Educational renewal in an era of polycrisis

There is a developing consensus that the world is now in the grips of a serious polycrisis (Lawrence et al., 2024), an era when multiple interdependent crises are causing disruption and damage to both the planet and to human civilisations. Climate change, biodiversity loss, the rise of nationalism and resultant wars, economic inequality and stagnation, and mass migration are just some of the worst problems facing the planet.
And within this polycrisis what is the role of education? As a sector, many countries have continued to follow a tried and tested model of education, that defined and structured by neoliberalism (Sahlberg, 2011). Thus, education is characterised by simplistic processes of efficiency, competition, and ever more micro-managerialism, made worse by overbearing accountability systems, leading to enforced hyper-change. The consequences are clear, with ever worse recruitment and retention issues in many countries (Quickfall and Wood, 2024), rising problems with mental health issues amongst students and a growing uneasiness that education systems are no longer particularly relevant or effective in their sole duty of preparing children to enter adult life as confident, thoughtful individuals ready to play a role in making society better.
In this chapter we begin by outlining the nature of both the global and educational polycrises and why we need to react to them if we are to have any chance of creating a long-term sustainable future for the human species. We then go on to argue that a specific problem which many education systems face is that caused by a stubborn adherence to the belief that the world is characterised by linear, ‘knowable’ processes which we can fully characterise and control. This leads to simplistic, managerialist organisations which are run through recourse to reductionism, strategic plans, quantitative data, structured notions of leaders and leadership and learning as a purely cognitive and simple process of transfer.
We consider this model through the ‘thought experiment’ of the dissociative organisation, an archetype illustrative framework of the late neoliberal organisation. This organisation is made up of two main subsets, the ‘formal organisation’ of senior leaders who set change agendas, drive hyperaccountability systems and create dominant narratives about what is valued and what is seen as success. The organisational lifeworld, the part of the organisation which is populated by those who work with students, who offer pastoral care and who have to make the agendas of the formal organisation work, are constantly bereft of time, are under constant pressure with ever dwindling resources and struggle under the hyperaccountability and hyper-change agendas of the formal organisation. We discuss how this leads to dysfunctional organisations led by inappropriate forms of leadership.
We then present what we see as a hopeful alternative which engages with the complexity of polycrisis and which acts as a way of creating positive, generative organisations which have at their heart the fostering of human capacity and the development of thoughtful individuals capable of playing positive roles in society. Using a different set of assumptions, based on process philosophy, complexity theories and feminist economics, we present a contrasting thought experiment, the promotive organisation. Based on the interdependent pillars of belonging, thriving, fulfilling and sustaining we offer an insight into a heterodox approach to organisation in education where leadership is understood to be embedded within relationships and those who are formal leaders have a role to support and enable interaction and change. Educational organisations are built to foster community and to help individuals find and expand their strengths as well as support their weaknesses. Centred on an ethic of care and a belief that only by engaging with the complexity of the world around us will we create more sustainable societies able to emerge positively from the current polycrisis, this thought experiment is an attempt to imagine education differently.
We conclude by reflecting on what is stopping this transformation from occurring in the current system and why it is a crucial shift if we are to sustain both ourselves and the planet in the longer term.

Lawrence M, Homer-Dixon T, Janzwood S, Rockstöm J, Renn O, Donges JF (2024). Global polycrisis: the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement. Global Sustainability 7, e6, 1–16. https://doi.org/ 10.1017/sus.2024.1.
Quickfall, A. & Wood, P. (2024) Transforming Teacher Work: Teacher Recruitment and Retention After the Pandemic. Emerald Publishing.
Sahlberg, P. (2011) Finnish Lessons. Teachers’ College Press.