Islands of Coherence: Steiner schools and the Future

Welcome to Stina Voices, a podcast series hosted by Stina Education Australia. We're a forum for some of the very voices from Stina School communities around the country of teachers, parents and students. Follow us Stina Voices podcast series and you'll meet some of the many people who make Australian Stina School such vibrant learning communities. Welcome to Stina X, Y and Z. Dr Brad Kurschner continues his keynote presentations from our recent Glam Conference at Zapperdabilly Stina School. In the second keynote, Brad develops his theme as Stina Schools as Highlands of Coherence in the Sea of Chaos and Complexity in which we find ourselves at this challenging point in human history. Through our commitment to human values in learning art, community, nature, ritual and the seasonal cycles, Stina Schools can model coherence and become attractors that draw other elements to them, thereby helping to stabilize the wider system in society. In Brad's view, if we do the necessary inner work that disrupts the negative patterns from the outside chaos, we can start the healing process in both ourselves and the world. So a potential new story can emerge and ray out to help forge a future balance and harmony. Good morning. Wow. Yesterday. Oh, yesterday was such a beautiful day. Such a beautiful special day. For me, I really appreciated all the conversations I had with folks. I really just appreciated the resonance that I felt yesterday with everyone here. So thank you. Thank you for the warm welcome. Thank you for the attention and engagement and just thinking and intention. Yeah, it's been beautiful. So today we're going to just really continue the story. My intention is to delve a little bit deeper into some of the themes and topics that we started to explore yesterday and to continue to explore and consider really what is the role of Stina education in this time between stories. And one of the themes that came up in my conversations with people throughout the day yesterday is this notion of building bridges between Stina and other people, right? The importance of drawing on contemporary work and contemporary thinking and thinking about how other people are thinking about the world and weaving Stina into that, right? Not having it, not having us just be an island into ourselves, but an island with lots of bridges, right? So there's this metaphor of an island of coherence, which I wanted to draw on today. And it actually relates to the theme of complexity because it's from a well known chemist and physicist Ilya Prigotian who said that when a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order. So that notion of islands of coherence is from thinking about complex systems and how when things are very chaotic and there's a lot of this equilibrium, if just one place creates coherence, that becomes an attractor for the rest of the system and other parts of the system tune into that and model that and then find their own coherence, right? So just from an island of coherence establishing its own conscious coherence and sense of community and in the human sense, we as Stina schools can hopefully become islands of coherence and islands of sanity. So that's a metaphor I want to build on, but I think it's really important to extend that in terms of it has to have bridges, right? We have to be connected to things outside of the Stina movement as well. So how do we create these islands of coherence and sanity, right? And building our themes from yesterday, we do so by being attractors for consciousness and community, right? By enacting the union of thinking, feeling and willing, by balancing the hemisphere, so having an environment where human beings are growing up in a way where they're not being pulled totally into a left hemisphere dominant orientation to the world. By embedding people in community, nature, art, ritual, seasonal cycles, right? These are the things that we have to really appreciate the significance of the simple things that we do, the way that we tune into nature and the seasons as part of what keeps us balanced and keeps us feeling like we have a sense of coherent community. And modeling health and integration in the context of a new story that is related to the evolution of humanity and technology. So how are we creating coherence in terms of our story as well as an important part of what I think we can offer the world? So leadership in this domain, this is what we want to try to focus on a little bit more today as what does leadership look like in this context? Well, first of all, leadership means understanding problems well enough to stop perpetuating them, right? So much of the problems of the world are just coming from the unconscious perpetuation of problems because we don't have enough clarity about what the problems are. So we have to actually come to greater clarity for ourselves so that we can stop doing the things that everyone else is doing that's unconsciously causing so much of the suffering in the world today. And then also inspiring others to see the opportunity in the complexity that surrounds us and doing the inner work, doing the inner work to disrupt the patterns in ourself, right? However, we've been affected by the environment. We have to go inside and actually come to healing and clarity and coherence in ourselves before we can build it in our community before that can extend outward. So part of what I want to explore a little bit more in detail today, yesterday we talked big picture, talked about evolution. And one thing we didn't actually grapple with that specifically is the shorter time scale of what's really just happened in the past 15 to 20 years in terms of technology and the impact that that's having on our children. So I want us to reckon with that a little bit today because I think it's helpful and important to see the impact that technology is having on ourselves and our children, both the intensity with which that's happened just in the past 15, 20 years, but then also in the context of this bigger story. So we talked a