109: Education in a time between worlds

It seems pretty clear that we are in a societal 'liminal space' right now, which is a threshold between what we have known until now and what we will know in the future. We are also in a liminal space related to learning and education, as schools hastily try to move learning online (despite disparities in access to online learning systems), and we have an incredible opportunity to think through what we think children's learning should look like in the future. In today's episode we hear from Dr. Zak Stein, who has spent many years thinking about ways in which the education system in the United States could be reimagined to take advantage of virtual learning opportunities and 'learning labs,' which gather resources around learners instead of having learning take place in classrooms isolated from real-world experience.  Dr. Stein is a big-picture thinker, and it was really exciting to sit with him and envision the future of learning. To learn more about the memberships I mention in this episode, please visit yourparentingmojo.com/together   Dr. Zak Stein's book Education in a time between worlds - Affiliate link   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen 1:46 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. To put the show into context before we get going, I wrote the questions for this episode on the night of Friday, March 20, 2020. And we recorded it on Sunday, March 22, which is coincidentally my birthday and I took at least half a day off. Here in the California Bay Area, we’ve been ordered to stay home for everything except non-essential errands for five days now. And the shutdown has now been extended to cover one in five Americans, including the entire states of California, New York and Illinois.   Now, I plan to reach out to our guests for the show in a few months’ time. But all of a sudden, on Friday night, I realized that I needed to talk with him now and that we need to hear from him today. And so our guest today is Dr. Zach Stein, whose book title tells you something of the breadth of scope of what we’re going to discuss, it is called Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology and Society.   We will lay some groundwork so we have a common understanding of how some of our global systems work, and then we’ll start to look at the role that education plays in the system. I think it’s become really clear to us in the last couple of weeks that many of the systems that we’ve built are unsustainable, and for a long time, that word has been used to mean that they’re bad for the environment. But I think that now we’re seeing that they’re actually not that good for us either. And so what will it take for us to do things differently?   Well, first, we need to start imagining what kinds of systems we might want to see instead and how we and our children can both live within those and also shape those. So that’s what we’re going to think about in this episode. And we wrap up the show by thinking about some of the steps that we ourselves can take in the coming days and weeks to start to put this in motion. And it was really great to hear Dr. Stein share some surprising and very doable advice on this topic.   One of the things that’s become most clear to me over the years that I’ve been doing this work is that the way we raise our children may be the single thing that we do that will have the most impact on the world. We talked about it a bit in the episode on Patriarchy a few weeks ago with listener Brian Stout and Dr. Carol Gilligan. The idea that systems that privilege men’s voices over women’s voices seems so huge and so deeply ingrained in our culture and they just seem impossible to change. But if we personally see the role that we are playing in the current system, and we accept that with grace and humility, but at the same time, take steps to do things differently with our own children, then we can actually make change happen. And I really feel like we’re on the cusp of some kind of big shift in our society right now.   Even a month ago, the conversation that we’re about to hear would have been mostly academic, I think, because it’s so easy to keep following the grooves in the system that we’re in, rather than get out of that groove and create a new system. But we’ve all been thrown out of our groove right now. We don’t have a choice but to do things differently. And we might miss the groove for sure it was comfortable, and it was comforting after all, and it seemed like we knew what was going on, and we could function within it. But the opportunity that I see is that the level of effort between the way that we’re currently existing and the future systems we can imagine, has never been smaller and may never be smaller again in my lifetime. And if today’s conversation sort of maybe helps us similar light bulb to go off in your head as it has in mine, even if it’s only a very nimble but you can’t really see anything else around it yet, but you can see that that bulb is there, I wonder if you would consider coming and joining me in a special edition of my memberships that I’m currently running.   I was planning to open them on a staggered basis later in the year, but we know that a lot has changed in the last few weeks. And I can tell from the kinds of questions and issues that are being raised in the free workshop that I’m running, which is called The Kids are Off School: Now What? There’s a real need for me to open these again right now. And so I host two memberships.   The first one is called Finding Your Parenting Mojo and it’s designed for people who agree with the ideas that they hear about in the podcast, but somehow find that they just really struggle to implement these in their daily lives. I know it’s so easy when you’re listening to a podcast, you just kind of nod along and you’re thinking, yeah, that sounds good. I’m gonna do that next time there’s a meltdown.   And then when you’re actually in the meltdown and you’re feeling triggered, then that thing that you heard in the podcast two weeks ago is nowhere to be found in your mind and you react in the same way that you’ve always reacted. And after it happens, you might even look back on the meltdown and you think, oh, I was gonna do that differently. Wasn’t I?   Or was there something I was going to do differently and then you just kind of fall back just as we do as a society into our regular group and nothing really shifts. But over time, things just seem hard. And maybe you wonder if parenting should be this hard. Or perhaps you’re just not sure what to do about it.   