To mark the moment and celebrate the release of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti's new book 'Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity, and Collapse with Accountability and Compassion', we are so happy to be able to bring you this fantastic episode! It is the sequel to Vanessa's 'Hospicing Modernity', which was published in 2021 and in four short years has become one of the most important books of the century. This new book is arguably even better, and Krista Tippett, the award-winning journalist, author, and public intellectual has called it "a moral, intellectual, and spiritual masterpiece."

What it means to be an educated person or have an educated population as a country is a big part of what informs the decisions around industrial, economic and education policy. But built into these questions are some fundamental assumptions about what it means to make “progress” or be “developed” as a society. And beneath that particular values about what it means to know and be in the world. My guests this week have been exploring these precise questions in the context of international development…

As I explore different aspects of the education transition that we need globally, and is emerging, it is increasingly clear that schools (or what might replacement them) won't be the only thing required. There is a huge amount of possibility and power in a broader ecosystem of organisations and networks taking different roles in enabling a more creative, meaning-rich, relational educational experience for young people and for communities. This week it is a huge privilege to be able to share the story of one such organisation that has been quietly getting on with incredible and impactful work doing precisely this for the last few decades at an absolutely massive scale across India.

If we are going to radically rethink and perhaps replace schools as the dominant institutions of education, what are the first principles questions that we should be asking? And what is the cultural rootedness and traditions that might provide a sense of guidance for these questions? I can't think of a better person to be exploring this with than Dr Kapono Ciotti, whose work in leadership and collaboration across countries, cultures and systems, and across decades, has allowed him to see and participate in these fundamental and urgent questions from many different perspectives.

In the business of education someone telling you that something doesn't make sense is usually the moment to step in and explain, support and resolve the confusion. Helping young people make sense of the world Is our job isn't it? But what if making sense sometimes gets in the way of making meaning?! What is our job as educators in creating opportunities for young people to cultivate meaning in their lives, however that might happen for them? I absolutely loved this comversation with Sam Crosby this week, as we explored his work around the role of ancient myth, story and elders in responding collectively to the times we're in, that many see as a crisis of meaning.

“Are we valuing what we measure or measuring what we value?” It's probably a familiar question to many of you. And this week we're taking a detailed and reflective look at the role of measuring complex competencies in our schools, with Michaela Horvathova, as this is often a big part of the discussion about what needs to change in formal education.

This week it is a huge pleasure to be able to bring you this cross-over episode with Kwame Sarfo-Mensah and his fantastic channel, #IdentityTalk4EducatorsLIVE. Kwame's work is full of insights gained through his own practice as a maths teacher and educational coach and consultant, and through his over 200 conversations with amazing educators and leaders.

What are the 'future skills' our young people need, and will the university of the future be unrecognisable from the universities of today? Laura Eigbrecht and Professor Ulf-Daniel Ehlers have gathered some of the top thinkers around the world who are creating the university of the future. They join Tim this week to share some of these powerful ideas.

Which places might be the first movers in a radical educational shift? And by radical in this conversation we're not talking about small tweaks in the types of individual competencies and credentials we optimize for in our current version of schools. But a completely different set of logics, values, meaning and purpose for what education could be, set in a broader context of the transformation of systems and radical democratic renewal. This might all sound pretty grand but I believe, like my guests today, that building for this transition is the work we all have to do! I've been a huge admirer of the work of Dark Matter Labs for a long time and so it was an incredible opportunity for me to be able to sit down with Indy Johar and Adam Purvis to explore these massive and important issues.

This week, we're diving deep into a conversation that bridges ancient wisdom and modern learning. Joining Tim are two incredible thinkers and practitioners, Satheesh Namasivayam and Bade Kucukoglu. We explore how ancient wisdom practices—from dance, to creative arts, ritual and community performance —can inform and inspire us to create different kinds of spaces in our schools and communities and help us address the growing disconnection young people feel in modern education.

