The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important. .
Martin Luther King, Jr
An unexpected hospital stay for some surgery left me with time to ponder the question asked in the heading for this post. I was prompted initially by reading an article in the Guardian in which they asked 380 top climate scientists what they felt about the future.
“Infuriating, distressing, overwhelming!”
“Infuriating, distressing, overwhelming!” were typical responses from the scientists involved – they were are all rather grim. The article does an excellent job of explaining just why each of these scientists feels this way. The evidence of the global temperature rise climbing beyond 2 degrees lies behind this concern, with all agreeing we need a concerted, global response – now. The likelihood of that happening appears to be a diminishing hope – driving even more of the despair felt by these scientists – many of whom are at the forefront of efforts to effect such change.
“I feel resigned to disaster as we cannot separate our love of bigger, better, faster, more, from what will help the greatest number of people survive and thrive,” said one US scientist.
Capitalism has taught us well
A key problem, they claim, is that capitalism has taught us well, and that overconsumption in rich nations has become a significant barrier to achieving the change we need to see. This is a point well argued by Sir Geoffrey Palmer in an article titled A fast track to environmental degradation that appeared in Newsroom this week. As he notes, our politicians are full of ambition. They want to achieve things and they want to achieve them fast. And often this is at the expense of putting the time, energy and fore-thought into the policy and legislation that might just leave our world a better place for our grandchildren.
Sir Geoffrey notes that in New Zealand, law can be passed very quickly and often without proper scrutiny or examination. He describes how, over successive governments, we’ve seen the result of this (and are again currently) on attempts to put in place a robust approach to our resource management act. All the while, we continue to consume the resources available to us at an unsustainable rate, and often, causing irreparable environmental damage in the process.
Billionaires Investing in Longevity
Contrast that with the newsletter I then read from Peter Diamandis, with a link to a blog post he’d written about Billionaires investing in longevity. In it he looks at 3 companies betting big on the longevity market and the promise of extending human healthspan: Altos Labs (backed by Yuri Milner & Jeff Bezos), NewLimit (backed by Brian Armstrong & Blake Byers, PhD), and Retro Bio (backed by Sam Altman).
Seems there’s a lot of interest (among the billionaire club at least) in discovering the secret of extending life – even if, for some, that means escaping the carnage left of this planet to establish new colonies on Mars, for example.
Diamandis even offers his own programme for those interested in a ‘deep dive‘ into the world of longevity – confirming the key motivation behind what he sees as the big opportunity here – ‘health is wealth’.
All of this seems a little outside the realm of the world in which I live currently, with news today of a shortage of 500 doctors in New Zealand as just another indication of the vast gap that exists between the lives of the everyday person and those with access to greater wealth.
What to make of it all?
It does seem, at a surface level at least, to be oddly contradictory that we might be facing an imminent threat to the future of the planet on the one hand and the insatiable desire to extend our lives to be able to “see it out” on the other?
Of course, it can be argued that the articles referred to above are the extremes, and that for every argument made or position taken there’s one that will contradict it somehow. This is certainly true in the case of climate change and climate (in)action, for example.
Back in 2021 Wired Magazine printed an article titled Why Humans Are So Bad at Seeing the Future. It was a reflection on the publication of the 1981 publication The Book of Predictions, and how none of what was predicted then came to pass. The author concludes that people tend to make predictions while looking through their own narrow lens, and that real vision lies in seeing connections.
This is part of what it means to live in a VUCA world I guess – where certainty and reliable ways of solving problems are no longer ‘fit for purpose’, and where ambiguity and apparent contradictions appear all around us. We have to learn to see outside the scope of our own lenses and learn to see the connections 0r to hear the signals talking as Amy Webb teaches us.
The complex issues and problems that will define the world my grandchildren inherit – everything from climate to pollution and from food security to global peace – will require quite different ways of thinking, working and acting from what I experienced. With globalisation there will be no escaping the impact of these things anywhere in the world – even in a remote part of the globe like New Zealand.
The kids at school now – my grandkids – will be the ones who bear the brunt of decisions we make now to continue to exploit our natural environment in order to increase wealth (for some at least), and to invest heavily in space travel and longevity at the expense of remediating the problems we are creating as a consequence. A driving factor behind Elon Musk’s desire to establish a colony on Mars is that it will provide an insurance policy for civilisation (here on Earth), for example.
What does this mean for education?
A principal I spoke to today told me that the bottom line for the schools in the Kāhui Ako to which her school belonged was that ‘all learners should be able to thrive’ (in the future). I applaud that as a worthwhile aspiration, certainly one that I hold for my own grandchildren. But what does that mean in the context of how schools operate, and the learning that takes place in classrooms? And how to we keep that focus in when feeling burdened with the responsibility of ensuring targets are met for literacy and numeracy development (all very important as part of developing the whole child for the future!)?
An important start point, in my view, is to gain broad consensus across staff, parents and community, about what they want for their children, what will be important for them in their future and what needs to be done now to prepare them for that. Many schools are well down the track with this in the development of their ‘graduate profile‘ or ‘portrait of a learner‘, which provide a distinctive shift away from focusing purely on the development of content knowledge and towards the development of the skills, competencies and dispositions that drive lifelong learning – things like collaboration, communication, critical thinking etc.
When I sat to figure out what I might do after leaving CORE Education some five years ago, this is what drove me to set up FutureMakers, with the tag line of ‘inspiring the next generation of leaders, thinkers and problem-solvers. These words were carefully chosen as I believe they are the characteristics our young people will require as they grow into a world where the concept of ‘thriving’ will mean something completely different to what it did for my generation.
The challenge, then, is finding ways of ensuring that the curriculum we design, the programmes we provide and the learning experiences we offer are all aligned with what we agree is important. Of course, literacy and numeracy are important, and given the evidence of declining rates across NZ, they deserve our attention. But we can’t stop there. We must apply the same fervour and determination to improve literacy and numeracy rates to our thinking about how we develop ‘decent’ human beings who are equipped with the future-focused skills and dispositions to thrive as outlined above.
What will we leave our grandchildren?
So back to the responses of the 380 global climate scientists – and the question we must consider, what will we leave our grandchildren? What is the future they will be inheriting? And what can be done to ensure it’s a future worth ‘surviving’ for?
Like the literacy dilemma, there’s no silver bullet, but there are things we can look to. For example, the UN has done a terrific job in defining the key challenges that we, as a civilization, are facing together, in the form of their Sustainable Development Goals. Loads of work has gone into developing resources and planning ideas to make these things actionable within the context of school. I’ve curated a number of these resources on the FutureMakers website on a page for SDG resources, which can be accessed via the Curriculum link under the resources tab.
While the focus of each of these goals can seem overwhelming to most, the resources that can now be accessed easily by educators enable learners to engage in legitimate, curriculum-supported, learning experiences that will help them grow in their understanding of the issues, and learn new skills that will help them to address these in their local context and thus contribute to the global context.
The gift I choose to leave my grandchildren, in addition to taking personal responsibility for addressing these things in my own sphere of influence now, is to ensure they are equipped in every way to participate in working towards a more sustainable future for everyone on the planet.
