Mason Pashia

Will Richardson on Confronting Collapse

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Key Points

  • Schools must prioritize preparing students to navigate complex global challenges by fostering adaptive skills and repairing relationships with all living things.

  • Establishing a shared understanding and language around education’s role in society can lead to more coherent and impactful teaching practices.

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On the latest episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Mason Pashia engages with Will Richardson, co-founder of The Big Questions Institute, to explore the evolving role of education in the face of global complexity and potential collapse. Richardson shares insights from his new manifesto, emphasizing the importance of repairing human and ecological relationships as a core educational mission. Together, they delve into the necessity of preparing students emotionally, physically, and spiritually to navigate an increasingly chaotic world. By focusing on adaptive change, curiosity, and the beauty of interconnectedness, this conversation challenges traditional schooling narratives and invites educators to rethink the skills and dispositions needed for the future. Tune in to discover how schools can become beacons of hope and resilience in uncertain times.

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Outline

Introduction and Host’s Perspective

Mason Pashia: You are listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. I’m grateful that in my role, I get to ask a lot of questions, and frequently these questions lead to more questions rather than answers. This has never felt more true than at this present moment where the web of complexity and interdependence seems more incandescent and fragile than ever.

Recently, I heard Ezra Klein say that the opposite of doom is not hope; it is curiosity and beauty. This is a posture that I hope to take today despite this conversation having sweeping and often frightening themes. For those who regularly tune into this podcast, you know I typically cover things like sustainability and regenerative systems, and that will certainly be woven through our conversation today.

After all, if we live on a finite planet—and we do—and also live in an economy built on infinite growth—and we do—then, to put it lightly, the math doesn’t really add up in the long term. In college, I remember a professor of mine sharing with us that the origin of the word apocalypse is to reveal. Recently, I encountered a new manifesto from Will Richardson, co-founder of The Big Questions Institute, and I wanted to unpack it on this podcast because it speaks to this. In the manifesto, Richardson quotes Daniel Berger of the Consilience Project, saying, “The vast majority of the most consequential and difficult problems we face—climate change, nuclear war, species extinction—are the unintended outcomes of humans attempting to solve other problems.”

For many of our greatest problems, at some point in the past, we designed technical solutions to address them, and in the time since, the solutions have had other effects that we either did not predict or did not mitigate sufficiently in advance. The problems the world faces today are not caused by our inability to achieve our goals; they’re a direct result of our success. They’re a result of how destructive we are in the pursuit of our goals. It’s this complexity that I want to address today, one that has many parallels in our education and learning systems. It’s near the beginning of the year, the beginning of a new administration, the beginning of a boom in technology, and many of us are in pursuit of a new answer to the question: What is schooling for now?

Introducing Will Richardson

Mason Pashia: As I said earlier, I’m joined by Will Richardson, former public educator and thought leader on social systems complexity and their impact on education. Will, welcome.

Will Richardson: Thanks much for having me, Mason. Really appreciate being here.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, it’s great to have you. Just do a little definition of how you think of the term schooling to start us off?

Will Richardson: Well, I think schooling is made up of the systems, the structures, the practices, the pedagogies that we think are the best formation of a process of giving the information and the knowledge and the skills and literacies that they need to be successful, quote-unquote, in the world in which they’re living. That kind of definition has been in place now for quite a long time. The narrative of what it means to go to school is deeply ingrained in our society and very difficult to shift.

Mason Pashia: Very much so. Yeah, I heard a podcast recently where they were talking about fermentation cultures of all things, and they mentioned the definition of the word culture being information that is passed down outside of DNA. I think that’s a beautiful way to think about schooling as well. Do you have a memory from your youth of powerful learning or, in this instance, schooling?

