How might we liberate ourselves from our archaic pedagogy that disables us from solving our complex web of self-inflicted wicked problems in the 21st-century?
How might we develop a broad range of collaborative skills to restore planetary health, and co-create a fair-free-flourishing-future for the benefit of all?
Traditional "talking-head" conferences with sages-on-the-stage, pedagogical systems, leadership programs do little to cultivate a broad array of skills for solving our complex web of self inflicted wicked problems. These problems arise from our shadows of human nature and our dark sides.
Political corruption, kleptocracies, ineffective public policy organizations, amoral and immoral corporatocracy and unjust legal systems
Fragmented, misaligned political, private and public sectors failing to collaborate for the common good
Neoliberalism without transparency accountability in failing to seek truth about the impact of linear extractive and exploitative economies on stakeholders and the planet
Controlling patriarchy, toxic masculinity syndrome, tyrants with asocial political personality disorders: pathological megalomania, malignant narcissism, incessant sociopathy and autocratic authoritarianism
False prophets, immoral saviors, ego-centric sages and unscrupulous marketing mavericks
The tribal trances of hero-worshiping cult leaders along with their blind unconditional loyalty
Irresponsible use of free speech, truth decay in journalist integrity, and fake news
Neo-terrorism: the wars of weaponized words without sociopathic regard to truth, integrity and transparent accountability
Propaganda machines perpetrating and perpetuating disinformation pandemics
Divisive fundamentalism, dysfunctional polarizations and politico-religious toxicities
The injustice of isms and inequities, the unfair advantages for the elites, the unfair disadvantages for the poor and human rights abuses,
Civil strife, uncivil societies and psychological traumas
Wars and the vast expenditures on the military industrial complex
Global warming, environment degradation, rapid declines in biodiversity, planetary demise and lack of pandemic preparedness
Pedagogy with teacher-centered assignments of projects are legacy systems of educational hegemony that stifle learners' natural curiosity, imagination and questioning. In effect, teachers rob learners of their human agency to work on projects of their own choosing. Students sacrifice their sovereignty and freedom to learn as independent and interdependent beings.
How might we heal a reductionist, fragmented and dehumanizing our educational systems?
Teachers unintentionally create spiritual voids of otherness in students with little opportunity to "know thyself" (the psychology of egos) and to "know thySelf" (the spirituality of transcendence). They take the humanity out of learner-centered transformational learning and reinforce the transactional machines of teacher-centered education.
Pedagogical hegemony reinforces competition and individual accomplishments. This approach is antithetical to developing ongoing collaborative learning communities needed to solve our wicked problems.
At its worst, teachers train students on what to think to a point that they resist learning how to think for themselves. They neglect and deprive students from developing a broad array of capabilities for human flourishing: such as self-awareness, emotional self-regulation, empathy, discernment, critical thinking, media literacy, anti-marketing, anti-propaganda, human-centered design, systems, complexity, ethical, civic, psychological, social, political and spiritual thinking skills.
Resistance against deep learning risks regressing to fear-based group think and malevolent self-righteousness fundamentalism: such as anti-intellectualism, demeaning ridicule, distrust of experts and blanket rejection of institutional integrity. To add fuel onto the fire, social and mass media propaganda machines incite "us versus them" divisiveness, amplify dysfunctional polarizations and manufacture disinformation pandemics along with conspiracy theories.
Such subversive politics undermine the humanitarian spirit of democracies and sabotage any civic alignment to do good for all and the planet. Our political, leadership, academic, educational, social and religious institutions are responsible for our deficiencies in developing a diverse array of virtues and skills needed to solve complex problems. Our institutions have failed us. We need radical transformational innovations in our educational systems, knowledge management methods and learning processes.
How might we:
Move beyond the pedagogy of teaching passive learners to cultivating activated learners learning how to work and collaborate together on the EquityMoonshot quest?
Imagine a digital learning revolution to surpass the impact of the Gutenberg innovation?
Cultivate the learning designers to scale up, amplify and exponentiate virtous transformations?
These educational deficiencies render broad swaths of people gullible to cult leaders whose lies become truth, and truth becomes lies. People sacrifice their freedoms of sovereignty to leave spiritual voids for belonging.
Cult leaders take advantage of the people's vulnerabilities to serve their narcissistic needs for power, control and influence. In extremis, the blind loyalty of this misplaced belonging suspends independent thinking to a point of mass delusions, sociopathy and psychosis.
How might we, as educators, become equity muses to:
Redress that the majority of our professional training remains irrelevant, inadequate, ineffective and even counter-productive in solving wicked problems?
Enable learners to understand why and how linear and reductionist thinking are counter-productive in solving wicked problems?
Unlearn the elite one-up-man-ship, competitive colonial-style, win-lose debates that stifle the collaborative spirit of generative dialogues needed to solve our complex web of problems?
Align liberty with equity to cultivate open-minded, truth-seeking, virtuous free-thinkers collaborating together needed to launch #EquityMoonshot?
Adopt learner-centered andragogical principles to build ongoing learning communities aligned to work on the equity moonshot quest?
Albert Einstein emphasized curiosity, imagination and questioning for solving complex problems.
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
The cognitive processes of theory development and academic reflections are favored over strategic doing and the pragmatism of social impact. Academic papers are like trophy score cards with impact factors that do not measure social impact.Â
The elite colonial style of antiquated academia reinforces competitive, reductionistic one-up-manship jockeying for professorial prestige, power, status and fame above collaborating for social impact.
The book manufacturing systems are like dis-connected, punctuation marks without commas. Corporate book productions are based on profit-driven volume and use authors as products, just like social media does to its users (social dilemma). One or more authors write a book together over X years, market the book and create a business card for their consultancy work. So many great books never see the light of day in the exponential growth of disconnected knowledge experts.
Our anticipated proprietary knowledge and academic systems along with their focus on individualism, atomization and fragmentation stymie collaboration. Our individualistically oriented knowledge management systems create disconnected experts, sages-on-the-stage, gurus and mavericks with massive redundancies across books. Finding unique insights is dependent of curating a lot of books.
Imagine if experts, non-experts, partialists (specialists) and generalists working collaboratively on an open living book based on ongoing iterative peer-review. processes, feedback from readers and editorial refinement for developing intergenerational lifelong learning communities.
Our knowledge legacy systems of the reductionist machine age constrain the cultivation of systems, complexity and human-centered design thinking, along the integration of indigenous and modern wisdom. We have the knowledge and skills to solve our wicked problems, which are not widely disseminated.
How might equity muses, leaders and learning designers:
Scale up the wisdom capabilities and capacities to redesign our anticipated knowledge systems for the digital-AI age?
Co-evolve ethical systems of virtues development to scale up transformational collaborative learning?
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