Meeting Our Moment

Education Centered on Our Civilization's Great Challenges

According to biologists, human evolution is the result of a series of very small, incremental changes occurring over many millions of years. From another perspective however, we can see the story of humanity as a series of distinct chapters, each marked by the unleashing of a vast new power and the unforeseen challenges that accompany that novel power.

When hunter-gatherers first settled down and began farming some twelve thousand years ago, for example, they quickly came to wield previously unimaginable powers. By domesticating grain plants,  humans could — for the first time ever — develop large surpluses of food. Using this new form of stored energy, agrarian empires were able to create permanent armies — large groups of warriors who could be freed from the demands of farming and could therefore devote themselves to protecting the society (and also commandeering neighboring societies and their grains). This new surplus also led to the creation of a scribe class, who used writing to keep track of the society’s economic resources as well as its cultural achievements. And as we’ve learned from archeologists, it was humans’ ability to store the power of sunlight in grains that allowed them to undertake the monumental building projects of the classical world. The pyramids of Giza and the Great Wall of China could never have been built without the power to free hundreds of thousands of people from the constant demands of food-acquisition. (In fact, some recent scholarship suggests that it was precisely to support these large-scale building projects that agriculture was developed in the first place.)
 

At the same time, however, humanity’s new agricultural power brought with it vexing new challenges. As just one example, humans had for millions of years lived in groups that never exceeded a few hundred people. Now, however, our ancestors had to coordinate the behavior of many thousands of people living together in our planet’s first towns. (It’s tempting to think of this as a relatively minor change, but we need to remember that this ten-fold increase in size made social groups FAR more complex than they had ever been.) And just ten thousand years later — a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms — the Roman empire sought to coordinate the behavior of hundreds of millions of people. To deal with this enormous leap in social complexity, humans all over the world developed a strikingly similar set of innovations: money, government, state-sponsored religion, and written laws. These inventions proved massively successful, and their widespread adoption allowed the human population to explode from 4 million at the dawn of agriculture to almost 200 million by the first century of the common era.

Since 1800, the human population has gone through another explosion, rising from one billion to almost eight billion. And just as with our agrarian ancestors, this shift has unleashed massive new powers and massive new challenges. As just one example, our global, technologically supercharged civilization has allowed us to harness the power of fossil fuels, a discovery that has led to vast improvements in humanity’s standard of living. At the same time, however, our  enormously complex global energy system has also created a new challenge of almost unimaginable complexity: how do we coordinate the behavior of 8 billion humans so that their carbon emissions don’t alter the climate of our planet in cataclysmic ways?

Amazingly, our global civilization has also unleashed other, equally consequential combinations of new power, new complexity, and new challenges. Over the last fifty years, for example, we have harnessed the power of digital computers, and these machines have obviously made human life far more comfortable and convenient. At the very same time, however, many intelligent people are warning us that artificial intelligence also poses enormous risks to our species. Because these challenges are so new, there is little agreement about what exactly they are or how exactly they can be solved. In my view, the very same thing could be said about genetic engineering: it’s obvious that this technology brings with it vast new powers and also enormous challenges. In both cases, I’d suggest that both the power and the dangers of these technologies derives directly from their complexity. A big part of what makes our current AI systems so powerful is that they can work with FAR more complexity than individual humans. And at the same time, we are already seeing signs of AI systems whose behavior is simply too complex for us to understand. With regard to genetic engineering, we face a similar conundrum: we now have the power to eliminate certain species of mosquitoes, but how could we possible wrap our minds around all the ecological effects of such a decision? Given the staggering complexity of ecological systems, how do we ensure that our genetic engineering doesn’t bring the whole system crashing down?

The students I work with are keenly aware of this situation. They see — perhaps more clearly than many adults — that their generation will be required to face all of these stupendously complex challenges head-on. While adults can muse philosophically about how quickly the world is changing, young people do not have this luxury — they must find actual solutions to these previously unimaginable challenges. It’s partly for this reason, I suspect, that many young people are so frustrated with school. To them, it feels insane to recite passages from Romeo and Juliet while their planet is besieged by these staggeringly complex challenges.

I find it fascinating that our specie’s agrarian empires responded to the new challenges they faced by inventing money, government, permanent armies, and written legal codes — the very same tools we’re using today to deal with our current problems. Given the VAST difference in complexity between modern America and ancient Egypt, it seems highly likely to me that the coming generations will be forced to radically rethink all of those systems — and perhaps to give birth to new, currently unimaginable tools of social coordination.

