[Prefatory Note: This is a revised text of my presentation at the 4th Istanbul Education Summit made on December 7, 2024, held under the auspices of the Maarif Foundation in Turkey that is responsible for a network of schools and universities present in 134 countries. About 11k were registered online for the conference. I found it difficult to address in what was listed in the program as the ‘keynote’ to such an unseen, large, disparate audience. The conference theme was ‘Education for a Fair and Equitable Society: For a Sustainable Future.’
As a result, my remarks were overly rooted in my experience in Western, especially US, higher education and exhibited broader interests in lending support to efforts to ground foreign policy on respect for international law, itself flawed, and the imperatives of peace, equity, justice, and non-theocratic spirituality. Despite my faltering efforts, educational reform should be near the top of the policy agenda of those seeking a brighter future for humanity, which can only come into being by trusting the imagination to overcome the disasters attributable to reason-based instrumental knowledge that lacks compassion for suffering, including of non-human species.]
EDUCATING FOR ADAPTIVE CHANGE BENEATH DARKENING SKIES
I thank the Maarif Foundation for inviting me to speak at the 4th Istanbul Education Summit and for orienting our sense of vocation as educators toward a future that will test the capacities of every national society to address the distinctive blend of social, economic, cultural and ecological threats that currently cast dark shadows over the human future. I will do my best to adopt a hopeful standpoint, although my rational self believes the conference theme is probably articulating a mission impossible. Such rationality accepts guidance from the evidence of world conditions combined limits on the autonomy of many educators, faculty and administrators, and even students to heed their ‘better angels.’
My more inspirational guidance is borrowed from Nelson Mandela, whose life embodied ‘the politics of impossibility’ emerging from prison after 27 years to lead South Africa to a peaceful post-apartheid future. In Nelson Mandela’s judgment: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” This uplifting affirmation of the importance of education by Mandela leaves open the haunting question of how this may be done in the highly diverse academic institutions responsible for education throughout the world. It also leaves open the question of ‘change for what?’ While acknowledging obstacles, my answer to such questions is the same as those who set the 2024 Summit theme in relation to societal equity and developmental sustainability.
In facing the darkness of the time, highlighted by the inability of the international system of norms present in the UN Charter and the refusal of leading political actors to take steps to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and even worse these UN members facilitated the continuation of the Genocide carried on with undiminished fury by Israel these past 14 months. It would be easy to succumb to despair given such a horrifying reality. We must struggle against all temptations and pressures to surrender to these evil forces. My hopeful sensibility continues to believe that if we can find the techniques and deploy the wisdom to manage prudently and empathetically this time of global transition a bright future could surprise us. We need to act as if the mobilized humanistic energies of civil society and the peoples of the world retain an ability to bestow on coming generations a world far more peaceful, just, and resilient than what currently exists. This is a challenge of global scope. It presupposes robust responses to mounting threats to the sustainability of the natural habitat. This condition of ecological jeopardy is new. It a worrisome set of circumstances that have never in world history menaced the whole of humanity. A scenario of hope calls for new thinking, new values, and adaptive visions of how to live together in ecologically durable and ethically fulfilling ways. It place trust in the moral imagination of the populace, and doubts the competence or good will of self-interested economic and political elites that run the world we all live in.
For us today, however situated we are on the planet, this current crisis agenda raises crucial questions about the nature of desired effects on the educational experience of youth. The practical concern is whether it is feasible to adapt teaching/learning approaches in various concrete circumstances that give priority to overcoming the injustices and environmental crimes that now obscure horizons of hope.
For education to play this emancipatory role, existing framework of learning, researching, and envisioning is itself in need of radical repair. The objective is to make the range of educational experiences more responsive to the values of an equitable society and the adjustments that need to be made to ensure the pervasive inclusion of sustainability dimensions in all pedagogical settings.
The deepest educational responsibility and opportunity is to prepare students of ages to live in a world facing drastic change and profound challenges to traditional ways of knowing, believing, and acting. This goes against the current of mainstream proposals for educational reform, which devote their attention to techniques helpful for the efficient manipulation of material reality for the sake of profits, growth, and contentment. Such an emphasis suggests that the highest educational priority should clearly be to teach skills and understandings appropriate to the digital age, and making digital literacy the test of whether educational institutions can pass the test of imparting digital literacy. While practically responsive to changes brought about by technological innovations, this emphasis evades the more fundamental challenges that might help society withstand the gathering storm.