Will Richardson: Well, sure. It’s connected to schooling as much as it is to just real life, right? I think, you know. Yeah, I know, right? It’s a little depressing and maudlin, but I think the moment that I characterize as the most powerful learning moment I had while growing up, or as an early young adult, was when my mom died suddenly when I was 23 years old. She was a single parent. She was all I knew in terms of family, and after getting over the very powerful grief moment around that, you know, all of a sudden, I had to grow up. I had to take on all of these things that I hadn’t been prepared for. I don’t think anything can prepare you for it, but it was a powerful learning moment. I had to learn about myself. I had to learn about living as an adult, living on my own, doing things that adults do, and learning a lot about just grieving and going through that. It was really difficult. I remember I was working as a reporter for a small paper here locally at the time, and I wrote a series just on what happens after death. About the paperwork and stuff that you have to go through. But a lot of it was just about the process, and it was cathartic for me. I’m not sure how many people read it, but that’s when I think I realized what it means to be responsible for yourself and take on all of these things that are happening in not just my world, but in the world, you know, kind of larger, and try to make sense of them. Again, it speaks to how we learn in just about every way possible.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. No, that’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Understanding Complexity in Education

Mason Pashia: I know you engage a lot with questions of complexity, and that certainly is a moment of complexity in your life when you realize all the things you don’t know and have to something like grief. But do you know when you were equipped with the language to talk about complexity or when you started to view things and actually use that kind of framing?

Will Richardson: Yeah, I am not sure I still am. Right. I understand what complexity is; the world gets more complex. So I don’t know that there’s a moment or something that happens that exactly puts, you know, turns that light bulb on and says, oh, so this is what it means. I think it’s just living in the world and, again, just being a part of what happens not just in your own life, but what’s happening in other people’s lives. The challenges and the opportunities that are going on, the new technologies. I mean, we could make a list, right? Of all the different things that are constantly evolving, constantly changing, you know, just trying to figure out. Well, what do those things mean, right? What is it not just making sense of what’s happening, but it’s also trying to capture what’s emerging and what is it that is going to be the best move next, right? And five years down the road, or 10 years down the road. And I think that especially is becoming more complex. It’s becoming much more difficult to out. Well, what’s 2030 gonna look like? You know, what’s 2050 gonna look like if we have a 2050? That change has always happened, right? And if you talk to our parents and grandparents, they’ll tell you that change is really fast. But I don’t think it’s the same. I really don’t. I think these are existential, just very fast-moving, mind-boggling in many ways. Things that are happening that hardly anyone can make sense of right now.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, I certainly feel boggled or baffled daily. So, I definitely get you there.

Confronting Collapse: A New Manifesto

Mason Pashia: You recently put out this manifesto, and it really frames the conversation around confronting collapse. And I know you put a lot of thought into both of those words. So could you give a little bit of context on either what it means to confront collapse or why those words specifically were chosen?

Will Richardson: Well, it’s hard, right? If you take collapse at a meta level, it’s really hard because it suggests that life as we know it on the planet can’t continue and will end. There’s a great quote by Dougal Hein where he says, “It’s not the end of the world full stop. It’s the end of the world as we know it,” right? So it’s not like collapse means the world’s going away. The Earth is gonna survive us no matter what, but it is the end of the world as we know it. And I really have come to that belief. On one hand, that’s heavy, no doubt, but on another level, it’s kind of freeing because it’s like, okay, so what’s the work in front of me now? You know, what’s the work in front of us? I think that there are a lot of people who are trying to fix all these problems that we have, but ultimately those well-meaning people are not fixing the core problem that we have, and that is that we are out of relation with one another and we’re out of relation with every other living thing on the planet. And as much as we might be able to find some technological fix for climate change or, you know, whatever, until we repair those relationships, collapse is still in the offing. I think. And it goes back to what you said in the introduction too. We live on a finite planet, and yet we have this narrative of growth that is infinite. Those two things don’t work. That math doesn’t add up, right? So it’s a posture that moves you away from needing to fix everything to how do we navigate this? How do we take care of ourselves? How do we best care for one another, for our children, for, again, all other life on the planet and really focus on repairing as much as we can and regenerating those types of relationships that are absolutely necessary for life to continue on the planet.

Mason Pashia: I was reading a poem this week by a poet named Carl Phillips, and the poem was titled “Regime,” but the end of it really speaks to this kind of sad comfort that you found there where he says, “It’s hard to believe in them, the beautiful colors of extinction, but these are the colors,” which I think is partially just gorgeous, but also like the beautiful colors of extinction. Like that really does feel what it means to have a really lovely or aware moment in this moment. Like there’s a context to it there.

