Educational Change in an Age of Polycrisis
The current discourse around educational change reveals a troubling pattern of reducing complex systemic challenges to simple binaries. The reductionism displayed fundamentally undermines our ability to address the multiple, interacting crises facing education today and fails to apprehend how multiple crises interact and reinforce each other. Teacher shortages and a workforce crisis, post-pandemic learning gaps, digital divides, political curriculum polarisation, economic inequality and school funding, mental health issues, and climate change all create a system under immense pressure. These challenges don’t just coexist; they amplify each other. Yet they are often presented as separate issues, and the solutions provided by tech companies, fellow teachers, and critics promote this separateness because it makes the polycrisis manageable and marketable, with power shifting to providers and evangelists who promise quick and simple solutions to complex problems.
For example:
AI in Education:
"A child who does not learn Morse code will find himself at a serious disadvantage in communication."
"A typewriter will be an indispensable tool of the modern office - no young person should leave school untrained in its use."
"A short-wave radio will soon be in every home and every classroom, making it an essential part of a child's education."
When you teach people how to use a tool, they are able to use that tool.
When you teach people how to think and learn, they are able to use all tools. Rather than trying to predict the future, let's keep school focused on developing skilled thinkers and agentic learners. - Hovarth
This presents a fixed solution pattern, teach thinking, not tools, and the critique of fixed mindsets ends up promoting a fixed mindset, a meta-Einstellung if you will, that ignores the complexity of what goes on in many schools. Any school leader with terminal examinations as part of their curriculum offering who solely thought about predicting the future rather than developing skilled thinkers and agentic learners would not be a school leader for very long.
The above quote replicates a tool fixation, rather than thinking about the general-purpose technology that allows those tools to function: electricity. When people discuss AI, they focus on the tools or products rather than appreciating that AI may be a general-purpose technology itself. To drive the point home, the historical examples above do not mention electricity, yet it is essential to their functioning. It replicates the polycrisis rather than trying to address it systemically.
Addressing the polycrisis requires moving beyond both simple solutions and simple critiques. Instead of asking how to solve individual problems, we must consider seriously how proposed solutions intersect with and affect multiple crises simultaneously. This involves an understanding of historical patterns of technological change and how societies have responded to them. It means embracing that possible solutions might look different across contexts and acknowledging inevitable resource trade-offs. Yet we must also recognise how communities experiencing multiple crises often develop sophisticated ways of understanding these interactions and create innovative approaches to addressing them.
The path forward begins with productive doubt, as it provides the means to keep us alert to the complexity of the challenges and the possibility of unintended consequences. This doubt helps us to reject the absolutes of technological solutionism and anti-technological rhetoric, no matter how well-intentioned, and maintains space for community knowledge and local adaptation.
It essentially means maintaining a posture of responsive engagement: in other words, being a good teacher.