little bit about this evolution from pre-modern, modern and postmodern and what that means culturally in part is sort of we have all the layers of problems of those different epochs all layered on top of each other. So we have the sort of tribalism of the pre-modern world. We have the materialism of the modern world and we have the relativism of the postmodern world, all layered on top of each other. So we have to heal all of these different layers of our collective psyche somehow to get to a place where those things are fundamentally transformed. And we're trying to do that in an environment where the way that we are, the way that our biology is basically established in relationship to the planet is being thrown off by new technologies that we've introduced to our environments. And one thing that we have to understand about humanity is this notion of neotism, right? So this idea that one thing that's really special about human beings as we also tune into what makes humans human, what is special and unique about humans. One thing that actually makes this special is we have a very long period of time when we are vulnerable and fragile and it takes like childhood is long, right? It takes a long time for human beings to develop most animals within weeks or days they're ready to go, right? And they're already enacting adult like behaviors in a very short amount of time. We have a very long period of sensitivity and vulnerability as human beings, which is one of the things we need to keep in mind as a fundamental reason why we need to protect our children. We need to protect our children from radical changes in the environment because they aren't ready to start acting like adults for a very long time. That's really unusual in terms of what's the case in nature. So we have this long period of neotany or development and we have a really uneven evolution of biological development, cultural development and technological development, right? So biological development goes really slowly, but we're changing very slowly. Humans today are still pretty similar biologically to humans a long time ago. Cultural evolution happens much faster than biological evolution, right? So there's over time, there's become a disconnect between culture and biology because culture is accelerating and a faster rate than biology is. And technology is going even faster than culture now. So you're short of it. It's three different rates of change where technology is changing faster than culture. It's just changing faster than biology and our biology is still the same as it was basically 100,000 years ago. So that's just another frame to help us understand sort of the situation that we're in. I think it was Ed Riddell Wilson who made a famous quote a little while ago. He said, "The problem is we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and God-like technology, right?" And it's a brilliant way to capture those really three different timescales that were caught in. And there's really no simple way to change that. And the only way to change it is through our consciousness and our awareness of it. So how do we adapt and respond accordingly? So with that in mind, where we are still emotionally biologically the same as we have been a long time, our culture is struggling to keep up with the evolution of technology. And now, since the emergence of smartphones, especially our children are growing up in a radically different world. So I'm hoping people are familiar with books like The Anxious Generation, Bajanathan Height, and also The Digital Delusion by Horvath is a really important recent book which I think goes even deeper than Height in terms of really explaining the world. the really overwhelmingly negative impact of digital technology on education. And we have to think about, again, what it means to be human, what it means to grow up in a healthy way, where why are to connect and attune to each other, right? Where why are to synchronize to a group, just like we were 100,000 years ago. And phones and the introduction of digital media is interfering with just the very natural necessary bonds between children and their parents and between people. We've gone from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood. And this blocks normal human development of sleep, play, and socializing. Jonathan Height calls him experienced blockers. You're actually blocking human experience every moment that you're engaged with a phone. So social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity, sleep patterns, all of these things have radically changed for children, just really in the span of five years. If you look at from 2010 to 2015, an incredibly short amount of time, the way that millions of children are actually experiencing life, radically and fundamentally changed. And it's not a coincidence that the mental illness epidemic began around 2012. So if you look at the data that Jonathan Height presents, it's right in that window between 2010 and 2015. That mental health among youth really started to collapse and get much, much worse. Major depression increased around 150% in boys and girls. And it had already doubled prior to COVID. So some people like to blame COVID for everything, but actually the mental health crisis started well before COVID. So when you think about the meaning crisis that we talked about yesterday, in terms of, we've sort of lost our sense of place in the world. We've lost our sense of what's our collective story. And now we have an attention crisis, which is the introduction of digital technology, hacking our attention and fundamentally disrupting how we attune to each other. That those two things together, I think are a good way to explain what is the mental health crisis. And now as I talked about a little bit in my AI workshop, we also have what could be called an attachment crisis. And I'll see if I can talk a little bit more about that. So again, just evolutionary framework, biology catching up to culture and technology, radical change in our environment. There's no way that that's not going to disrupt what it means to be