education is to empower us to face a future beyond any previous imaginings, a future that feels more like a threat than a promise, we must make haste to at least articulate an educational approach that might actually make some positive difference for current and future generations. We owe that much at least to a world on the edge.

Adapting to the current environment is really the key. Whatever educational systems worked best in the past, may not matter nearly as much as what education must now become to guide us towards a livable future. In the interest of pushing the conversation forward sooner rather than later, a few salient points about the current world will need to suffice to suggest the sorts of changes that may be required.

· Global climate change and environmental degradation suggest the serious potential for mass casualty events and human population decline before the end of the current century.

· Meanwhile, the remnants of historical empires and colonial systems are competing with each other for territory and influence, creating mass casualty events now.

· Human prosperity, populations, and lifespans are at an all-time high; wealth and opportunities are far from equally distributed; and the whole system requires fossil fuel consumption that destabilizes the climate. Feedback loops from the release of fossil carbon suggest a coming hard cap on prosperity, populations, and lifespans.

· Global trade and information technology have brought peoples and cultures together in ways that could scarcely have been imagined even a generation ago.

· Science and technology push forward at accelerating rates, leading some to hope for technical salvation, suggesting to others a world in which we humans can no longer find a home.

· By many accounts, young people in particular face extreme stress in finding their way forward through the maze of technology, competing values and cultures, political and economic uncertainty, and environmental decline. Mental health challenges abound.

A need for action: Circular education for a circular economy

Plenty of books have been written about all that. The book What it Means to be Human was brought out partly as a response to issues such as those above. But a book is an artifact, a thing, a frozen moment. Change demands process too. Beyond the book, what is the process? Metacrises require metasolutions. The ideas below suggest some starting points for how a community gathered around a book can make a difference in a world needing new answers, and needing those answers at the earliest possible moment.

· Whatever education must become in the future, it must be on some level global.

· Each local culture must find its own way forward to engaging with the wider world.

· A global conversation must occur in which each culture has a voice and a speaking turn.

· Global standards and systems will emerge from that conversation.

As an architectural vision for this proposed model, I have offered the phrase “circular education for a circular economy”. That describes what bildung and related approaches are already. It also prescribes what we need to focus on going forward. The “circles” involved may be as small as local neighborhood study groups. They may also grow to larger scales of community, nation, region, and world. At any scale, participation, engagement, and student ownership of the process is essential to any possibility of success. It’s not like any of us teachers actually know what to do! If we did know that, then shame on us for having not done it all already! More realistically, as a species, we are in a discovery process, trying to work out solutions in situations no one has ever had to face. Our best chances come from empowering the most minds and hearts to engage with the many problems. Most of the resulting actions will be local. Stories about those actions can easily go global. Through the right sort of education, embodied action in one place can magically take root in other places too. To solve the problems the world faces now, we need eyes on those problems from every conceivable perspective. We need trained, motivated, skilled people in every corner of the world who know how to share their skills, their experiences, and their visions. No one person can find a viable pathway to a human future. Collectively, we might just get there.

Join the global conversation on September 21, 2024, about What it means to be human: https://www.globalbildung.net/what-it-means-to-be-human-2024-september-21/ it is free of charge and everybody can join.

Read more about the project: https://www.globalbildung.net/what-it-means-to-be-human/

And check out the book with contributions from Bhutan, South Africa, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Uruguay, China, the US, Canada, Lebanon, and Aotearoa New Zealand: https://www.nordicbildung.org/what-it-means-to-be-human/