In my opinion, what is most needed are types of learning that equip students when they finish their education to be positive contributors to a better future by way of their social engagements relating to the future. This means no longer being content to be passive spectators in a world they have been led to believe is beyond their capacity or disposition to alter. For education to be relevant functionally and normatively, there is a need for receptivity to innovative pedagogies that might be developed and applied so that citizens of the future could more become committed to a lifetime of support for adaptive change.
The Global Context. All forms of traditional education that I am familiar with, starting with high school, concentrates its energies on the mastery of distinct subject matters. I mean by these separated silos of knowledge such as math, various sciences, economics, history, and literature. Such an education seeks to prepare students through in depth teaching of various strands of knowledge and skill sets useful for later employment or for a more appreciative humanistic sense of culture, generally emphasizing national or civilizational perspectives. Most teaching takes the natural setting of human activity for granted, there to be exploited for the benefit of various national societies and aggressive commercial entrepreneurs. Such an approach served the modern world quite well until recently. It encouraged a sense of reality and knowledge as fragmented and specialized, the educational goal being gaining command of a knowledge silo, that is, with a distinct part with little relevance accorded to the whole. This orientation tended to be insensitive to the stark reality that societies could no longer safely assume the sustainability of their natural habitat that has allowed individual and collective life to flourish for several centuries without taking notice of externalities such as remote environmental harms. Fragmentation of knowledge also mirrored the global reality as divided into parts, predominantly sovereign states with little sense of responsibility for the stability of other states, and even less for the sustainability of the whole.
Our cultural learning experiences beyond the domains of technical knowledge, by and large nurtures love of country, its history, culture, language along with the distinct ethnicities that give national identities to the sovereign states that we live in. I think these ways of breaking up reality, whether political, societal, or educational are practical accommodations to our experience of living, doing, and being, reflecting the enclosures that shape and condition our lives, especially since the rise of science-oriented approaches to useful knowledge. These enclosures are part of who we are, and should not be rejected, but rather enlarged, merged, and adapted. This expresses the growing need to supplement traditional ideas about the role of higher education as imparting knowledge mostly as specialized and fragmented units. This would adapt the world we are accustomed to inhabit to this broader, growing awareness of wholeness, interactivity and interdependence, as well as otherness. To a much greater extent than in earlier periods of history, what is done in one place impacts elsewhere.
This sense of a global context for human activity underlies recommended partial reorientations of education for the future of the sort envisioned by the Summit theme. It is what I believe will produce more fulfilled lives for present and future generations of students. Hopefully it will also give rise to a social and ethical consciousness in greater harmony with emergent realities and challenges. However much this adaptive approach to education seems persuasive it will if pursued face formidable obstacles, including from special interests that benefit from the existing order and from entrenched beliefs resistant to change. Economic elites often resist equitable and ecological adaptations, whether due to their perceived short-run negative effects on profitability or economic growth as when energy giants oppose environmental protections or regulations of carbon emissions. This opposition is reinforced by the tendency of dominant political classes to oppose changes that displace national security by appeals to human security that is widely regarded as subversive of military spending and societal safety in relation to foreign threats. Nationalist and fundamentalists, whether secular or religious, tend to be protective of beliefs that privilege the part over the whole within as well as without their enclosures. And thus, if we take this Summit theme seriously as generating normative guidelines for educational adaptation it will confront stiff opposition and resistance. Nevertheless, reality has its way of forcing itself upon social consciousness sooner or later, and education helps explain why.