a human being and how children are experiencing the world. And this is just something that we as adults have to come to terms with and be clear about. There's a recent book out by Arthur Brooks called The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, from which I'll just share some relevant data in quotes. So according to a general social survey, the percentage of American adults of all ages are not too happy about their lives, more than doubled from 2000 to 2024. The percentage of American adolescence with symptoms of major depression nearly tripled from 2005 to 2019. So again, just evidence that the rupture that we're experiencing is really quite severe. And for many people, in this book, they talked to lots of young people and they try to get their experience of life from their own words. And what you get hearing from the young people that he interviews is that for many people, life is feeling unreal, right? It's full of false rewards, empty accomplishments, therapeutic talk, fake experiences, work and relationships for many people feel meaningless, people don't know what to do with their lives. And a theme that comes out of this book is that it's actually worse for people who have privilege. So we talk a lot about equity and equality, social economic inequality. These things are important. Obviously, everyone's quality of life to be better. But there are psychological, cultural problems that are actually exacerbated in the most elite and most privileged social economic sectors of the world. And that's something that in independent schools and standard schools, we're seeing in our families. We're actually seeing the mental health crisis showing up in private and independent schools all across the world in a really sort of intense way. So it comes down to just accepting this, acknowledging this, and then feeling into what do people need? What do our young people need to find meaning? Again, to find a meaningful story again. Meaning is a question that must be lived. It can't be solved with a Google search or simulated by artificial intelligence. It requires deep contemplation and a commitment to living a real life full of unsolvable secrets and puzzling riddles. And what we're dealing with right now is a world in which we've moved from playing sports outside with friends to computer gaming, from reading newspapers, to scrolling clickbait, from watching full stories on film to scanning reels, from writing letters to cranking out disappearing short texts, from sweetly suffering through romantic courtship to swiping right. We've implemented efficient substitutes for the experiences we crave, but they don't deliver a sense of life's meaning. That's a quote from Arthur Brooks. So in our increasingly complicated technology dominated an LSE distracting world, another thing that Brooks argues is that we're being shoved to the left side of our brain. So Brooks actually also makes this connection between how this hyper tech environment is actually disorienting us to the point where it's actually fundamentally changing the way that we're utilizing our brains to experience the world. And many young people today even say things like, I feel like I'm living in a simulation. They're so trapped in the left brain representational abstract experience of life that life doesn't even feel real to them sometimes. Another frame for understanding this crisis that we're facing is the phrase social atrophy. So it's not just a tech crisis, it's not just a brain crisis, it's also a relationship crisis. In America, men have reduced their hours of face-to-face socializing by 30%. Unmarried people by 35% and teenagers have decreased face-to-face socializing by 45%, so almost half. The result is social atrophy, which is the shrinking of people's social brains as they increasingly withdraw from others. It's a change in someone's ability to perceive the world and act within it. And one thing they found in the studies on social atrophy is that people consistently underestimate how much they value-- how much they will value future social interactions. People don't actually know how much social interaction they need. They think they're OK. It's not just that people are feeling lonely. It's that they actually think they're OK. And they don't realize they need more social interaction because the part of themselves that would be tuned into that has actually atrophy did not even been developed. So they don't even have an accurate read of what they need themselves. So it describes-- it's not just that we have less of something that is individually or socially desirable. It's that the kind of people we are is changing, right? The kind of-- the way that people experience what they even need socially is changing. And all of this is happening in this context of this post-truth world that I tried to talk about yesterday, where children are also getting this message from parents and adults in general that is much too focused on the negative action in terms of being overwhelmed by what's happening in the world. And the sense that we are somehow responsible from the problems in the world, but not having really clear pathways of how to solve it. And I just think that's important to keep in mind, because even this juxtaposition of tech and then culture on the tech side, environment is being disrupted. Attunement and attachment is being disrupted. And even how we tune into what our needs are socially is being disrupted. And then culturally, we're being given a really negative picture, a sense that adults really don't know what's going on or what to do. And I think while the impact of smartphones and social media is undoubtedly a substantial cause to the mental health crisis, it's actually this broader phenomenon, right? The cultural predicament of materialism and relativism, which leads to this feeling of living in a post-truth world where you don't know what's true. That's actually even more fundamental, I would argue, than the technological disruption of smartphones. And it's more difficult to see and describe and respond to, which is why I'm trying to