Transforming the political economy of education in the 21st century

Human intelligence evolved though the synergies of social living, tool crafting and cooperative activities. Our species’ history is defined by the emergence of intergenerational communities of interpersonal care, creative play and skilled practice. Learning is at the core of what it means to be human. However, despite this reality, contemporary education stands in opposition to nearly all the fundamental dynamics through which humans learn. Our institutions compartmentalise and isolate generations by age. Mentorship, social-emotional development, exploratory play, collaborative problem solving, crafting and artistic expression are marginalised. Rather than cultivating holistic knowledge, critical reasoning, creative thinking, and pragmatic skills, our institutions seek to maximise the efficiency of information transmission and the fidelity of repetition. Our dominant cultural narratives conceptualise education as a mere jobs program whose primary function is to determine career placement in support of our economic system. It is our contention that this framing is perfectly back to front. Education has always been the beating heart of human sociality, since our ancestors first started teaching each other how to make and do things together. In other words, our political economies should exist to generate and facilitate creative and collaborative educational communities. Indeed, the dynamism and intrinsic nature of human learning reveals the truly radical potentials of pedagogical liberation. In our view, developing resilient and scalable community focused educational institutions has the potential to generate cascading reorganisations in our political economies. We believe that revolutionary paradigm shifts can be catalysed by designing learning environments that methodically and structurally seek to generate synergies between cooperative activity, social-emotional care, critical thinking, creative expression, technical skills and pragmatic interventions.

In this transnational workshop, innovative approaches to learning will be presented by participants from diverse scholarly, artistic and geographical backgrounds. On this basis we will envision, explore and discuss collectively, what pedagogical approaches may be most suitable for dealing with the challenges of the 21st century, such as cascading socio-ecological systems failure.

Local embeddedness

In line with the principle that “education should take place where the problems we deal with are localised”, we will meet in Salzderhelden. To avoid unnecessary travelling by plane, it will also be possible to participate online. Salzderhelden is a village with about 2000 inhabitants, close to Göttingen. The village was once a thriving cultural centre for the region. Over the last 300 years, however, Salzderhelden has increasingly lost its importance. For around 50 years, more and more young people have been leaving the region as there are few attractive prospects for living and working. Landscapes are characterised by industrial monocultures and dying forests. It is only in the last 4 years that a different trend can be observed. Young people have come together to drive forward social and ecological transformation in the region. They are fighting every day for a future of the region that is compatible with local and global ecological conditions. To this end, they are getting involved in local politics and experimenting with the development of commons-based projects, such as a café and food distribution that reject the logics of commodity exchange, participatory, regenerative agriculture, ecological construction methods, weekly village meetings and an open project house with a metal, wood and bicycle workshop. To further promote this trend, residents of the village want to establish a “creativity lab” in Salzderhelden over the next three years. In the lab, new egalitarian modes of education can be experimented with to address the most urgent local and global challenges of the 21st century and help catalyse socio-ecological change.