From: jimruttshow8596
Zach Stein, a writer, educator, and futurist, focuses on bringing a greater sense of sanity and justice to education, especially as it relates to the global meta-crisis [00:00:34]. His work is primarily explored in his book, “Education in a Time Between Worlds” [00:01:52].
Education in a Time Between Worlds
The concept of “a time between worlds” is drawn from Immanuel Wallerstein’s world Systems Theory, which describes periods of economic rollovers where a dominant force decays, leading to a lack of clear overarching order until a new one emerges [00:02:29]. These periods align with models of cultural evolution, marking transitions between historical epochs (e.g., late pre-modern to early modern, mature modern to postmodern) [00:03:04]. Currently, humanity is in such a period of transition, moving to a different world while still on the same Earth [00:03:33]. In these times, education becomes a primary vector for establishing the new world order [00:03:47]. This perspective informs the need for a “hard reboot” of basic human structures, which links to concepts like Game B [00:04:18].
The Global Meta-crisis and Education
Stein posits that education is a central aspect of the global meta-crisis [00:05:19]. The meta-crisis can be understood as a superordinate crisis arising from the combination of many individual crises (ecological, geopolitical, local political, schools, healthcare) [00:06:07]. It is fundamentally an educational crisis, akin to being lost in the woods and lacking the skills and mental fortitude to navigate the situation [00:06:21].
This meta-crisis manifests in several ways within education:
- Capabilities Crisis: A mismatch between exponentially rising complexity in the world and a lagging increase in human capacity to meet these problems [00:07:13]. Civilization’s problems have become too complex too quickly, leading to a lag in the human capacity upgrade needed [00:07:42].
- Legitimation Crisis: A difficulty in determining who holds legitimate authority, leading to a lack of social cohesion and capital [00:08:04]. This has been present in schools and universities for a while, contributing to a widespread sense of illegitimacy across major institutions [00:08:56].
- Meaning Crisis: A cultural incoherence where people lack a sense of purpose as a species, nation, or individual, questioning the meaning of suffering, joy, death, sleep, and dreams [00:09:17]. This vacuum is often filled by conspiracy theories [00:09:55].
- Intelligibility/Sense-making Crisis: A struggle to cognitively make sense of the world, distinct from a capability crisis [00:10:06].
These crises are not infrastructure failures or political breakdowns, but rather “interior” problems residing within the human psyche and body [00:10:42]. They are issues of consciousness, learning, human development, and education that require a different approach than technical solutions [00:11:04]. Despite the primacy of education, it has been marginalized and neglected, and is now “preyed upon by forces seeking to profit from the obvious crisis of capability” [00:11:51], such as predatory student loan lending and the push to privatize schools [00:12:17]. This poor management since roughly 1972 has led to a potential catastrophic breakdown of intergenerational transmission [00:12:40].
Reductive Human Capital Theory
A significant impediment to genuine education is the “reductive human capital theory” [00:15:27]. This theory views human beings as a form of capital or commodity, where skills residing within individuals are seen as capital [00:15:55]. The educational system, in this view, becomes a sub-component of the broader economy, tasked with supplying human capital [00:16:16]. This approach reduces the multifaceted dimensions of intergenerational transmission to solely the reproduction of the economic system [00:16:32].
Stein argues that this theory is a “self-terminating protocol” for an educational system [00:16:47]. It undermines the “hidden curriculum” of culture, which includes the uncompensated labor of human development (often performed by mothers) [00:16:56]. By over-focusing on economic efficiency, it ultimately destroys intangibles like motivation, creative thinking, and ethical compass [00:18:31]. Examples include “No Child Left Behind” and “Obama’s Race to the Top,” which are dominated by this human capital mentality [00:19:10]. This approach treats education as a commodity exchange, prioritizing return on investment over genuine learning and ethical development [00:59:09].
Instead of blaming schools or parents, the focus should be on the surrounding institutions and systems that make it nearly impossible to “do the right thing” within these spaces [00:20:20]. True education reform requires broader societal reform [00:20:36]. Ideas for good policing or education cannot work in the current “hyper financialized ratchet of status as consumerism” (Game A) [00:22:51]. The inability to have ethical institutions work points to fundamental flaws in society itself [00:22:36].
The Breakdown of Intergenerational Transmission
The current situation is characterized by a “catastrophic breakdown” of intergenerational transmission [00:25:50]. This failure is a result of the “colonization of the life world” by commercial and strategic interests [00:26:16]. The distance between elders and youth has grown so significant that it risks becoming “generational warfare,” with current asset holding and access to power largely hoarded by older generations [00:27:51].
The information ecology, dominated by platforms like Facebook and Google, has become a major factor in shaping people’s capacities and epistemic frameworks [00:37:38]. While these technologies offer amazing informational resources (e.g., Google Scholar, Khan Academy) [00:41:23], informational environments are not necessarily educational [00:43:07]. Social media, in particular, is designed to be addictive and is used for micro-targeted advertisements, harvesting attention and capability for profit [00:38:30]. This impacts the least well-off, who may lack the self-direction or discipline to navigate these environments educationally, leading to depression, addiction, and susceptibility to conspiracy theories [00:45:20].