find ways for us to see it and to describe it, because we have to try to wrap our heads around it somehow. Another good and beautiful book that came out this past year that I want to talk about a little bit is called Against the Machine by Paul King's North, because it gets at some of these themes in a different way. Just to really, again, we're thinking about this rupture that's happening this time between worlds that we're living in. And he characterizes this sense of this modern machine that we're living in, and how knocking out the sacred pillars of culture leaves people experiencing a level of trauma that is very deep and mostly subconscious, but has a big impact. And that the vacuum created by the class of having a sacred order has been filled by the activity of consumer capitalism, right? But it's left people feeling sort of empty and meaningless. And he draws on people like Simone Vey, who talk about the importance of having roots. And I want us to think about that a little bit in terms of what it means to be rooted in a community. Because one of the things that Vey talked about and wrote about is that those who are uprooted are the ones who uproot others. And when we don't feel rooted, when we don't feel rooted in community, when we don't have genuine connections, to other people, to our families, to our schools, we fall into more abstract ideas of identity, right? One thing we've seen with identity politics is people really latching onto these identity categories, these sort of abstractions of like, "Oh, I'm this or I'm that." And one of the things that he's trying to help us understand is that itself is a symptom. That's a sign that you don't really have a strong sense of identity in your actual embodied relationship. People who are really rooted in communities don't have to signal to the whole world what their identity is. They're not obsessed with your identity if you're actually rooted in community, right? So the degree that we're talking about identity all the time is a sign we don't actually have a rooted sense of community. It's a pretty scary red flag. He says, "The more you talk about it, the more you have lost." And I think there's some deep truth to that. He also offers us some ways to think about some of the difficult things that we're grappling with in terms of what he calls the great unsettling, which was perpetrated by the West through modernity, through colonialism, through empire, right? And what we have to grapple with there, I think, is that when we think about the spread of the West and the spread of colonialism and the sort of dominance of the modern machine that has spanned around the globe, we're not so much talking about one group of people dominating another group of people. If we actually look at the history of Europe, you see a very small number of people in positions of power who first colonize their own people, right? And then that's spread outwards. We're really talking about a sort of mind state, a worldview, and relationships of power where the West colonized itself first with left brain dominance is how he puts it. So this notion of being left brain dominant, having this really fractured, abstracted, sort of market oriented, efficiency oriented worldview, trying to seek and maximize profit, sort of losing an embeddedness, losing a sense of rootedness. This happened first in Europe and then spread, and now it's really everywhere. So we need to, I think, not get caught in the trap of thinking about good versus bad in terms of people, but thinking just looking at what's happening to everyone. Like we're all in this together. It's happened to all of us. We've all been uprooted in one way or another. And we all have to find ways to find roots again. Simone Vays says, "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul, and it is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living shapes certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future." Another way of thinking about this, I was saying this in the drive over here, one way I think about this sort of deep human need that we have, and this deep human need that every human has, it's good to remember, every baby that is born is born indigenous to this planet, right? There is a fundamental human indigeneity that we all share. And we've all, we're all born into that, but we're not ushered into cultivating that necessarily. We've been born into technological environments and cultures that create a rupture, and a dis-a-a-distructure of that feeling of being at home in the world, that feeling of being indigenous to the planet. And we're all seeking that in some way. I think we're all seeking for that sense of roots and indigeneity and being at home in the world. And we need to sort of have an open-hearted compassion for all people, not just some people in terms of how we're all struggling with that in different ways. A quote from King's North, "This is the work we are being called to, to build new things out on the margins, not to exhaust our souls and engaging in a daily war for or against a West that has already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might one day long after us become the basis of a new culture, to go looking for truth, to light particular little fires, fires fueled by the eternal things, the great unchanging truths, and ten their sparks as best we can, to prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real, and the true." And that sense of lighting little fires, I think, dovetails well with this notion of creating islands of coherence and islands of sanity. And my sense is that the vision I'm trying to point us toward here is that Steiner's schools can be the tenders of those little fires of sacred culture. We need to be those islands, those little fires, those tenders of how do we create environments where people feel rooted, people feel at home in the world, people feel like they are as indigenous to this planet as any other human is. And I think there are many beautiful and simple ways that Steiner's schools do that. We do that through maintaining the respect for a sense