Educational Innovation Is One of the Major Catalysts of Fundamental Historical Change

Discussion

Zachary Stein:

"I argue further that educational innovation is one of the major catalysts of fundamental historical change. Other drivers of history, such as technology, warfare, and economics, presuppose and stem from educational realities. Humans make history when they make intentional changes to the dynamics of intergenerational transmission. This means literally changing how we “pass on” the knowledge, skills, and character traits that make possible the unfolding of what we call history. When looking at prior times of great change seeking lessons for today, I suggest keeping an eye on things like socialization, enculturation, contexts of human development, dynamics of teaching and learning, and intergenerational transmission. This is all “education”—as I broadly construe it.

Thinking this way about history allows me to say that, today, education is the meta-crisis.[4] Education is the root of all more specific crises such as climate change, governance breakdowns, impending war, and social unrest. There is a hidden crisis that is giving rise to the many obvious crises: it is unfolding in our own minds, and within newly complex and problematic dynamics of intergenerational transmission.

Take climate change. CO2, fossil fuels, and superstorms are not themselves the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is how we think and make choices concerning those things, and by implication, more importantly, how we will “pass on” certain failed ways of being and knowing to the next generation. If we don’t solve the problem of education none of the other problems can get solved. Absent education, only temporary solutions exit.

Our civilization is starting to mishandle the basic task of equipping the next generation with the requisite skills, personality structures, and cultural resources needed to maintain essential social systems. This is what might be called “social autopoiesis” —the self-(re)creation of the social body—and it can only be accomplished through intentional practices of education. Drastic educational crises that remain unresolved result in failures of social autopoiesis and eventually civilizational collapse.

Times between worlds—liminal epochs—always involve profound educational crises, which can rapidly cascade into total civilizational breakdowns. The ideal response has been to “reboot” the social structure using an updated educational operating system. The best example from recent history—the last time this happened at scale—is the story I tell in this essay.

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The phrase I have used in my book to describe our current historical epoch—“a time between worlds”—is not a metaphor. It is not “as if” we are in a time between worlds; we are quite literally in such a time. It is possible to see within history periods of time that mark transitions between world-systems; times when the deep structures and codes of civilization itself are in flux. Comenius lived in such a time, and so do we. Understanding this requires looking into the work of diverse and relatively new fields such as world systems analysis,[13] cultural evolution,[14] and cliodynamics,[15]which can all be classed under the heading of “metahistory.” Metahistory is about the search for overarching patterns that characterize large swaths of time. This can only be undertaken through an integration of multiple academic disciplines.[16]

Notably, this search for large patterns in the unfolding of human societies used just to be called “history.” But the grand narratives of modernity fell hard as their ideological underpinnings began to fade. Postmodern social sciences dissected and fragmented “his-story” into various camps. Then postmodern approaches encountered their own limits. Arguing for the absence of a metanarrative is still a kind of metanarrative, and a particularly incoherent and confusing one. Social systems and cultures do not long survive when there is no “shared story” about the big picture of history.

So, today, a new generation of scholars are using unprecedented analytical tools to tell a different kind of “metahistory.” These approaches engage with the complexity sciences, epistemology, and syntheses of quantitative and qualitative data across various time scales and geographical scopes. The result are compelling metahistorical insights into trends, dynamics, and patterns unfolding over centuries involving billions of people.

Thus far education itself has not been a focus of metahistorical analysis, although the role of education has not been neglected entirely either.[17] I believe that educational systems and practices can be reformed in light of patterns revealed through metahistorical analysis. These insights into how education makes history must be held alongside and interwoven with insights from psychology, anthropology, and all the other various fields comprising the interdisciplinary field of education.

There have been historical moments in which education and educational thinking have fundamentally implicated world historical transformations. Education becomes a radically transformative enterprise during times spent “between worlds,” when cultural and social patterns are fundamentally changing."

(https://systems-souls-society.com/education-must-make-history-again/)