Oddly, perhaps the best way of learning to face a challenging future is to consider the past. From diverse pre-modern ways of being in the world we can learn the importance of living-with-nature, communal identity, and more equitable ways of living together. While from the early modern liberation of law, politics, and ethics we can learn the benefits of emancipation from the tyranny of superstition and certain constraints on educational freedoms deriving especially from institutionalized religion. Modernity brought especially to industrializing societies in the West a sense of progress based on technological and material progress that freed many millions of people from poverty, illiteracy, dangerous work, and short life expectancies enabling more satisfying lives. Modernity led to educational adaptations to meet the needs and beliefs of a science and knowledge-based new order. Similarly, the destructiveness of religious rivalries and its connections with the imperial expansionism of the Global West led to widespread colonialism in the Global South, generating over time nationalist, anti-colonial movements of self-determination and resistance. The point I am trying to make is that the critical study of history helps students realize that the challenges of the present that are now so threatening were always fused in troublesome ways with the life experience of the human species for as long as humans have inhabited the earth. True the emergent future we now face is both radical and novel in substance and scope, expressive of an unmanageable and uniquely dangerous period of history. Current challenges can be made less menacing if tempered by sensitive portrayals of past historical analogues, and the efforts of contemporary storytellers to narrate the dilemmas of change versus tradition over time in human relations and in the broader dynamics of organized society, which is best captured by a dialectical sense of history.
More specifically, we can now ask in this hyper-modern atmosphere, ‘where is this likely to lead society?’ I offer three focal points of the tensions between benevolent and adaptive change as opposed by mal-adaptive forces associated with capitalism and state-centric global self-interested resistance to change: wholeness, fairness, otherness.
—wholeness: the sense that in addition to national, ethnic, religious, cultural, class, and gender identities we are now in need of developing what can be called ‘a human identity’ or ‘a species identity’; what is declared is a condition of mutual dependence when it comes to addressing climate change, biodiversity, ocean resilience, and global security. It is time for civil society to nurture sensitivities associated with citizenship in the world with displacing the positive sides of national citizenship. To surmount and survive we need new patriotisms to the earth and to humanity.
A way of conceiving this abstract issue is to select a concrete instance where global security shifted from a reliance on military superiority to one of bonded interests for even the most hostile confrontations between enemy states.
The use of atomic bombs at the end of World War II against Japanese cities signaled the onset of this break in the dynamics of global security that led to divergent responses: nuclear disarmament and a strong UN; a nuclear arms race; the Cold War ‘balance of terror’ domesticated as ‘mutual deterrence,’ and global governance a oligopoly of the principal nuclear states.
The Great Power structure of global governance with respect to global security given the existence of nuclear weapons is illustrative—it involved the appearance of an equitable treaty bargain in which states not possessing the weapons would give up the right to develop and possess such weaponry. In exchange states possessing the weapons pledged their good faith in the form of a commitment to denuclearize by disarming stages, and accept accompanying abridgements of national sovereignty in the form of intrusive international inspection to verify compliance and detect cheating. This path to a world without nuclear weapons was cynically endorsed by the nuclear weapons states, but in practice treated as a ‘useful fiction,’ operationalizing claimed to be eliminating, that is, the permanent possession and development of nuclear weapons. This geopolitical fakery went unchallenged for more than half a century, to be nominally challenged by a coalition of governments from the Global South, awakened from their long sleep, and putting before the world a treaty in 2021 Treaty of Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The three NATO nuclear weapons states expressed their opposition to this denuclearizing inititiative, acknowledging their unconvincing belief that the world was safer if it continued to rely on the guardianship of the weaponry by way of the unregulated deterrence as geopolitically managed.
What has been operationalized over the decades includes discriminatory tolerance and coercive denial of proliferation options to non-nuclear states (compare Israel and Iran) coupled with the refusal of nuclear states to disarm or become transparent about their currently secretive doctrines of nuclear use. This reality reflects living with what I would identify as the primacy of geopolitics. In my language it accepts living indefinitely with negative wholeness. It also entails foregoing the opportunity to build a peace and security system on the basis of positive wholeness that relied on respect for law and morality and recognized that retaining nuclear weapons meant living permanently with the menace of a nuclear war that could occur at any moment, likely destroying all that has been built over the centuries. It also meant weakening the authority of international law by entrapping non-nuclear states in a treaty bargain that they largely kept, while the nuclear states consolidated their control of geopolitics.