of sacred hierarchy. So something we've also lost is a sense of having a legitimate vertical dimension of authority and power that's actually righteous and virtuous and good and OK. Robert Blyt talks about this in terms of this notion of the world we're living in, being a sibling society, where everyone's just like siblings. There's no vertical order anymore. We've lost the vertical plane of tradition and religion and devotion where you actually look up to people, where you have exemplars, where you have elders. And if you look at any traditional pre-modern culture then the role of elders is very, very important. And actually Steiner's schools keep that, I think. I think we actually do a beautiful job in the model and the authority of the teacher. The teacher is the elder for the children. The children are expected to respect the teacher. Having that vertical dimension is really, really important. And it's lost in many places in our culture and our society. We also honor the role of imitation in early childhood, right? That looking up to the adult, the imitation of the adult. There's something very sacred about that. We also have a connection to the cosmic calendar and the seasonal cycles. There's something sacred and hierarchical about that. And the way that we use verses from Steiner and staff study drawing on anthropology, again, it's a way of acknowledging that there's a hierarchy of being. There's a hierarchy of truth and goodness and beauty. And we all do well to try to attune to that and respect that and have a reverence for that. Everything is not just flat. A quote from Credula Frey was a woman that, at our school, I do a reading group actually with parents. And one of the books we read is called The Alchemy of Soul by Credula Frey. She says, "We do not lack information. We lack structures, social, cultural, ritual." That reminds human beings of who they are beneath productivity. We lack spaces where nervous systems can reset, where meaning is felt rather than argued, and where life is experienced as participation instead of performance. And again, I think she's pointing to what Steiner schools can be at their best. So this need for local, small-scale communities of trust is really essential right now. When we are abstracted from the real and live and into relationships into a formal systems, we've left the world of the human and entered the world of what King's North calls the machine. And trust is really the only mechanism that enables coordination without centralized control. We can only evolve culture at the speed of trust. But real human networks do have limits. There's something called Dunbar's number, which is this notion that in groups of about 150 people or less, that's kind of what, again, thinking about our evolutionary history. We're biologically evolutionary attuned to know groups of about 150 people. Beyond that, we actually just start to exceed the capacity of our hardware. Like it's hard to really know intimately more than a couple hundred people. So once we get in groups larger than that, we have to create institutions, contracts, credentials, and systems that approximate trust without really being able to share it. So in our school communities, we have to find a way, as best as possible, have real lived embodied trust and not only be interacting through proxies for trust that we find in bigger systems. Because when we're in bigger systems, we lose that shared story, and we shift more easily into modes of competition in a sense of scarcity. And in that context, that's where people start to identify with things like their job. They find meaning and productivity, and in their ability to compete in the marketplace. And they find their purpose that's grounded in the goals of the scarcity society, and how much money do you make? What's your status? How many likes are you getting on social media? Like we're looking for these ways to feed our needs. And when we're in these abstract, broad, big, sort of digitalized communities, we're finding them in really unhelpful ways. We need to get re-rooted in the real ways that we can meet those needs with the actual people that we know. So one thing I think we need to really help our children to do kind of one thing that this comes down to and points to is the sense of vocation. A vocation used to refer to one's religious calling, but the sense of a vocation that comes from the sense of having a summons or a calling. What are you called to do? Because when you take away the social media, when you take away the likes, when you take away the significance of your job for young people, we can't just leave them with a vacuum. We can't just leave them with what than what is their sense of meaning and purpose. They have to have a sense of something they're being called to, right? What's their story that's calling them forward into a meaningful future? And a big part of this work is helping people to clarify their own desires. So this is a theme that I've been working with lately in terms of how part of the disruption we're experiencing from technology and from the chaos of culture is we're losing connection with our own intuition and our own sense of clear desire of what we actually want, right? Like I mentioned with social atrophy, we don't even know how much social experience we need, right? We don't, we're not reading ourselves accurately. It's not like we all know what we want and we're just not getting it. We're so confused, we don't even know what we want anymore, especially when thinking about our children. So but if we help children be rooted and grounded in real community, helping them to slow down, helping them tune into themselves, they can find their sense of what they're being called to. But again, just when we need most to clarify our desires and purpose, our sense making and our meaning making are being degraded by these profit seeking technology systems that are actually degrading our ability to know what we want. Right, so this is a key thing to see. When our attention gets hijacked and when we, you know, the high rates of attention deficit