Re-establishing Teacherly Authority
A central theme for education reform is the importance of re-establishing “teacherly authority” [00:48:26]. This is seen as the root of resolving the educational and, by extension, the meta-crisis [00:49:29].
Nature of Teacherly Authority
Teacherly authority is a species-specific human trait, essential for human culture [00:50:14]. It’s a deep-seated archetype of teaching and learning, facilitated by “joint attentional awareness”—an interaction where a knowledgeable person (teacher) engages with a less knowledgeable person (student) with the shared intention of learning [00:50:34]. This involves an asymmetry of knowledge and capacity, often with a power asymmetry, but crucially, the teacher acts in the best interests of the learner [00:53:08]. It relies on the perceived legitimacy of the relationship [00:53:56].
Teacherly authority is not limited to formal schooling; it occurs in diverse contexts, such as an auto mechanic explaining car problems [00:55:28]. It’s a dynamic, flexible, and shifting structure where competence and skill spontaneously create hierarchies in productive working groups [00:55:53].
Undermining Teacherly Authority
Current systems have undermined legitimate teacherly authority:
- Bureaucratic Power: When teacherly authority is based solely on bureaucratic power rather than actual knowledge asymmetry, it becomes “pseudo teacherly authority” [00:54:08].
- Digital Information Ecology: The rise of digital platforms where authority is based on popularity, likes, or celebrity status muddies the water, making it difficult to detect legitimate teacherly authority [00:57:36]. This “water has become so muddy” that when true authority appears, there’s often a knee-jerk reaction to reject it [00:58:05].
- Commodity Exchange: When education is framed as a commodity, students act as consumers who are “always right,” disrupting the student’s role as a learner who needs to be challenged [01:00:11].
- Standardized Testing: Standardized tests mandate specific content and assessment types, forcing teachers to prioritize test performance over authentic learning, thereby undermining genuine teacherly authority [01:20:57].
The Role of Parenting
Parenting is intimately linked to teacherly authority and intergenerational transmission [01:04:15]. The breakdown of family structures is not merely a moral failing of individuals but a “moral failing at the level of the society,” which allows for conditions like inequitable distribution [01:22:51]. Attempting to micromanage familial life through social workers or parenting licenses (e.g., paying mothers to raise children) would be an “Orwellian shitshow” that devastates the intergenerational transmission of love [01:01:51]. Families are preyed upon and used to “offload externalities” of the current social system [01:26:59].
Towards a New Model
Stein advocates for a “nuanced and distributed and non-dogmatic form of teacherly authority” [01:03:36]. This would involve dismantling traditional schools and creating an “educational hub network” where distributed teacherly authority flourishes [01:18:03]. This requires contexts where younger and older people engage with actual meaningful problems together, moving away from “busywork” towards apprentice-like relationships in “neo-guild like structures” [01:18:23]. Such spontaneous contexts allow legitimate teacherly authority to arise, whereas traditional schooling often disincentivizes it [01:19:15].
Pharmacologicalization of K-12 Education
A controversial symptom of the educational crisis is the “pharmacologicalization” and medicalization of K-12 education, particularly the proliferation of ADHD diagnoses and psychotropic drug prescriptions for children [01:28:27].
This represents the “medicalization of academic underperformance,” which turns the dynamic of teacherly authority into a strategic one [01:30:52]. Instead of “raising children” into their unique selves through collaborative, non-strategic interaction where interests align [01:32:40], this approach constitutes “designing children” [01:32:28]. It involves unilateral, strategic intervention into the biological substrate of the child to perpetuate the older generation’s view [01:34:03].
Reframing academic struggles as medical problems shifts the locus of intervention from cultural and interpersonal dynamics (teacherly authority) to biomechanical intervention [01:35:15]. This leads children to believe their nervous systems are “broken” or genetically disadvantaged [01:38:37]. This trend is part of a broader “depoliticization of deviance” and medicalization of any view or lifestyle that is disagreed with or not understood [01:39:35].
The disproportionate impact on boys (e.g., 15% on ADHD medication vs. 2% of girls, though girls are often prescribed different meds for anxiety/depression) [01:41:42], along with the “utopia of rules” (Graeber’s concept of excessive bureaucracy and zero tolerance) [01:43:29] and reduced recess time, is seen as systematically disadvantaging normal boyhood development [01:45:10]. Reducing unsupervised play limits children’s ability to creatively resolve interpersonal problems and develop autonomous moral reasoning [01:46:12]. This controlling approach stems from a neurotic desire to control every aspect of a child’s life, preventing them from becoming sovereign agents and instead designing them to perpetuate an economic system that disadvantages them [01:48:46].