The future is imminent!

There really is a need to get our act together

I have been reading ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ by Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard Business School.  It is a quite extraordinary, and compelling, description of what has been happening in the digital world and explains all the apparently odd and inconsistent behaviours that we see from the likes of Google and Facebook.

Frankly, it is eye-opening.  Its central premise is that human behaviour is being turned into a tradable commodity just as human work became ‘labour’, and natural resources became ‘real estate’, in earlier iterations.

One of its clearest lessons is that if we are to thrive as individuals and as societies then we need to bring up our young people to think and act autonomously and to be resistant to the subtle (and not so subtle) behavioural manipulation that we are being increasingly exposed to.

Gustave Caillebotte - Jour de pluie à Paris

There is an urgency now which is growing steadily more acute.

This is not about young people acquiring more knowledge or skills but simply being allowed to grow into adulthood at their natural pace without the constraints that have been built into our systems – creation of a red brain, favouring focused attention over the more open sustained attention.

Curriculum has moved in this direction as has pedagogy, the last and most important piece is adult behaviour.

We should be asking teacher training organisations to develop teachers with the behaviours that inspire learning in students and the level of meaning making that can fully support the growth young people need to make.

All of this is now knowable and doable.  We just need to set it in train.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

·       To purchase a copy of Red Brain Blue Brain or Student Feedback go here