Underneath retaining this capability to destroy civilization was the holistic realization that a major war fought with nuclear weapons would destroy not only the warring states but spill its lethal effect over to neutral states, potentially putting modern life on the entire planet at risk. In this sense the negative wholeness of a possible nuclear war remains an abiding danger that has failed to cause sufficient pressure to bring about conditions of positive wholeness. We seem doomed to live indefinitely with the awareness that life under the shadow of nuclear weapons is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Such a prospect has been given a frightening plausibility by recent escalations in the Ukraine War. Ukraine being given permission by the US Government to shoot long-range weaponry deep into Russian territory and Moscow threatening to use nuclear weapons in retaliation against NATO weapons supplying countries. How should educators treat this defining reality of the last 80 years? Or should such a reality be outside what we want young people to learn about? Do we want to shield students from grim features of the present human condition or we have the courage to expose these dangers in ways that include the presentations of ways to surmount such catastrophic threats?
This same logic even more clearly pertains to ecological challenges of our time, most notably climate change. Global warming endangers social wellbeing, even our physical survival, throughout the planet, but it cannot be solved without a strong turn toward positive wholeness, and a cooperative approach that requires sacrifice and commitment. Because ecological challenges are somewhat more openly addressed and acknowledged by the established order, the possibility of education-driven adaptations are greater, offering a variety of teaching, training, and learning given practical relevance in the everyday the everyday encounters with polluted air, poisoned soil, and acidic oceans. This ecological concreteness contrasts with the abstractness of the issues posed by nuclear weaponry.
—Fairness: in addressing ecological challenges it is necessary to induce cooperation among grossly unequal states with respect to responsibility for the buildup of carbon emissions that is the main cause of global warming. Unlike the situation with respect to nuclear weapons there is a consensus among governments that a positive adaptation to climate change requires an unprecedented cooperation in reducing carbon emissions that will only be forthcoming if fairness prevails and the richer, earlier industrialized countries help poorer ones reduce emissions without slowing development. The late developing countries are far less benefitted than the highly developed economies of Europe and North America by industrial development that was dependent fossil fuels and hence, the buildup of emissions than the late developing Global South.
Although this dynamic was largely innocent, it allowed Western industrialization to proceed for many decades without paying the true costs of development. There is an abstract recognition of a vital equity component in an effective policy of ecological adaptation, but little agreement as to how to calculate the level of subsidy and the allocations of amounts to be paid and received. Also more recently developed countries are not willing to accept levels of supervision needed to ensure that the funds received as subsidies were being used to reduce carbon emissions rather than to accelerate industrial development or to enrich corrupt elites in government and the private sector.
Another dimension of the ecological challenge involves preserving tropical rainforests, currently under threat from private developers and ranchers, as in Brazil and elsewhere. These rainforests absorb large quantities of carbon and function as valuable repositories of biodiversity. Here the adaptation issue is quite different than in relation to climate change. It involves encroaching upon the territoriality of sovereign rights to safeguard the global public good. It involves respecting the wholeness of perspective while reconciling constraints with fairness. This leaves space for social conflict and political paralysis that sidetracks adaptive behavior, and increases the watchdog responsibilities of civil society.
—Otherness. Identity politics, both negative and positiv at all levels of social and political consciousness stress and privilege differences and overwhelmingly viewing others with suspicion, hostility, and a sense of rivalry. Only recently has negative otherness been countered by resistance and the assertion positive claims by subjugated others. in world affairs, aligned civilizational identities confront collectivities of otherness. The ultimate expressions of hostile otherness occurs in the context of war, whether giving rise to opposing alliances internationally or to internal struggles or civil wars between adversary formations, typically challenges of social movements to existing elites controlling identity formations be the state.
Samuel Huntington at the end of the Cold War followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union predicted not a peaceful sequel, but rather a new wave of conflict in the form of ‘a clash of civilizations,’ and most specifically, of the Global West against a rising Global Islam situated in the Middle East. Huntington believed the faultlines of post-Cold War conflict would center on securing favorable Western access to energy reserves and upholding the security of Israel against regional identities shaped by resurgent post-colonial identities that sought to exclude the West.
The historical context featured the collapse of the European colonial system which was a form of otherness that involved domination by colonial powers and unabashed subjugation of indigenous populations in the Global South. The apartheid structure of racist domination in South Africa exploiting the black African indigenous majority as the other to the white settler minority is a prime instance of the repression of the other. Ending colonizing and racist otherness has been internationally affirmed in adaptive changes in international law. This positive flow of history that liberated many peoples suffering from abusive forms of othernessvertically arranged in master/slave or white/black hierarchies of domination, but it far from cleared the agenda of negative otherness.
