Radical Curiosity: Questioning Commonly Held Beliefs to Imagine Flourishing Futures

The cultural interregnum is the messy middle space in which both legacy narratives and challenger narratives exist simultaneously. Friction, uncertainty, and growing pains are felt because so many facets of society are changing—but not at the same rate.

Teaching has been too closely associated with the transmission of knowledge as an object, the exchange of information from someone who knows to someone who seeks to know.

Are we so numb to when life is our teacher that we can only recognize learning when it has been tagged, packaged, evaluated, and offered as currency?

The blueprints of the past are artifacts of the thinking that created the very problems we seek to confront. We need to discard these outdated models that no longer serve us.

Nor should the social contract be static. To remain relevant in changing times, such a contract requires amendments. It should exist in a constant state of redesign.

Honest naming is a kind of ethical responsibility. We have a moral duty not to simply accept a harmful narrative, even if it comes cloaked in positive associations as a result of tradition, efforts by the powerful to preserve that power, or ignorance. We must not cave in to peer pressure from dead people.

It is not enough to raise awareness and launch an assault upon legacy narratives. To successfully dissolve them, we need to articulate what a healthier alternative may look like.

to author more beautiful futures, we must imagine and express what a fundamentally different possibility might be. As the award-winning poet and author Ocean Vuong described with stunning clarity: We often tell our students, “The future is in your hands.” But I think the future is actually in your mouth. You have to articulate the world you want to

We get educated out of our creativity. We unlearn our willingness to take risks and be wrong. Robinson goes on in his talk to define creativity as “the process of having original ideas that have value.” Our education system is educating people out of having original ideas that have value. Let that notion sink in for a moment.

Society is stitched together through a shared code for what we believe and how those beliefs translate to the way we live. In the same way that the operating system of our computers dictates the basic functions it performs, culture is a kind of operating system that dictates how society functions. A set of rules, normative behaviors, and collective