The Octopus Movement White Paper on Education: Solving the Unsolvable

what would education look like if the goal is human and planetary flourishing?

Some of us may prefer just to hear the content, some of us want the visual interaction, some of us actually want to write it down, some of us want to teach it to another person in order to understand it. And so my view is we have to do a fundamental educational reform, because the reality is, going through a formal education system just once in our... See more

Do the schools that we have designed best suit the world we are entering into? Has the old industrial form of education that our current system is based upon become obsolete? How can schools be designed to prepare young people for a changing world with increased needs for circular and systems thinking along with skills for a future that will be ver... See more

Along these lines, the world would benefit from an organized effort to understand how we should identify and train brilliant young people, how the most effective small groups exchange and share ideas, which incentives should exist for all sorts of participants in innovative ecosystems (including scientists, entrepreneurs, managers, and engineers), ... See more

Now consider our current situation. Despite all the language professing otherwise, in general the education system of the United States is based entirely on genetic determinism. A child is born assumed to have innate traits, including, for example, a preference as to what they want to be when they grow up (somehow just waiting fully-formed inside o... See more

Thus, this all begs the question, do modern schools actually build knowledge and capacity for all, or do they just reinforce old ideas of how industrial needs are met with a workforce? If schools are, at their fundamental level, designed to create the workers of the future, why are we still teaching siloed skills of the industrial age, when we have... See more