A changing world requires new educational foundations. Young people today are growing up within ecological, social, economic and technological systems that connect their lives with people, knowledge and consequences across the planet. Human capacities for learning, cooperation, communication and knowledge develop through relationships with other people and the environments in which we live, while many of the systems through which those capacities are now exercised operate across distances and scales far beyond individual experience.
Education Foundations for Thriving Futures sets Regeneration Transitions as a long-term wisdom goal for education. Regeneration Transitions involve maintaining, renewing and strengthening the ecological and human systems that enable life to thrive across generations. This includes how we organise economies and societies, how we experience and understand the world, and how we develop and use knowledge.
Education organised towards this goal connects knowledge and skills for contemporary life with relationships that support long-term human and ecological wellbeing. Learners develop their relationships with the living world, their capacities for cooperation and participation, and their ability to investigate and work with knowledge from different sources. These foundations develop the knowledge, skills, experience and agency through which people can participate in Regeneration Transitions as circumstances change.
Learning takes place through accumulated knowledge and direct experience. Science, history, Indigenous and local knowledge, research, stories and other forms of inquiry allow people to learn from observations and experience extending across places and generations. Observation, participation, practice and dialogue allow learners to develop knowledge and skills through their own experience. Within the Global Care Packs programmes, these become the Narrative and Experiential Learning Paths, each informing and extending the other.
This book develops the Narrative Learning Path through the River System of Human Time. The River follows selected human capacities, relationships and knowledge from their deep evolutionary origins through changing economic systems, social relationships and knowledge networks to the Anthropocene present and towards probable and possible futures. Research, teachings, and experience from different disciplines, cultures, and generations provide tracks that can be followed, compared, and questioned throughout the journey.
The Education Foundations bring this learning together across our relationships with the living world, with other people and communities, and with the wider human experience of knowledge and meaning. They draw on established research, practices and knowledge traditions to develop capacities for connection, strengthen relationships that have become more distant, and build the knowledge, experience and agency needed for Regeneration Transitions..
The Global Care Packs programmes give students, teachers, community members and regeneration stewards opportunities to develop these foundations through learning, shared experience and participation. Knowledge and ideas introduced in this book can be investigated through direct experience, developed through practice and applied within local communities. The programmes are collaborative and continue to develop through the knowledge and experience of those who participate in them.
Education Foundations for Thriving Futures can be read independently or used with the experiential programmes developed through Thriving Futures 2100. Together, the book and programmes connect accumulated human knowledge with learning through experience, organised around the long-term goal of Regeneration Transitions and the pursuit of thriving futures.
