What sort of education do we need to meet the challenges and opportunities of our rapidly changing world?
When looking around the world today, we might be forgiven for feeling a bit overwhelmed. We are seeing issues in mental health rising dramatically, inequity and fragmentation across our social-systems and an ever-increasing climate emergency that many of our current systems are helping to perpetuate.
We’ve moved beyond healthy limits and are living in a state of imbalance – emotionally, socially and ecologically. Many of us are now recognising things have to change. The energising part is that we already have the solutions to not only treat the symptoms of imbalance but revitalise ourselves in the process.
1. Let’s start thinking in systems
Everything in life is connected- our bodies, minds, emotions, communities, habits and our unquestionable dependence on the rest of the natural world. Connections are inbuilt into our DNA, and nothing in life works if we're not celebrating and supporting these relationships. Connection is what makes us so human!
Thinking in systems - and seeing these connections - allows us to start to understand the root causes of the challenges we face. Many of our current systems, including how we teach, learn and work, often function in silos, rather than embracing the bigger picture – which is why so many of these systems no longer make sense.
To tackle the root cause of our growing sense of disconnection, our focus needs to be on renewing and regenerating the relationships and connections around and within us which help us to live in healthy balance with each other and this shared planet.
In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
2. Let’s start practising relationships
Through my own experience working with education systems across the global north and south, I’ve connected with thousands of children, educators and practices, all working towards creating healthy learning environments for people and planet. The one thing they have in common? They put relationships at the heart of teaching and learning.
Regenerating education is a process of allowing and enabling all aspects of education to be restored and rebalanced to a healthier state. It’s a bit like gardening, if you like, as it’s a process of cultivating the conditions for healthy growth. Which, in this case, is by nurturing our relationships. It’s that simple.
Healthy learning environments don’t focus on output, they focus on culture, because if you get the culture right, everything else follows. By creating a culture of care, we are helping to promote relational intelligence and restore a healthy balance in all areas of our lives. These times invite us all to focus on Self-Care, People-Care and Earth-Care.
Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.
– Chief Seattle
3. Let’s be really bold and really human.
It requires great courage to relinquish the familiar in a world of uncertainty. For many of us, the instinct is to cling on even tighter to what we’re used to. Yet this moment in history welcomes us to let go of all things getting in the way of life’s flourishing and start living out some of these different stories.
From modern neuroscientists, environmentalists and indigenous communities to psychologists, pioneering educators and children - the same answers are revealed from every strand of exploration into this space: Healthy relationships are foundational to life’s flourishing and the key to a thriving future for people and planet.
We can't solve our problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Now is the time for regeneration – for becoming more creative, more purposeful, more compassionate, more in balance with life within us and all around us. Quite simply, it is a time for becoming more relational and more human.