disorder, like when we don't have a pace of life that allows us to be tuned into the natural flow of natural cycles, we're losing connection with ourselves and we're losing connection with what it is we even want. And there's a big tangent I could go on, which I won't, we talked a lot in the workshop yesterday about AI and how we've moved from hacking our attention to even going deeper than that and actually becoming attached to digital technology. People are actually getting attached to chat bots and sort of a pseudo relationship with technology. And the kinds of behavior modification that's happening in the digital space is really alarming and concerning. But the key point here is just that our relationship with technology, no matter what it is, it can never tell us what we're supposed to do. Right, only we can answer that for ourselves. And one of the reasons why we have to protect children and help them disinbed from those unhealthy relationships with technology so that they are able to discern for themselves what they really want in life, what they're called to do in life. And being tuned into the world so that they know what the world needs from them. Right, if you think about being summoned towards something or called to something, what is it that's calling you? It's the world itself. You have to be in relationship with the real world to know what it needs of you. Right, and if you're not even having a direct embodied experience of community in the world, how would you know what your community needs of you? So this is why Steiner Schools must be places a refuge and protection to enable the development of not only this planetary story, but also a perception of value. So, and McGill-Christ, who is the scholar who really talks a lot about the brain, he also talks a lot about the importance of attention and value and that the world we experience is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it. And the choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is a creative act and it's a moral act that has consequences. And it's really making this connection to attention and value and needs and desire. What are our needs, what are our desires, what do we value and what are we paying attention to? All those things are related. Another way of thinking about this is opening the eye of value. Right, so we're tuning into cultivating our attention, being rooted in community. And just as we train the eye of the senses through science, like we train our ability to understand the empirical world through science, we also have to train our eye of value through religion and philosophy and thinking. Right, we have to actually be able to cultivate the capacity to know what's valuable. This is a fundamental human skill that we have to develop and that we can't take for granted and that we've sort of lost sight of the fact that that's an important part of our work as human beings, to know and to discern what is valuable, what is good. And again, that is something we can never offload to technology. AI cannot tell us what is good and valuable. Only we can do that. Another great book is called The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford. He talks a lot about this about how we have to create the conditions for achieving a coherent self that is able to perceive value in the world. And one of the things that he points to is the important of craftsmanship and connection with the arts and music. And when you're working with your hands and when you're working with things that are very tangible in the real world, which we're very good at at Steiner Schools, you're actually cultivating your agency because you're getting real feedback from the real world. And that's actually, it's a taken for granted part of human life that's always been a part of human life is building things, making things, creating things. You're getting that very tangible feedback from the world. It's helping you understand your agency, your ability to do and to make. And having a sense of power and medicalness and you just can't ever recreate that in a simulated way. You can only do that in real and tangible ways. And we can't lose those capacities. So it's just a way for us to really appreciate the crafts that we do, the music that we make, the arts that we produce. These things are fundamental to building the human capacities that we need to survive in this world. So what is leadership in this context? That's a picture of the world we're living in. Again, another way of thinking about some of the problems that we're facing, some of what children are having to grapple with some of the things that are most important for us to be thinking about. So as administrators, how do we think about the role of leadership in this context? Well, in some sense, we need to have a vision, right? So what we're trying to cultivate here is a vision of what's happening and a vision of where we need to go, right? A visionary is someone who can transcend and include the present moment by envisioning and articulating an inspiring form of life that helps others to believe in it and usher it into being. As school leaders, we need to take up this role. We can't bypass that need. People are in need of real visionary. These people need positive visions for the future and to be appreciating the simple and good things that we're doing that are actually going to help us get where we need to go. And in order to change the culture of our schools, we can't just be proclaiming, right? What we have to do, we actually have to change the nature of the conversations that we're having. People don't just change their behaviors based on information. So I'm well aware that just giving you all this information is not going to fundamentally change your lives. You have to actually embody these things in your own communities. And we do that through the ways that we talk to each other and relate to each other. We're not computers. You can't just insert data and expect a different output. Every piece of information that we're sharing comes into an existing worldview that quietly negotiates