Will Richardson: I think it speaks to, I mean, Margaret Wheatley is someone who has had an influence on me and her concept of really what it’s about right now is creating islands of sanity, right? These places where we can come together as we go through this chaos and do things where we still remember what good humans do. Where we still treat each other with kindness and with equity and justice and, you know, that all those good parts of being a human are still possible to us, but the reality of it is maybe not possible at the scale we need them to be right now, just because of so many of the, again, the tensions and narratives and systems and whatever else that make that a very heavy lift.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. So let’s take this directly back into this schooling lens. So I think we’ve got in your manifesto you also quote Indy Johar as like outlining who’s at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and a Harvard lecturer and frames it up nicely as we have this view of reality that’s composed of divisible objects versus entangled wholes. And I think that the schooling system really leans into that, where it’s like all of these kind of atomized experiences and individuals that have no real, I guess not impact, but like significance in the real world while they’re in school and like not on each other, they’re kind of kept separate. So we do a lot of work at Getting Smart, talking about basically what people should know and be able to do, given things that are changing and emerging. And a lot of that work results in something akin to a portrait of a graduate, right? Where you have like a district or a system defining outcomes for students. There’s variation and there’s some like thoughtful more like differences among communities, but in general, they kind of hover around these four Cs. It doesn’t get too far.

The IDGs and Skills for Growth

Mason Pashia: So in your manifesto, you talk about the IDGs 23 Skills for Growth, which include things that I think are related to the four Cs but maybe do gesture at this more entangled sensibility. I don’t know if you know those off the top of your head or have some that you can rattle off. I have some here, but would love to just talk about some of the things that are mentioned in these IDGs to start.

Will Richardson: Yeah. Well, you know, I think that the premise of the IDGs is that the, you know, the kind of adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals was kind of not going as quickly as people had hoped. And what they realized, or thought, was that it was because we weren’t ready as individuals to really fully embrace and articulate and put into practice at scale the types of sustainable goals that had been articulated. And there’s a quote in there, I’m not sure if I can remember if I put it in the manifesto, but they have a quote in the prelude to the Inter Development Goals where it says something along the lines of, “We realize that this is not a technical change; it’s an adaptive change.” Right? And this goes back to Ron Heitz at MIT or Harvard, you know, talking about, sure you can bring someone in to fix your technology or to change, you know, what your classrooms look like in a technological sense. But if you don’t also change the dispositions that people have toward the technology and the ways in which they relate to the technologies, then there’s not really gonna be a shift in what classroom practice looks like to use a, again, a school example of.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Will Richardson: So I think that what the IDGs are trying to say is these are the, this is how we need to be. And they are mostly, you know, I think they call them skills. I think most of them are just dispositions, right? They’re about having courage, having honesty, having empathy. But they’re also about kind of skills in the context of being skilled at organizing, you know, at bringing people together, at being skilled at looking further into the future. I do think a lot of that separation that happens in schools, like you said, separation of ages, separation of classes, separation of curriculum, all that kind of stuff, separation in terms of competition; all of that leads to separation. And, you know, the way that we think about the world, the way we think about one another. And again, the IDGs, I think, are trying at least to help us identify at the very least, those types of things, those types of dispositions and skills, and in some case literacies that we need to have more, have to come together more to be more coherent in what we are hoping for, and then hopefully be able to move more effectively toward that.

Mason Pashia: Hmm. Yeah. And I have a couple of them in front of me, so I’ll just read a couple. They’ve got on these IDGs a list, they have inner compass, sense-making, long-term visioning, mobilization skills, humility—things that are, I think some of those do toe the line between skill and disposition, but they really are like a pretty beautiful list. So definitely I’ll link in the show notes, check out that list of IDGs and maybe cross-reference it with your portrait and see what’s missing and where you can really lean in, in terms of modeling them at the very least throughout the day and your school culture.

Will Richardson: I think, you know, I think I may have mentioned honesty too, and that’s not one of them, but I want to add that, facing reality, being honest about the situation that we’re in right now, again, Vanessa TI and Hospice Modernity, right? Talking about acknowledging and then trying to overcome the denials that we have in terms of how we think about the world and how we see the world. If you’re not starting from a place where you are looking at the world realistically and understanding what the challenges are, you know, I think it’s much harder, obviously, to move with coherence collectively, whatever, with others to get to those outcomes, those aspirations that we may all have.

