The Future of Higher Education and Challenges Faced by Young People

My guest today is Dr. Brad Kershner. Brad is a school leader, independent scholar, and meta-theorist, currently serving as the Head of School at Kimberton Waldorf School. His research, teaching, and writing cover a wide range of entangled topics, including education, leadership, parenting, cultural diversity, technology, integral theory, meditation, complexity, and developmental psychology. His first book is Understanding Educational Complexity: Integrating Practices and Perspectives for 21st Century Leadership. Brad is also a longtime student of multiple Buddhist lineages, a practitioner of Zen meditation, and describes himself as a lifelong student of developmental psychology and early childhood education.

What’s so unique about Brad is that he’s a Waldorf educator who is also metacrisis-informed. As listeners of this podcast know, many of our conversations explore the metacrisis, or the entangled web of global crises that we’re facing and that have common underlying generative dynamics that we must navigate to support the continued emergence of life. Brad and I talk about why it’s so critical to not only work to deeply understand the metacrisis in all the ways we come to know and understand anything but to also have a contemplative practice alongside that often very cognitive exploration.

When referencing the metacrisis, Brad says, “...it's an educational problem. It's a consciousness problem. It's a cultural problem”...and Brad’s focus is on helping people to understand the psychological, emotional, and cultural roots of the technological and scientific challenges that we face.

We talk about the importance of slowing down, beyond the personal benefits, but highlighting how it's necessary to be able to engage with these wicked crises, in ways that veer towards the direction of more life and love and away from the direction of destruction and fear.

We talk about the Waldorf approach to education and human development, its roots, and why so many of the teachings of its founder, Rudolph Steiner, remain relevant for our modern world.

One thing to clarify is that when Brad says he is a “techno-optimist” he means he sees the value and potential in technology to improve our lives, not that he’s aligned with the “techno-optimist” movement whose adherents claim that market capitalism and technology will solve the world’s problems. This version of techno-optimism simply justifies elite power and promotes indifference to human suffering rather than the alleviation of that suffering.

If you’re a parent of any age child, I think this conversation will be well worth your time in your already very crunched schedule.

Watch the video episode on the entangledworldpod YouTube channel.

Brad Kershner’s Links & Resources:

Understanding Educational Complexity: Integrating Practices and Perspectives for 21st Century Leadership

Waldorf Education, Stolen Focus and the Crisis of Attention

Other Resources Mentioned:

Stolen Focus, Johann Hari

Rudolf Steiner

Waldorf Education

The Social Dilemma film

John Vervaeke

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