I stood in front of the Career Services building near the conclusion of my senior year at Dartmouth, watching my classmates line up. Everyone seemed to be dressed the same as they waited for their corporate job interviews, the men in navy jackets and the women in dark skirts.
I remembered my first day on campus four years ago, when we were all dressed differently and dreaming of different futures.
It was as if, rather than increasing our individuality and inventiveness, our education had crushed them to uniformity.
It wasn’t a one-of-a-kind scene.
Formal education provides the economy with workers who will enhance productivity all over the world.
Its goal is to keep the economic machine running rather than to change how it works. However, this machine is now a threat to our very existence.
We’ll need many planet Earth to supply the resources if the entire world reaches the levels of consumption observed in high-income countries today.
Our economic system is based on the nonsensical concept of endless development inside a finite territory.
Formal schooling produces progressively more efficient “human capital” to keep this machine going.
Our civilization’s approach to training our young people is driven by increasing productivity metrics—such as income per employee or return on investment—rather than the individuality of students.
Even though the Sustainable Development Goals call for education to be a force for sustainability, the way Western societies have come to think about education has often undermined our ability to deal with an environmental challenge.
To get through this crisis, we need to strengthen rather than weaken our imagination.
None of my schoolings encouraged me to imagine a world other than the one I observed around me as a child.
I had to learn textbooks word for word as a child in 1990s Slovakia.
As an education researcher, I’ve seen children in other countries go through similar experiences—a chorus of Indian students reciting lines put on the whiteboard by their teacher, a South African student yelled at by the teacher for failing to duplicate exactly the content of the textbook.
In much of the world, rote learning, discouraging originality, and encouraging docility in children are still at the heart of what it means to be taught.
Many experts think that such educational practices must be abandoned.
However, the suppression of children’s imagination is not limited to underserved neighborhoods or outdated educational institutions.
The problem is concealed, but it’s even worse in “elite” institutions that promote “critical thinking.”
Throughout my Ivy League undergraduate and Oxbridge graduate years, few people encouraged me to conceive a different future for the globe, except for a few smart mentors.
These schools want their graduates to succeed, and success is typically defined by preserving existing systems rather than reinventing their underpinnings.
We’ve seen initiatives to standardize curricula all around the world in recent years. Western conceptions of educational achievement are brought to the rest of the globe through such reforms.
Countries are focusing on improving quantifiable results such as reading and numeracy as a result of the OECD’s standardized assessments, which rank education systems.
Winning the race for the most efficient educational system today means having the most efficient workforce and accelerating the growth of the national economy tomorrow.
Children are effectively shaped in the image of artificial intelligence by our standardized, metric-driven, “efficient” educational systems (AI).
AI is the ideal “worker” since it constantly increases its productivity while remaining unconcerned about the bigger structures in which it operates.
One of our time’s great contradictions is that we spend so much money on supercomputers while ignoring the creative potential of millions of human brains.
Our approach to education is driven by our focus on technical solutions to our civilization’s difficulties.
More students are studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) at British institutions than ever before, with AI programs seeing a 400 percent growth in enrollment in the previous ten years.
Social sciences and humanities are frequently undervalued and viewed as inferior by policymakers and the general public when compared to STEM.
However, this strategy is ineffective because non-STEM topics are critical in developing our ability to envision the world.
We’ve even pinned our hopes on AI to solve the environmental catastrophe.
Machine learning is used to manage energy networks, track land-use via satellite imaging, and forecast extreme weather.
However, AI, like all of our other technologies, can only cure the symptoms of the environmental catastrophe, not the underlying causes.
Our arrogance and lack of sensitivity to our impact on the planet are to blame.
The answers to the problems in our politics and society that are at the root of the environmental catastrophe cannot be delegated to technology.
Throughout history, those who have made significant changes have relied on their imaginations to overcome basic societal faults.
Dissidents fighting Communism in my birth country, Czechoslovakia, have kept their hopes of democracy alive for decades by picturing alternative futures.
Nelson Mandela’s supporters in South Africa had to be radical in their imagination to construct a vision of a kinder society during apartheid.
Visualizing democracy while living under a totalitarian dictatorship is similar to imagining degrowth in an infinitely growing environment.
The intelligence that Nelson Mandela and Václav Havel possessed was not created in a laboratory.
The ability to reimagine the future and challenge the status quo is a uniquely human trait.
Children, unlike AI, are naturally inventive and question society’s principles.
In my research, I’ve found that young children’s imaginations are typically the most radical in thinking alternate futures; as they get older, their imaginations become more generic, following dominant technological advancement narratives.
Ideas like degrowth and intergenerational fairness will remain fringe and unrealistic to many as long as our imagination is stifled.
Learning from history’s disruptors who made the seemingly impossible digestible is an important part of cultivating creativity.
It entails a shift away from standardized curricula, quantitative measurements, and authoritarian teaching methods.
It implies looking for inspiration in children’s imaginations rather than disregarding “childish” thoughts about the future of the world.
Arts and creativity are just as vital as math and science in an educational system that values imagination.
Teachers create their educational theories and put them into action. Children determine their definition of success.
Idealism and pragmatism coexist. Having an opinion and participating in politics are goals of education, not side activities.
Some of these concepts have already sparked educational ventures around the world, such as forest schools in Europe, jeevanshalas (life schools) in India, and Schumacher College in the United Kingdom, although they are the outliers.
The environmental catastrophe is a crisis of imagination, not one of technology or science. We might just be able to dream our way to survival if we let children be our guides.
THE AUTHOR IS : Peter Sutoris is an environmental anthropologist based at SOAS University of London and the author of Visions of Development and Educating for the Anthropocene. More about his research can be found at www.petersutoris.com/.