Mason Pashia: I definitely agree. I have a distinct memory of a—I went to a rowing class one time and I think I wrote a blog on this and I was very struck by the fact that the progress meter was the whole class’s progress and how far we rowed. And I remember that just totally shifting my mentality as like I was going through the motions and everyone around me the same way. It was just so powerful to see something growing and just changing because of a whole group’s impact rather than just the usual exercise monitor of like, “Oh, I’m letting everybody down or not, or myself down.” On that note and what you, what we were talking about with versus entangled and divided, how do you think you begin to shift some of these, like achievement goals, performance outlooks from more of an individual aim to one that’s more collective? Do you have any ideas around that? I feel like it’s a, it’s a tough, it’s a tricky one to.

Will Richardson: I think we are very incoherent in the language that we use in schools. I tell this story all the time, but I have gone into, in many cases, gone into a school, gone up to 10 different people and asked them how to, they define learning. I’ll get 10 different answers. I’ll ask them how do they define success? And those actually are a little bit closer, but still kind of all over the map. I think that in order to really begin to move into a different way of thinking about what happens in schools, I kind of used the phrase that we can build a different experience of schools for kids and for teachers. I think you have to be on the same page when it comes to what you think learning is and how it happens. You know, I talk about this a lot, but there are these kind of unspoken truths about school that we don’t want to really acknowledge, and that is in many cases, schools are built in ways that, and use practices and structures that are antithetical to the way that humans learn, like totally. And again, it goes back to that idea of separation. I think the really hard part about it, or interesting part of it, is that everyone knows it, but they just don’t want to talk about it. You know, if you ask people what do you need in order to learn, they’ll list a whole bunch of things that normally don’t end up in classrooms. Right. So I think that’s a, that’s a piece of it.

The Importance of Shared Language and Nature

Will Richardson: I also think though too, that we have to stop referring to nature as something out there and, and, you know, talking about it or learning about it out there. And first of all, acknowledge that we’re all part of nature. That we are nature, we are not separate from nature. And, and that without all those other living things out there, we don’t live on the planet. And I think the most striking thing maybe I heard in 2024 was when Casey Means was the Doctor, Casey Means was doing a giving a talk or on a panel for actually a government program where she said basically that incarcerated criminals get more daylight, sun time, outside time than most kids in schools in this country on a regular basis. You know, and so you wonder, well, why? Or you don’t wonder actually, you’re not surprised when we’re, we don’t feel connected to nature when we don’t, or, or to, you know, all those other living things that are out there. And I struggle a little bit here too because I, I think every time actually we say nature, we kind of, again, separate ourselves from it, right? It’s, it’s all other living things on the planet, I think is a better way of phrasing it, even though it’s clunkier, but I think it’s more meaningful. So I think, again, some shared language, some shared understanding of, of what the basics are, you know, in terms of what we believe around, what the, what schools should be and what, what the outcomes are. Shared belief around what’s happening in the world right now. Come to some coherence around that and a, and actually too, a shared aspirational future where we can look 20, 30 years into the future and say, yeah, that’s where we want to go. That’s what we want. And I do think that’s easier for people 20, 30 years in the future than it is for the, you know, three to five year strategic plan, which, you know, is kind of. Unless you have a 25 or 30 or 50 year vision for where you want to go, that three to five strategic year strategic plan is kind of this way for five years, then this way for five years, then that way for five years. You know what I mean? So yeah, just coming to some shared community understanding of the role of school and, and what the world is demanding right now of our kids, I think is the first step.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. You’ve also, I think you’ve described it as just to go back to the portrait, framing it for a second, like as a portrait of an ancestor, which I’m sure has some amount of homage to Roman Krznaric’s book “The Good Ancestor” and a lot of other thinkers. But I think that’s a really unique way to think about it too, that sort of implies this entanglement and also accountability. I think that comes along with it that like when Portrait of a Graduate seems like the world is yours and you’re out there doing whatever, and Ancestor really does have this like, core piece to it that I