Negative patterns are also evident in societal contexts as exhibited by the hostile othering of deviant life styles as expressed over the centuries by such behavioral patterns as homophobia and xenophobia. Positive patterns of resistance from below are manifest in such slogan as ‘black is beautiful’ or Jews as ‘a chosen people.’
The most extreme form of negative otherness involves the total dehumanization of the other has sadly not disappeared even in the creative centers of hypter-modernity. It has been labeled and outlawed as ‘genocide’ since the Nazi Holocaust a Jew-hating slaughter that featured death camps and mass killing, even extending its lethality beyond ethnicity to gypsies and to left political activists and intellectuals.
We live now at a time where Israel has conducted a genocidal campaign against the entire population of 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. It recalls a line of poetry from W.H. Auden: “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” It has been proclaimed by Israeli leaders in chillingly forthright language of total dehumanization and operationalized by a daily spectacle of horrifying atrocities. It has repeatedly assaulted the eyes and ears of the peoples of the world in real time, an educative experience made possible by the TV journalism of the digital age. Unfortunately, despite this unavoidable awareness the genocide is continuing and spreading beyond the borders of Gaza in ways that threaten regional war further magnified by global proxy participants.
The UN and the Great Powers have been either unable or unwilling to stop this genocide. Shamelessly, the liberal democracies of the Global West led by the United States along with profit making corporate have refused to exert their leverage to restrain Israel, or hold it to legally permissible action. Instead they have been complicit in direct violation of the Genocide Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide by lending active support through supplying weaponry, financial assistance, diplomatic support, and even military intelligence. Seen in from a broader civilizational perspective, the governments supportive of Israel are all from the Global West of North America and Europe, although Ireland and Spain have stood apart from the Western consensus. In contrast, the most dedicated support for the Palestinian resistance is from Islamic majority states and political movements, especially Hezbollah and the Houthis. It is a reminder that clashes of civilization and ethnicities are part of the historical present, resulting in instances of genocide in settings other than Gaza, such as Myanmar and Sudan where the dehumanization of the other leads to genocidal politics often intertwined with and obscuring strategic ambitions relating to land and resources.
It is my contention these psychological, political and economic motivational patterns that contradict the premises of positive wholeness, fairness, and positive otherness are indicators of educational failures, reflective of non-adaptive practices, policies, and values, a situation that reinforces the argument for educational reform. I am trying to convince you that these features of our world are dangerously inhibiting adaptation to the ethical, economic, and ecological imperatives of the wellbeing of future generations. Our students deserve to learn how to have useful lives that are responsive to these concerns. There is a folk saying that imparts wisdom: “If it’s not broken don’t fix it.” But there is a secondary insight bearing on the malfunctioning of the global security system and poor capabilities to provide urgently needed stability and sustainability: “If it is badly broken, do everything possible to fix it.” I think there are many fix-it approaches worth pondering in classrooms without presupposing a sophisticated view of the complexities of the contemporary world and its challenges. Let me venture two lines of educational opportunity.
Civic Engagement. It seems clear that the current leadership of both governments and corporations are not positively oriented toward implementing wholeness, fairness, and otherness in creative and ethically meaningful ways. Governments are preoccupied with the pursuit of national interests, with governing performances judged in terms of short-term results when what is most needed is long-term policies. Psychologically important is whether the quality of economic and political life for the national citizenry was being widely regarded as improving. The dominant logic of such styles of governance is to disregard wholeness and to conceive of fairness as a matter of how the national population is being treated. Naturally distancing themselves to varying degrees from alien forms of otherness is treated as though it was a natural element of the human condition. Creative pedagogy would teach a greater appreciation of and contact with others as connected with living and acting effectively in the world.
The corporate outlook, shared with banks and mechanisms of finance, is preoccupied with the profitable manipulation of money and maximizing the growth of GNP. It is not concerned with fair distribution of wealth and income, or with facilitating the costly process of replacing a precarious framework even if its purpose is to enable a sustainable existence. In fact, the prevailing economic logics of both capitalist and socialist orientations is to minimize interferences with profits and economic growth by being adopting various postures of denial with respect to harmful ecological dimensions of this late modernist ethos of efficiency and growth. As such the main justification for modern economic activity is associated with the embedded belief ‘that more and bigger is better,’ eventual for all. Contrary pro-capitalist mythmaking ‘all boats don’t rise,’ especially in the rough waters of competition or monopolistic markets.