In the parenting membership, we take one topic per month and in the beginning of the month, I send you a short guide. And it turns all the research that I do for this podcast into a short set of really actionable tools on that topic.   Around the 10th of the month, we get on a group call, we see if you have any questions as you read through the guide, and you start to think about implementing the ideas. And then you go away for a couple weeks and you start practicing them. And towards the end of the month, we have a second group call because by then you tried a bit and you’ve had some successes, yay. And you probably have some failures as well and things that didn’t quite go the way you hoped. And we celebrate those successes, and we work through what happened with the things that didn’t go as well as you hoped.   And we help you to adjust course so that you can refine your approach and by the end of the month, you haven’t just read or listen to something and forgotten about it or even half remembered it, but don’t really know what to do with it, you’ve actually had support in figuring out how to implement it in your real life with your real family. And you’ve been through a couple of cycles of doing it. And you’ve been supported in that, and you’re on the way to making it a new habit.   And then in the next month, we move on to the next topic, and we repeat that process. So in terms of the topics we cover in the first month, we dramatically reduce the incidence of tantrums at your house, give you a bit of breathing space, and who doesn’t need breathing space right now. And in the second month, we look at what values we want to hold as parents and how we raise our children in line with those values. And this isn’t me telling you what values you should be using to raise your children. But this is you defining these with my help and support.   In the third month, we will understand where we might want to get more aligned with our parenting partner and use some tools to open up conversations with them in a way that invites them to share their ideas with you rather than making them feel attacked. And we also acknowledge that it’s totally fine for parents not to be on the same page some of the time and we help you figure out which are those areas for your family, and how to manage those. And after that we picked topics by group vote and these may include things like supporting emotion regulation, understanding anxiety in both parents and children, and navigating screen time. All the ideas and tools that I present in the membership are based on scientific research, but the overarching principle is that if you don’t want to, you never have to read another parenting book.   You just don’t have to do that anymore, because we go right to supporting you and implementing the tools that are based on the research. And given that a whole lot of parents are at home with their children for an extended period of time, it sort of seems as though the time is right to start thinking about how you want the next few months to go. Schools been closed for a couple weeks now. So how are things going? Can you imagine doing things the way you’ve been doing them for the last few weeks for several more months? If so then way to go. You got this. But if that thought makes you kind of nervous and you might want to think about using the membership to make a shift in your approach towards something that helps you work with your child, rather than feeling like you’re butting heads all the time, so the coming months and even years really can be easier and more peaceful. So that’s the Finding Your Parenting Mojo membership.   And so the second membership is the Your Child’s Learning Mojo membership. And that’s where we support children’s intrinsic love of learning. And you’ll hear a little in this episode about how schools have really not been designed for children’s learning. They were actually designed to mold people who would produce goods in factories and consume them in homes. And that’s why education is so standardized because getting people with standardized skills out the back end is really useful when you’re producing standardized products. And I have to say, it frustrates me no end that so many thousands of skilled and compassionate and knowledgeable teachers work within the system that so devalues their abilities and their relationships with our children in a way that really stamps out our children’s natural curiosity and the world around them by about second grade.   So in the Your Child’s Learning Mojo membership, we understand in layman’s terms how children learn. And then we learn how to use their own questions and interests as a jumping off point for engaging them in learning those deep and meaningful, and we’ll stay with them for so much longer than learning based on worksheets and curriculum. And as well as the actual learning on individual topics that happens which is great, we’re also helping them learn how to learn.   So we’re really being their guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage. Where it’s reimagining our job. Our job isn’t to provide them with answers. Our job is to connect them with resources, and see how the process of learning works so that they can apply this no matter where their interest take them in life.   And so schools are going to be closed for at least the next several months. So I know parents are wondering how the heck they’re going to support their children’s learning in that time, without standing over them, forcing them to fill out worksheets every day. Nobody finds that fun. One of the parents in the Learning membership told me last week that, “My children’s creativity and excitement over learning has been exploding since I’ve been in the membership.   Until last week, my only concern was that we would never get to all the projects we thought of based on their interests now home because of the Corona virus, we have no shortage of meaningful activities to fill our days for weeks, or even months to come. This course has put me in a position where I can turn lemons into lemonade.” And of course, that’s not to say that you or even this parent has to fill every moment of your day with projects. We’re not saying that at all. But rather, that you never need to search online for another list of 100 things to do with your child while shelter in places in effect, because you’ll already be working with your child on things that they love to do.   