Will Richardson: Well, they’re two different success narratives that are embedded in those two things. Portrait of a Graduate is you’re ready to go out in the world, go to college, make some money, have a good life type of thing, right? Portrait of an Ancestor is you’re ready to go out in the world and be a good human. That’s not to say that we don’t want kids to be good humans if we have a portrait of a graduate, but portrait of an ancestor requires you to think about, well, what are the implications of what I’m doing right now on my kids, my grandkids, or future generations down the road? How do the decisions that I make right now change the narrative or change the arc of the world moving forward? Right? And if, again, if we’re honest about it and if we are facing reality, we understand that we’re not going to be able to make decisions based on growth and increased incomes and economic gain for very much longer at all. And that the decisions we have to make have to be for more regenerative, sustainable, longer-term visions of the world or, or as aspirations for the world that we really want to live in. So I think there are two very different premises that we write those things about. Right? And I’m not sure, to be honest with you too, that a lot of schools have the capacity to really understand what it means to be a portrait or to have a portrait of an ancestor.

Mason Pashia: Totally. Well, I think that it gestures at how hard the work is and how important it is to bring in the whole community in that process. Like it’s sort of the, it takes a village mentality. Like you, it can’t be the sole goal of school to prepare everyone to be a good ancestor. Like that is a very collaborative and inclusive process that everyone has to be a part of and, and buy into.

Will Richardson: What’s really interesting though, you know, we’ve, we’ve gone to schools and we have this, this other document eBook called the 12 Big Questions, right? And the first question in there is, what is sacred? And we’ve gone to schools and brought together parents and community members, kids, teachers, and the interesting thing though, not surprising, all of them say the same thing about what is sacred. That is relationships, community, mental health, right. None of them say college diplomas, good grades. You know what I’m saying. Right. So I think regardless, even of, you know, how fraught the political scene is right now in the United States and elsewhere, I do think there are still core agreements that we have about what we want our world to be and what we want for our children, and I think it’s a great starting point, right? That we can agree here. Okay. So if those are the things, then what do we need to do in order to be good ancestors and perpetuate those things that are really important, those relationships, the health, the communities that we live in, right?

Mason Pashia: I think we’ve, we’ve covered a number of either schools or like advisory programs like Crew that I think do a really good job at trying to keep some of those things sacred and preserve them throughout the day and make them visible rather than just sort of like an invisible sacred which still has value but may perhaps it’s less actionable in a moment. But yeah, there’s a ton there. To return to the, so this, this question of what is schooling for now in this moment? I know we started with this kind of collapse narrative, and I’m just curious if you have either a belief or a theory about like, how, how do you bring that up to kids? Like, how do you talk about a world that is on a path and really bring it up without making it feel like that is both permanent and just like terrifying in some ways?

Will Richardson: Well, I think it’s a question that we need to be asking a lot more than we are right now.

The Role of Schools in Navigating Complexity

Will Richardson: You know, in the manifesto, when I got to the final or the next to last belief in there, I said the purpose of schooling now is to help kids navigate what’s coming both emotionally, physically, spiritually, that that is the work of schools to prepare them with the dispositions that they need, the skills that they need to do that. Right.

Mason Pashia: Mm-hmm.

Will Richardson: I also think though, by not talking to kids about this in age-appropriate ways, and I think we can do that. We can figure out how to do that. But by not talking about that, to be honest with you, I think we’re lying to them. We’re lying to our communities. We’re not, we’re just not being honest with them. And, you know, kids know this stuff. I mean, they’re not, they’re not immune to what’s happening in the world. They’re getting news. They see things that are going on. And I think in many kids, for many kids, it’s kind of like, why aren’t you talking to us about this? So, I just want to tell you a quick story. So, because it happened, it happened on Tuesday. We’re running this, this workshop, this confronting education workshop starting in a couple of weeks. And I’ve invited some students to come in and be a part of this group of 50 people. And so there was a woman who started a school in Bangalore. And one of her students came in and she was talking, the student was a year 10 student, and she was just talking about how that school approaches your question, right? And what they, they’re honest. And look, when you’re in Bangalore, collapse is outside your front window, right? You’re in the middle of a drought. You’re in the middle of a flood, you’re breathing air that is, you know, toxic. And so there’s, you know, you’re not escaping it. It’s not to say it’s all happening there, but you know what I’m saying.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, of course.