The educational opportunity is to present ‘small is beautiful’ views of benevolent political and economic life. Instead of a worldview that instructs us that the world works by reference to win/lose outcome it would be helpful to investigate situations where a win/win approach is viable for all participants. Games and stories that illustrate win/win outcomes could be drawn from history. Ideas of ‘human security’ and ‘common security’ based on a cooperative view of the sort pioneered in regional communities such as European Union or in the elaborate Chinese Road and Belt Project where the rewards of cooperation and mutual benefit mitigate the one-sided patterns exploitation between winners and losers. The costly and menacing militarism of current international relations needs replacing by vastly cheaper, safer, and less destructive frameworks of peace-building and mutual tolerance.
Similar narratives can be developed to support for the Rule of Law as a replacement for the Rule of the Gun. Internationally it can be shown that respect for the constraints of international law frees resources for constructive uses in relation to the demands of fairness as well as to facilitate greater investment in ecological sustainability. If not globsl wholeness, then communities of states acting regionally, can solve common regional problems of security and sustainability and thereby provide the framing of better lives and more benevolent governance during a transition to a condition of true globality. It is almost self-evident that the US would be much better off it is had shaped its foreign policy in conformity with the constraints of international law. Existing global arrangements, including the UN, would work more effectively and much less expensively, leaving increased funds available for sustainability and better lives through a reliance on the guidelines of international law rather than, as has been the practice of Great Powers, by engaging in futile unlawful interventions and destabilizing arms races costing trillions while increasing risks of acute catastrophe. The remarkable rise of China for over the course of the last half century without relying on conquest or exploitation, despite certain deficiencies, offers a model of an extremely successful alternative path. Also instructive would be a comparative study of US and China in relation to these three signposts on a path leading to rational sustainability in the 21st century—wholeness, fairness, otherness. A comparison of the negative treatment of the poor, vulnerable, and internal others (or minorities, refugees, and immigrants victimized by informal hostility and formal discrimination).
A look at the experience of the last several decades would confirm this line of policy reform. It has not yet happened because the established order resists with all the policy instrument and brainwashing propaganda at its disposal. Special interests have been increasing their influence on the behavior of governmental institutions working day and night for higher military budgets and on behalf of profit/growth oriented policies. This critique applies to lucrative arms producers that have a vested interest in exaggerating security threats and the dangers of diverse ideologies or energy giants keep carbon fuels flowing without concern for climate change while suppressing evidence that their activities are causing harm.
Education does have the capacity to shape minds, transform societies, and help discover and explore pathways to a sustainable, just, peaceable, and more enjoyable future. As educators we should commit to making education a catalyst for fairness, equity, and sustainability. In the process nurturing a sense of wholeness and overcome relevant enmities toward otherness.
Citizen Engagement. As suggested, beyond skills lies a broad range of enlightening approaches to learning that can teach us to live adaptively in ways that take due account of 21st century realities. Aside from family influences on opinions and values, as well as the educational tropes of social media habits in the homes and neighborhood of students, the greatest influence resides with charismatic educators in halls of learning if sufficient academic freedom exists for teachers and students to put forward their own ideas and understandings of the unmet requirements of fairness and sustainability communally, nationally, and globally. I am unsure as to whether state propaganda and reactionary monitoring of school curricula and libraries will allow the educational sectors to play positive adaptive roles with popular and institutional encouragement in countries with great variations in state/society relations with respect to formal education. We in the United States are feeling strong pushback in academic life from ultra-right enemies of open minds both in government and well-funded reactionary enclaves in civil societies. The rise of an activist billionaire caste eager to monitor teaching and learning is marginalizing adaptive education
Ideally, education at all levels should prepare students for active societal roles as participants organizing to shape public policy, and not be passive spectators in the face of developments and challenges that threaten their future and that of future generations. Public pressures from below can potentially make political leaders, as well as mainstream media and social media platforms take account of demands for reforms carried out within a more globalist way of interpreting and understanding than what now prevails in most societies, including those that have free elections and independent political parties, but are guided by outmoded gepolitical belief and predatory forms of economic behavior.