This week, it's a huge pleasure to welcome Adam Kahane onto the podcast to talk with Tim about the everyday habits and radical engagement that young people as well as educators and leaders, at all levels of our education systems, can learn in order to do the coordinated and constant work of transforming systems.

This week we're exploring embodiment science in education with some of the worlds leading embodiment practitioners and cognitive scientists! We believe that this is one of the most important shifts happening in education globally, which is simultaneously so simple, and yet so hard to budge given the depths of the tendencies towards disembodiment, especially in the Western tradition, that we explore.

The idea that schools simply deliver objective and neutral knowledge and skills to our young humans is a complete myth. In fact, with the amount of time that we spend in them over the course of our early lives, schools are incredibly good at conditioning us into particular sets of assumptions about the way the world works. My guest this week, Dr Ida Rose Florez is calling this out in amazing and very grounded ways and we discuss the impacts of what this does to our ability to be comfortable and competent in working with and in complexity (which is pretty much the place we all find ourselves in pretty consistently these days!). Ida Rose tells the full story brilliantly in her new book, The End of Education as We Know It: Regenerative Learning for Complex Times, as well as describing the examples of learning communities that are successfully doing education in whole new ways!

After learning about the amazing work of my guest, Dr Viviane Clay, I had an idea that I wanted to test out. Perhaps our current obsession with Large Language Models is revealing of our historic obsession with a narrow cognitivist view of how human learning happens (and, therefore, how schooling is structured)?! Memorise the largest possible bank of static data and then output plausible propositions, in response to prompts from a teacher or a standardised exam! Obviously that's a bit of an unfair caricature of the industrial schooling system, but also not a million miles from the truth!

This week, we're thinking about how change happens, or more often doesn't happen in formal education! What are the practical approaches that education leaders and policy-makers sometimes miss when they are initiating change management and innovation processes. This week we welcome back Dr James Mannion to the podcast, in light of the recent publication of his book 'Making Change Stick'. He's done a fabulous job of synthesising the change management literature, including techniques and strategies from many disciplines so that you don't have to.

A huge part of the shifts we want to see in schools and in education more broadly is more agency, choice-making and self direction for young people. There is an increasingly compelling story about why this is important for them, as well as for the kinds of challenges we're facing in local communities and national and global society. But sometimes what isn't highlighted is the impact of not having those things. What toll does it take on youth well-being and mental health? So this week I'm joined by renowned clinical psychologist and educator Dr Naomi Fisher to help me find out.

This week, we are celebrating 5 years and 193 episodes since going live with Episode 1 in April 2020! You can hear Tim's reflections, as well as clips from previous episodes with Marie Battiste (Ep154), Nora Bateson (Ep116), Roland Kupers (Ep 185), Wakanyi Hoffman (Ep 157), Carl Mika (Ep179), Nolita Mvunelo & Matias Lara (Ep190), Zineb Mouhyi (Ep184) and Zoe Weil (Ep171).

Are we educating young people as consumers? Have educational institutions become service providers in the consumer economy of educational products?  Or are we educating young people as citizens - of their local communities, nations and the planet? If so what does that mean for how we engage them in the  processes of living and working together, making meaningful contributions and learning important things as they go.  I'm not sure that that looks much like what we're currently doing in most schools around the world.

Jon Alexander is on a mission to help a new story to emerge about how people all over the world are getting involved!

Is it possible to unlearn the conditioning of our minds, that many of us who have had traditional educations have experienced, such that we can think differently about what an education could be? This week's guest, Manish Jain, has seen both sides of this experience, and is weaving incredible communities and new institutions all over India and the world!

As I often say we radically underestimate young people and what they are capable of. They are asking to be involved in the critical conversations about systems change. And not only that they are also building their own capabilities for and with each other about how to engage with it's systemic issues. So it's a huge pleasure this week to be speaking with Nolita Mvunelo, Matías Lara and Vanessa Terschluse who have taken it upon themselves, as The 50 Percent, to gather a collection of insights to enhance young people's understanding of systems and how they move and change. They have published the amazing 'Young Person's Guide to Systems Change'.