Will Richardson: And she said it’s heavy. The year 10, this, this girl said, you know, it’s really heavy and it is hard and it is depressing, but my school lets me work on those problems, right? So they call it a problem to project pedagogy, right? So they talk about these things, and then kids tap into different parts of it that they find interesting or relevant to their own lives, and then they pursue those things and they learn about those things, and they talk about solutions to those things. So it’s like they are empowered by the fact that a, they’re being told the truth. And b, they’re giving space and agency to actually work on those things in their own lives, right? In the context of this school experience that this particular person has created for them. And it was amazing. I felt joy after listening to her. I really did. I was like, thank goodness, you know, somebody’s actually going there with kids and what’s happening is kids are stepping up. I understand why we fear it. You know, I understand that we want to hold our children, but I don’t think that that’s preparing them for the world that they’re going to exist in. And I don’t think it’s even arguable anymore that the world that they’re going to live in is going to be even more complex and more chaotic than the one we’re living in right now. And if we’re not talking with them about that, and if we’re not preparing them for that, then we are doing this. We are going, good luck. Good luck. Alright. Hope that works out for you. Right, and that’s just unconscionable almost, right? So I think, you know, it can be done, but I think we have to learn those skills. We have to, as adults, we have to learn those skills. As adults, we have to first acknowledge and again, stop denying the fact that the world is in some dire straits right now. We have to, I think we have to own it for ourselves, right? But I also think that one of the reasons we need to do that is so that we can help our kids through this.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, I mean, there’s so much there. I just want to highlight one word you said, which is care. And I think we also just, the nuance in that word, like care is not just positive things all the time. Like, I think that even touches back to what you were talking about earlier with grief. It’s like grief is care. Like there’s so many of these negative, in quotes for those who aren’t watching, emotions that I think are so important to both share and understand how to share them with others that right now we just kind of push under a rug. So

Will Richardson: Yeah,

I.

Mason Pashia: yeah. So sharing is caring. Again, in this instance, sharing about collapse is caring. So I want to just go ask another question. You’re talking about these strategic plans, and I know that you do some of this work where you’re helping folks through strategic plans, and you’re talking about sort of the challenges of a three to five year one. When you’re doing this work, do you also, do you have like a big picture, vision day first where you’re like, okay, let’s project out, and how, what are some things that you say to folks to kind of get them with that, like either future thinking mindset or really like that expanded horizon view?

Will Richardson: Well, I think, you know, again, here’s another challenge, right? And that is it’s really hard for us to imagine 25, 30, 50 years out. And part of that is because, again, the world is changing as quickly as it is. But the other part of it is, is that we don’t do this work. We don’t flex our imagination muscles hardly ever. Especially in schools, and especially in thinking about the futures that we want. So part of it is to try to develop some regular practice around imagining, and there’s different ways that you can do that, obviously. Rob Hopkins, who wrote a book titled “From What Is to What If,” which is a great book on imagining, and he shares a lot of his practice, but some of it is to simply take imaginative trips into the future, you know, and to close your eyes and you’re on a time machine and all of a sudden you open up and it’s 2050. What do you see? What do you smell? What do you hear? You know, how’s the world changed? So there’s that. There’s things like design fiction where maybe during that trip you ask people to tape to bring back an artifact from the future. And then, you know, like talk about it. Like the one great example that I’ve seen, there’s many, many, but one of them is called cricket crunch, right? Which is this cereal from the future that’s based on crickets because we run out. You know what I mean? But it’s great, right? So you kind of sit there and go, well, how’d we get to that? You know, and to kind of unpack that. So it is a process of trying to develop that mindset, develop that skill of imagination. It’s a process of bringing together disparate groups from within the school community to have, you know, we’ve called them Dream Summits.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Will Richardson: You know, like what is it that 30 years down the road you hope this place looks like, and, and you know, what, what is it again? What’s sacred? What have you kept from the current moment, but maybe what have you, what have you not kept, you know, what have you, and, and kind of the, the term these days, what have you hospiced and moved away and what might be new in the things that you’re doing? It’s hard. It’s hard for people to think about that. I think, again, the school narrative that we have right now is so deeply, deeply ingrained that to really think of something different, especially for a school that’s an established school and been around for a long, long time. It’s very, very difficult to do that. But the key is it’s not a one-off. It can’t be a one-off. Right. And I think, again, too many schools say, oh yeah, we, we did that. We checked the box. We imagined, you know, it’s like that’s not really the point, right? We’ve tried to create what we’ve called kind of these futures committees, you know, that we would meet on a regular basis that would read about change in the world. It’s hard, you know, I mean, it’s hard for people to commit to that, but I do think that’s where we have to start. And again, our own imaginations too, right? I wrote on LinkedIn early in the year that one of my goals this year was to just spend time imagining, you know, what I want my future to be, what I want my kids’ future to be, what I want the world’s future to be. It’s hard.

