Treating Students as Civilization Builders

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Entangled World explores the interrelated, existential social, economic, ecological, and technological risks we face, their underlying drivers, and how a more beautiful world might emerge.

In this episode, I’m joined by Homa Tavangar and Will Richardson. Homa is a best-selling author of Growing Up Global: Raising Children to Be At Home in the World and Global Kids. Homa advises and trains K-12 schools and Boards around the world. She was born in Iran, has lived on four continents, speaks four languages, and has heritage in four world religions.

Will Richardson has spent over 40 years in education, the last 20 of which have focused on sparking global conversations around educational change in response to the growing challenges and opportunities that our complex times present. He is the author of six books, and most recently published "Confronting Education in a Time of Chaos, Complexity and Collapse."

Together, Homa & Will co-founded the Big Questions Institute (BQI), which challenges educators to develop personal and institutional capacity for addressing the confounding problems of our time. It aims to help educators of all stripes build their capacity to see and accept this unique moment for what it is and to peer into the future with skill, grounding that work in "fearless inquiry," a disposition of deep questioning and truth-telling.

Homa and Will explore what it means to truly educate children in a rapidly changing world, focusing on the importance of relationships, connection, and the sacred elements of learning. The conversation delves into the roles of community, power dynamics in schools, while also highlighting the beacons of light in small, startup schools, many of them nature based, that are doing things radically different from mainstream education. We discuss the community-and-child-empowering frameworks that can help bring about desperately needed shifts in our education system by beginning with asking, “What is sacred?”