threatens our very survival.,If the entire world reaches the levels of consumption seen in high-income countries today,we'll need multiple planet Earths to supply the resources,The absurd(荒谬的)idea of infinite growth within a finite territory is at the heart of our economic system.
To keep this machine running,formal education generates ever more efficient "human capital",Increasing productivity metrics(指标)rather than the individuality of students drives our civilization's approach to schooling our young people Whereas the Sustainable Development Goals call for turning education into a force for sustainability,the opposite is often true:The ways Western societies have come to think about education undermine our ability to deal with the environmental crisis.To get through this crisis,we need to cultivate our imagination,not undermine it.
Growing up,none of my schooling fostered my ability to imagine a world different from what I saw around me.Besides,I realize the suppression(抑制)of children's imagination doesn't take place only in underresourced communities,but in"elite"institutions that tout"critical thinking".Schools want to see their graduates succeed,and success is too often about maintaining current structures—not about reimagining their foundations.
Essentially,our education systems shape children in the image of artificial intelligence.The perfect"worker",AI,continually improves its own productivity but doesn't challenge the larger structures within which it operates.It is one of the great paradoxes of our time that we invest so much into building supercomputers while marginalizing the imaginative potential of millions of human brains.What's more, we even put our hope in solving the environmental crisis on AI.But AI,like our other technologies,can only treat the symptoms of the environmental crisis,not the causes
Throughout history,achievers of great change have relied on their imaginations to address fundamental flaws in society.In my country of birth,communists kept their dreams of democracy alive for decades by imagining different futures.In South Africa,Nelson Mandela's followers had to be radical(激进的)in their imagination to create a vision of a fairer society.Imagining democracy when living under a totalitarian regime(极权主义政权)isn't that different from imagining degrowth when living in a world of infinite growth,
The kind of intelligence that Nelson Mandela and such possessed was not artificial.The ability toreimagine the future and disrupt the current situation remains a distinctly human quality.Unlike AI,children are naturally imaginative and question the premises of society.In my research,I have observed that younger children are often the most radical in imagining different futures.
As long as our imagination is curtailed,ideas like degrowth sound utopian(乌托 邦 的 )to many,Cultivating imagination means learning from history's disrupters who made the impossible possible.Instead of dismissing"childish"ideas about the world's future,it means seeing inspiration in children's imaginations.In an education system that celebrates imagination,arts and creativity are as important as math and science.Idealism coexists with pragmatism.The environmental crisis is not a crisis of technology or science,it is a crisis ofimagination.If we let children be our guides,we might be able to imagine our way to survival.
