Are we educating young people as consumers? Have educational institutions become service providers in the consumer economy of educational products?  Or are we educating young people as citizens - of their local communities, nations and the planet? If so what does that mean for how we engage them in the  processes of living and working together, making meaningful contributions and learning important things as they go.  I'm not sure that that looks much like what we're currently doing in most schools around the world.

Jon Alexander is on a mission to help a new story to emerge about how people all over the world are getting involved!

Is it possible to unlearn the conditioning of our minds, that many of us who have had traditional educations have experienced, such that we can think differently about what an education could be? This week's guest, Manish Jain, has seen both sides of this experience, and is weaving incredible communities and new institutions all over India and the world!

As I often say we radically underestimate young people and what they are capable of. They are asking to be involved in the critical conversations about systems change. And not only that they are also building their own capabilities for and with each other about how to engage with it's systemic issues. So it's a huge pleasure this week to be speaking with Nolita Mvunelo, Matías Lara and Vanessa Terschluse who have taken it upon themselves, as The 50 Percent, to gather a collection of insights to enhance young people's understanding of systems and how they move and change. They have published the amazing 'Young Person's Guide to Systems Change'.

There are very different ways of 'doing' education all around the world and my guest this week has spent many years exploring and deeply understanding many of them. As Alex Beard highlights in this conversation really powerfully, "does the purpose match the how or the process?" And how does this align with the values of the communities involved? When there is so much ideological warfare and polarisation around, we need more wise voices like Alex who are deeply expert and evidence-based but also oriented strongly around values and purpose.

As you will know if you've listened to previous episodes, this podcast is really about the central question of the kind of education (formal and informal) that we need to support and enable us all, but most importantly our young people, to transition effectively through this historical period of massive flux and change. There are many people around the world putting language to these shifts and offering guidance to leaders, and organisations for how to navigate them. But few are doing this as prominently and at such a scale as my guest this week. Otto Scharmer's substantial work with MIT, Theory U and the Presencing Institute for the last few decades has been helping leaders embrace cross-sector systems transformation. To quote his 2007 book on Theory U, his work opens up pathways for "dealing with the resistance of thought, emotion, and will; and intentionally reintegrating the intelligence of the head, the heart, and the hand" in the context of leadership, decision-making, and almost any kind of collaborative work.

With the so many prevailing stories of uncertainty around for everyone, our roles as educators supporting young people and colleagues to know how to navigate it can be overwhelming! As Thea Snow said on a recent episode, feeling safe in uncertainty is hard. But this is where perhaps we can all learn from the wisdom of those with expertise in futures work and facilitating spaces to explore desirable regenerative futures. Bill Sharpe (⁠http://www.billsharpe.uk/⁠) is one such expert, who has been helping teams in all sectors of organisations and society find co-ordinated ways of managing innovation, creating transformational change that has a chance of succeeding, and ways of seeing the future in the present. He developed the adapted version of the Three Horizons framework as a method for futures studies and practice with Anthony Hodgson, Andrew Curry and Graham Leicester.

As you will have heard on many previous episodes of the podcast, with Marie Battiste, Carl Mika, Wakanyi Hoffman, Vanessa Andreotti and others, understanding the ways in which our colonial schooling systems have propogated one particular way of knowing our world, and excluded and often violently suppressed many others is something that I care deeply about. For me, it has to be a key part of any transformative work that we do to, with humility and curiosity, to reorient education systems. But in order to do this, we need people who are able to gather and convene the critical conversations that put these ways of knowing in dialogue with each other. It is therefore the greatest honour to have Professor Catherine Odora Hoppers joining me on the podcast this week. For her entire career Dr Hoppers has been at the forefront of facilitating these vital conversations. In post-Apartheid South Africa, she designed and enabled the process that led to the first national policy on the recognition, development and protection of indigenous knowledge systems.

Reductionism - the breaking down of complex phenomena into as many parts as possible to make them fully understandable - is everywhere. To some extent the whole enterprise of modern formal schooling is based on the promise of reductionism, as we break life down into subjects, concepts, facts, etc to be digestible by our young people. It has also enabled unbelievable scientific and technological progress. So who could possibly argue with this? And yet, reductionism has become like the hammer that sees everything as a nail. One of its problems is that is renders everything into a mechanistic functioning of parts and nothing more. Our inability to perceive, understand and value complex and systemic patterns and relationships is maybe something that we need to engage with in our education systems.