In the past, I have argued in favor of an adaptive form of citizenship, what I have labeled as ‘citizen pilgrims,’ drawing on the tradition of pilgrims as those persons among us who are searching based on faith and belief, for a better future. Citizen pilgrims embark on a personal journey that envisages collective transformations responsive to humane values and adaptive imperatives. Can the educational systems around the world be entrusted to go beyond specialized training in useful skills to give students the kind of knowledge and ethical commitment to progressive civic responsibility as the core obligation of citizenship, superseding the minimalism of electoral politics.
Technological Innovation. From an educational perspective of both preparation for a professional career and for benign citizen engagement, it seems essential to prepare students for technological innovations on the horizon. It is obvious that AI will exert a growing influence in all phases of future life in ways that are liberating and patterns that may cause educators and society a bundle of dangerous troubles. In the educational process, the management of immediate access to knowledge that undercuts the value of writing assignments and tests poses fundamental issues that will become more complex as AI is on a trajectory of rapid and continuous improvement. Perhaps, creative educators will rely more on dialogic methods of learning that rest on placing confidence in subjective learning experiences. Robotics is also relevant from the perspective of progress and employment choices and opportunities. There is a need to evolve courses and study programs that take account of job markets and changing societal priorities, as well as the collective challenges.
What educators need to think about is how to create courses assuring that students achieve digital literacy even if they are not inclined to seek a career directly related to such transformative technologies that will strain existing societal ideas of fairness and equity. Beyond this, is the social regulation of innovative technology that endangers safety or has provocative capacities to disrupt cyber security within and among states. In other words, new technologies can also endanger social peace within societies by making many forms of work obsolete, creating labor crises. Technological innovation can also cause havoc in international relations by introducing variants of stealth and remote weaponry, of which attack drones and exploding pagers are illustrative, that can disrupt existing patterns of security. Unlike nuclear weapons, there is no way to control the proliferation of drones. More that 20 years ago, a technologist named Bill Joy wrote a provocative article entitled “Does the Future Need Us?’ In other words, is human ingenuity generating uncontrollable dangers in relation to conflict while rendering most learned skills, and hence jobs, superfluous? It seems that creative and ethical innovations to keep pace with technologies would have to become equally innovative, reinventing roles for body and mind.
Political Realism. Among the obstacles to innovative education is the unconscious consensus among societal elites of ideas and values that are resistant to the prerequisites of adaptive, fair, and sustainable present and future life experiences. These are asserted here as wholeness, fairness, and otherness. Educators might devise courses and readings that include utopian visions of a peaceful, more eqitable, worldwide coexistence of diverse peoples striving for sustainability. In the words of the World Social Forum, ‘another world is possible.’ The ambitious objective of education in this era is to give students confidence that different versions of reconfigured realism need to guide behavior at all levels of decision-making. This alone would make ‘the possible’ become ‘the attainable.’
Conclusions: As stressed, educational endeavors are challenged everywhere but under a variety of diverse conditions involving cultural norms, political structures. economic practices, and spiritual aspirations. Of course, diversities of experience exist within national and civilizational boundaries, as well as within regional and global spheres of human activity with different perceptions of appropriate responses. This will likely give rise to a bewildering variety of responses, not all in keeping with the theme of this Istanbul Educational Summit. Hopefully, some will, and that may embolden others.
Present and prospective concerns associated with excessive fragmentations of identity, technological innovation, unfair distributions of material benefits and career opportunities, non-sustainable patterns of economic development, and out of date political beliefs and practices challenge the diverse missions of education. This atmosphere encourages educational reinterpretation, dialogue, and experimentation. Benevolent pathways to the future will be more likely to be taken if more students are oriented toward the urgencies facing humanity. Silos of learning experience need to be replaced by inter-cultural dialogues and by increasing exchange opportunities for students and faculty so that the world and its problems can be experienced away from homelands.
As is so often the case, the insights of great men and women are fertile sources for those of us who have chosen to be educators at this hour of ferment. Despite these turbulent times of relentless change, Mahatma Gandhi remains a guide for all humanity, whether viewed individually, or as a collective edict: “Learn as if you will live forever; live as if you will die tomorrow.” [as borrowed from Bishnu Patel ]
Global Justice in the 21st Century 