Mason Pashia: It is, and oftentimes I know that this was, I think kind of the impetus for your manifesto too, is it’s like you have to sit down and actually put words to it because if you’re just kind of making the space and feeling it out, it’s really hard to ever grasp something tangible and organize your thoughts in a way that’s like, no, no, this is, this is the thing that I’m imagining.

Will Richardson: And it just helped me clarify what I believe.

Mason Pashia: For sure.

Will Richardson: You know, I mean, when, you know, when you’re reading about this and thinking about this, there’s just so many things that are kind of, you know, bouncing off each other in your brain. But I, and I do suggest in the book that schools should have that conversation: What do you believe about the world? What do you believe about education? What do you believe about the future? Because unless you’ve, you know, kind of, unless you’ve clarified that again, it’s hard to be coherent in the ways in which you move forward towards some established vision or goal.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Mason Pashia: First of all, thank you so much for joining us today, Will. Really lovely conversation. One thing that really sticks with me, partially just because of the work we do, but I love this idea of portrait of an ancestor. I think it’d be a really valuable exercise for school leaders to look at their portrait of a graduate through the lens of a portrait of ancestor and say like, are those linked or are they not? And how can we really start to fill in some of that scaffolding or the gaps or bring in the community to talk about these things. I also just love the generosity with which you share the people who are shaping your thinking from the manifesto. So that’s just like this Getting Smart tenet of learning out loud. You’re just kind of like, oh, these people, these people. So I’ll be sure to copy all the folks from your footnotes as well as the link to your manifesto, but put ’em in the show notes ’cause there’s a bunch of real gems in there as far as thinkers and people who kind of reframe the world for you. And I think there’s also just this sort of belief in the value of people and learning that you have, that I just really find beautiful and encouraging. And I think that holding that as like kind of a candle in this, in this darkness of potential other ends is really a generative place to start from. So I really appreciate all that. Check out the manifesto for sure. I’m gonna end with reading you alluded to this, but to answer our question for today with, for which is what is schooling for now? This is a quick little paragraph from your manifesto. So, and you already said some of this, but. An education must now center on preparing our children and ourselves emotionally, physically, and spiritually to navigate complexity, chaos, and collapse, and to place a deep emphasis on repairing our relationships with one another and with all living things on the planet. Will, thanks so much for joining today.


Will Richardson: Really appreciate it. Thank you.

Guest Bio

Will Richardson

A former public school educator of 23 years, Will has spent the last 20 years developing an international reputation as a leading thinker and writer about the intersection of social online learning networks, education, and systemic change. Most recently, Will is a co-founder of the Big Questions Institute which was created to help educators use “fearless inquiry” to make sense of this complex moment and an uncertain future. In 2017, Will was named one of 100 global “Changemakers in Education” by the Finnish site HundrED, and was named one of the Top 5 “Edupreneurs to Follow” by Forbes. He has given keynote speeches, led breakout sessions, and provided coaching services in over 30 countries on 6 continents. (Come on Antarctica!) He has also authored six books that have sold over 200,000 copies worldwide, and given TEDx Talks in New York, Melbourne, and most recently Vancouver. In addition to his focus and expertise on classroom pedagogies, learning theory, and emerging technologies and trends, his current interests include the use of Design Fiction, Speculative Design, and Regenerative Design to help schools and districts envision potential futures. Will has two adult children, Tess and Tucker, and lives in rural New Jersey with his wife Wendy.

Mason Pashia

Mason Pashia is a Partner (Storytelling) at Getting Smart Collective. Through publications, blogs, podcasts, town halls, newsletters and more, he helps drive the perspective and focus of GettingSmart.com. He is an advocate for data and collective imagination and uses this combination to launch campaigns that amplify voices, organizations and missions. With over a decade in storytelling fields (including brand strategy, marketing and communications and the arts), Mason is always striving to inspire, as well as inform. He is an advocate for sustainability, futures thinking and poetry.

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