Everyone involved in education from young people to tecahers to leaders to policy-makers are being asked some really tough questions in these current times. Do the systems and institutions that we are working and learning in still serve us? Did they ever? And what are we being called on to do differently? This week, it was such an amazing pleasure to chat with ⁠Zineb Mouhyi⁠ who is the co-founder of ⁠YouthXYouth⁠, a global organisation that she set up with Valentina Raman, to convene action around transforming education systems but in a way that didn't excluding the core of these systems, the primary constituents that they were seeking to engage and serve: young people.

In episode 181 with Robert Barnett, Rob and I were discussing the real constraints and difficult conditions teachers find themselves in as they try to prioritise the meaningful learning and growth of their young people. This week, we are taking a broader look at the kinds of institutional structures that might actually help rather than hinder these more generative ways of living and learning - the kinds of institutions suited to the transformative adaptations and systems change that we desperately need.

As educators, a great deal of our understandings of what learning is has been dominated by behaviourist and cognitivist ideas, but what if our decisions about how we design learning environments, and think about pedagogy and curriculum had taken in ecological insights of Eleanor Gibson & James Gibson and the branch of psychology known as ecological psychology. So few educators know that such a sub-discipline even exists!

Systems change is a big phrase, which can mean a lot of different things to different people. Quite possibly the system doesn't actually change "up there" in the realms of national and trans-national policy-making. Perhaps it changes in individual classrooms with teachers choosing to do something different. I was so happy to sit down with ⁠Robert Barnett⁠, co-founder of the Modern Classrooms Project to talk about this and find out how he, and his co-founder ⁠Kareem Farah⁠, have made some very specific and not particularly easy choices about which leverage points they were going to work.

As Manda Scott's BRILLIANT podcast suggests, "another world is possible… we have the power of gods to destroy our home, but we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine." This week's special episode is a joint podcast with Manda on her Accidental Gods podcast (https://accidentalgods.life/ ). In all of her shamanic work, bestselling novel-writing, podcasting and convening, Manda Scott is gathering people around the vital question, how we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations to come?

This week it was a huge pleasure to be able to welcome⁠ Carl Mika, Professor of Māori and Indigenous Philosophies⁠ from Aotearoa, the country now known as New Zealand. As you can probably guess from the title of this episode, this conversation with Carl went pretty deep pretty quickly! That's because underlying the most apparently basic concepts like learning or logic that people use all the time are some pretty fundamental assumptions about the way the world is. And they're certainly not universal to all humans.

This episode is a fantastic conversation with 2 brilliant women who have been whipping up a storm this week with the release of their amazing new book ⁠The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better⁠! Dr Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson chat with me about the disengagement crisis facing our young people and what we, as parents and educators, can do about it.

It's a strange thing that the concept of school has become almost universal over the last few hundred years. If you ask anyone almost anywhere in the world, they will be able to describe something that looks roughly like a shared concept of school. But maybe it didn't have to be this way. Maybe it could have been different. This week the amazing professor of anthropology Susan Blum Joins me to talk about 'schoolishness' which is her latest fantastic book, based on decades of research into the cultural development of the dominant ideas around formal institutional education.

We're ending this final epsiode of 2024 in a beautiful place with Karima Kadaoui sharing in some co-reflections with me about the trustful and humanising society that she is seeing emerge in Morocco and beyond. It became really clear to me during this conversation with Karima, that the way that we talk about the work we are doing is a really important choice. This is because it sets up frames and expectations that really affect how we do the work. So for that reason, I'm not going to say much about the incredible work that is happening across communities, schools and government ministries across Morocco through the Tamkeen process as Karima describes it much more beautifully than I ever could.

The inspiration for this end-of-year impromptu gathering came from a recent flurry of ‘Collapse'-inspired exchanges in my (un)social media feeds! This was prompted largely by Ginie Servant Miklos’ recently published and brilliant book, Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for The End of The World as We Know It (quoted in the title of the episode) and Will Richardson’s equally provocative and inspiring, Confronting Education In a Time of Complexity, Chaos and Collapse…

Systems change, or in fact any change, in formal education systems is notoriously hard. Research and innovation across the sector has been historically weak. But as the stakes get higher for much-needed change, we have to get better at harnessing the collective intelligence of what we know, from young people to practitioners in classrooms everyday to parents and leaders. This week’s guest has been working at the heart of this issue since the 1990s. Sir Geoff Mulgan is a Professor at University College London (UCL), in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Policy team (STEaPP) in the engineering department.

One of the things that I enjoy doing on the podcast is problematising various ’school subjects’. In previous episodes, with various guests we’ve questioned maths, languages, economics, history, physical education. But we haven’t yet taken a critical look at science itself, which is not only a set of disciplines, but also an approach and methodology that underpins a lot of the logic of how many like to imagine that we direct education, through evidence-based practice and the sciences of learning. Apparently it tells us ‘what works’ in inverted commas… doesn’t it?