And so just to tie all this together, on Thursday, I hosted a circle for 40 parents it was on a Zoom call and they’re all taking the free workshop which is called The Kids are Off School: Now What? We were laughing a little and we were crying a little and for a couple of hours it was just kind of okay for us to lose it a bit and then gather up the pieces and go back to our families and some of the folks who are in the memberships also joined and they were feeling as much stress as everybody else was, but a couple of them said, “I feel like we’ve been preparing for the last 18 months for this.”   And so they’re referring to that period since they’ve been working with me and they’ve been practicing tools to help them in regular everyday parenting that they’re now finding are also so incredibly helpful in navigating their children’s anxieties about Coronavirus as well as just simple things like routine changes and not being able to see their friends and so these parents are feeling confident and prepared and ready for whatever comes up with their child.   So if that sounds like the kind of feeling you would like to have as you prepare for the next few months at home, which so many people seem to need both at once right now, I’m running a special package when you sign up for both of these memberships together, both the learning and the parenting one.   So, to see how that works just head on over to YourParentingMojo.com/Together.   Once again, that’s YourParentingMojo.com/Together. All right, so with all that out of way, let’s go ahead and meet today’s guest. Dr. Zach Stein studied Philosophy and Religion at Hampshire College and then Educational Neuroscience, Human Development and the Philosophy of Education at Harvard University. He’s now a scholar of the Ronin Institute, where he researches the relationships between education, human development and the evolution of civilizations. He’s also the co-president of a Think Tank, a board member at a number of technology startups, and he consults with schools, organizations and technology companies. Welcome Dr. Stein.     Dr. Stein  13:29 It's great to be here.   Jen  13:31 So I'd like to start by waiting right into the deep end with the big picture systems and then we'll move from there towards understanding the implications of these for our children's learning and education. And I'm going to quote from your book you've said that, “Based on an analysis of long-term global trends in economics and political history, contemporary world systems analysts argue that we have reached a crucial moment in geo history. When any complex system reaches its structural limits and evolutionary crisis ensues and a fundamentally new kind of system must be painfully and violently born”. So, if we were beginning this conversation a month ago, you know, yes, research on this topic has been around for a long time, but we might have needed to spend some time thinking through what this actually mean for us as fortunate people in our real lives? And today, we don't need to do that, we see the collapses beginning to happen. And we intuitively understand that what you wrote is true. I wonder if you can help us to maybe put your thinking about the Corona virus pandemic in the light of your previous writing and thinking please.   Dr. Stein  14:31 Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot. I, along with a bunch of other scholars since about 1972, not myself personally, you know, that the current way the systems running simply can't be sustained. So if you look at a book like The Limits to Growth, which was published in 1972, where the Student Loan Corporation, which was founded in 1972. And you look at the predictions from a lot of economists who saw the kind of waning of American hegemony beginning in 1972, which is when the dollar was taken off the gold standard by Nixon, through Fiat. And so a whole bunch of things basically started to get a bunch of people thinking that we need a fundamental change, right? Environmentalist sounding the bell, right? I think Silent Spring was 1962. So, what you have is a sense that, yeah, we were seriously running out of time, that there were all these extremely fragile systems that were reaching the limits of their growth, that the thing was wrongly conceived that you can’t have a plan to infinitely extract resources for capital gain on a finite planet. And so there was just this question of, what will that transition look like? How will we go from this kind of unsustainable model of civilizational growth to a sustainable way for in perpetuity, there to be human civilization? So, I started talking about this notion of being in a time between worlds because we're aware that the current system is ending, even though it may not look like it on the surface. And we're aware that the current systems ending and we don't know exactly what that next system looks like. So we're valley crossing in terms of evolutionary theory, we're moving out of one world and to another world. And this was apparent to people who were like, a small number of academics were basically looking through into the deeper structures but now this rather esoteric notions become exoteric and you're getting it like down on Main Street at an every living room that there's a phenomenology, there's an experience so whoa, we just been deworlded, right? The world as we knew it has kind of changed, that the old world is gone. And something new on the other side of this will emerge. That's been the feeling in the abstract and now it's the feeling in the concrete. And so it's revealing all of those systematic vulnerabilities in civilizational architecture, which have been known about, but it's making everyone aware of those, like, for example, the supply chain, right? It's like, when you go into a store and it's packed with goods, you're like, there's no problem with civilization. Look at this, like, everything's packed, right? You go into a store, and there's some stuff missing. You start to think maybe you maybe have the thought occasionally, but now you're thinking like hard about it, like, how does that supply chain actually work?   Jen  17:33 And then you buy more toilet paper?   Dr. Stein  17:35 Right. So this is the idea is that whoa, all of these supply, you know, all of the vulnerable infrastructures that sustain us now are...