Unfortunately, however, our educational system is not currently focused on supporting young people in this momentous task. In most high schools, for example, there is very little energy devoted to helping students articulate viable alternatives to capitalism, even though it seems clear that our current levels of consumerism cannot be maintained indefinitely (nor can they be extended to the billions of people in developing nations). Similarly, the looming environmental crisis has convinced many futurists that our world’s current challenges simply cannot be solved at the level of the nation-state. As long as environmental policy is set by countries looking out for their own self-interest, these thinkers argue, we will not be able to find sustainable and equitable solutions to the climate crisis.

At the same time, however, it’s hard to imagine a viable alternative to our current system. Can the world’s most powerful nations be convinced to pursue environmentally sound policies based on national self-interest, or will we have to abandon the entire idea of nationalism, coming to see ourselves primarily as citizens of Earth? Here too, we can see that most high schools offer students very little support in contemplating these questions. While social studies classes deal extensively with the history of the nation-state, almost no attention is paid to what the next chapter of human political organizations could (or should) look like.

As an alternative, I imagine that we could structure our entire educational system around the major challenges which coming generations will face. Instead of dividing up the school day into different academic subjects, we could organize our schools around the monumental problems which young people will need to solve in their lifetime. As just a few examples, classes offered in high schools and colleges could center around:

  • Economics: The history of economic systems and possible future ones.
  • Governance: The history of humanity’s political systems and their possible evolution.
  • Energy: The history of humanity’s energy use and different options for its future evolution.
  • Technology: The history of technological innovation and exploration of fruitful directions for the future.
  • Justice: The history of justice and oppression in human history and the creation of a more just, equitable world.
  • Ecology: The history of our species’ relation with the planet and the task of making humans a mutually enhancing part of the Earth community.

•••

In my view, there are three noteworthy benefits to this approach:

1: It’s deeply empowering. The message this approach sends to our young people is that their creativity is wanted — and even needed! As we already mentioned, enlisting students in solving problems to which we adults do not yet have answers can be tremendously inspiring. For many young people, these kinds of monumental challenges may be exactly what they need to start prioritizing learning over distraction and relaxation.

2: It’s enormously useful. If all college students majored in one of these challenges, they would enter adulthood (and the job market) as experts in one of these massively important challenges. This would help students find stable jobs (these problems aren’t going away anytime soon), and it would also help our civilization focus the vast creative power of coming generations on our most pressing challenges.

3: It’s naturally interdisciplinary. Apparently, the word “excellence” was originally used to refer to someone who was good at many different things (the Greek hero Odysseus, for example, was considered “excellent” because he was a great athlete and also a wise ruler). Over the course of the last few centuries, however, this word has transformed to describe someone who is unusually gifted at just a single thing. I suspect that this evolution mirrors a wider social shift, away from valuing the “renaissance (wo)man” to valuing the “expert.”

The enormous specialization that characterizes this new kind of expertise is very useful for solving detailed problems in one field, but it’s entirely ill-suited to solving challenges that spread across many disciplines. As one example, we could imagine what would be required of students who devoted themselves to reimagining our world’s energy infrastructure. To tackle this challenge, students would obviously need to understand the role fossil fuels play in our world, and this would naturally require them to engage with a WIDE variety of different subjects, including:

  • The chemistry of combustion and the physics of an internal combustion engine
  • The geology and economics of hydraulic fracturing (fracking)
  • The history of the Middle East after WWI
  • OPEC and the economics of global energy markets
  • The history of Standard Oil and its relationship with the American political process
  • The environmental impacts of fossil fuel emissions
  • The technology and economics of renewable energy
  • The history of the industrial revolution from the perspective of energy consumption
  • International efforts to tackle fossil fuel consumption through legislation, economic incentives, etc.

At YourCosmos, we believe that this kind of interdisciplinary inquiry will play a crucial role in helping us solve our civilization’s massively complex challenges. For this reason, we structure all our courses — and even all our individual classes — to weave across the boundaries between traditional academic disciplines. By incorporating physics, biology, psychology, history, and sociology in every class, we allow students to see the threads wearing the cosmos together into a single, unified tapestry.

As we’ll explore in the next post, this kind of coherent vision of the cosmos — in which our species plays a meaningful role — appears to be essential to human survival.