whether or not it gets absorbed, right? So we have to be really sensitive to the worldviews of the people that we're working with. Because challenging someone's worldview is often experienced as a threat. So we have to be creating places where people can be receptive and slow down and that only takes place if it's a context of safety and connection. And when somebody really listens to us and when we really feel cared for, and when we feel that our ideas matter and that we are worth listening to, then we feel more connected to the listener. We have that sense of trust and intimacy that can only happen in a real and embodied community. We can let our defenses down a little bit. That creates the conditions for undefended self-reflection. And that's when we can really create cultural change, right? So it's about changing the conversation in the way that we have conversations as opposed to changing the language. So interesting contrast, right? In our world today, there's a lot of focus on saying the right thing, kind of thought policing, word policing, people are worried about saying the wrong thing all the time. There's a lot of repetition of cliches, this notion of thought terminating cliches, where if you just say the right phrase over and over enough times, it's like you don't have to think about it anymore. You need to stop doing that and focus on creating the conditions where people are really vulnerable and being honest with each other and listening to each other. In our school at Cambridge and Waldorf, we're experimenting with lots of different ways to try to do this, right? So we've created over the course of a few years, we were doing these things called conscious conversations. We were just open invitations about once a month to the whole parent body. We get about 15 or 20, sometimes more people to show up and just sit in a circle and just what's on people's minds, right? How are you feeling? Giving people the opportunity to just show up, share how they're feeling. Sometimes it would have a theme, sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes based on a reading, sometimes not. Just creating spaces for people who are feeling that need to connect, to have a time to connect. Another thing I do is I actually host a weekly reading group. Every Thursday morning, I meet with a group of about a dozen parents and we read. We read and we talk. We read How to Know Higher Worlds. We read Steiner's Biography by Gary Lockman. We read the book I mentioned, "Ochemy of Soul" by Kurdula Frey. We read a book called "Education in a Time Between Worlds" by Zach Stein. And we read some essays, just creating spaces for thinking, for talking open to anyone, open to any parent, creating spaces for teachers as well. We created a podcast. Every summer, we offer a selection of reading to teachers, which is ideologically diverse, like really modeling for teachers exposure to ideologically diverse perspectives. We have to be signaling in our communities that we are not overly identified with any abstract political category of people, but that we're actually pointing to a sort of transpartisan, more like just pro-human sensibility. I feel like how we communicate and the kinds of things that we're reading, the kinds of things that we're sharing with our communities really matter. And as leaders, we have to take ownership of that. Just some examples of our staff, for these we read the Identity Trap by Yasha Munk, we read The Cuddling of the American Mind by Luciano von Height, we read How to Know a Person by David Brooks. These are all great book recommendations, I think for communities, very just universal human themes of how to build community, how to think about what's happening in the world today, and just how to do the little things well that really help people to feel grounded in a sense of community. Another important point is that it's not just for teachers. Parent education is a big responsibility of schools. There's so much happening, there's so much changing, parents are overwhelmed, there's never been a harder time in the world to be a parent. Who's gonna teach the teachers and who's gonna teach the parents? And if it's not schools, I don't know who's gonna do it. So it has to be us. Like school leadership entails parent education. We have to be thinking about it in these terms of seeing the polarization problems that people are falling into, seeing the lack of rootedness that people have, and pointing people towards sources, and forms of coming together and conversations that are gonna be healing. Another thing we can think about in Steiner's schools, this is a big topic in itself, but I feel like I need to name it. It's even come up in conversation over the past day. Thinking about this evolution that we're a part of, thinking about school leadership, thinking about the fundamental needs that people have. One of the things that's also happening that we can see in Steiner's schools is just the evolution of the leadership model itself, and it's interesting for me the way I see it, if you think about sort of this move from postmodern to whatever's next, you see within Steiner's schools, there was a past of more traditional hierarchical leadership, which I would think more like traditional modern sort of set up, and then this move in 60, 70s and 80s into more of a college of teachers model, more egalitarian, more flat. That's more of a postmodern culture sensibility, and now I think we're actually in process, my sense in the United States and here and elsewhere, we are in a developmental journey to figure out what is the next form of structure that's going to meet the needs and address these tensions between hierarchy and equality, right, between centralization and decentralization, between stable values and conservative values and stability and social influence and social trends and change and evolution. These are fundamental tensions that are showing up at every school and they will, and we all have to find a way to address them as best we can in our local context. The Association for Walder Schools of North America, Auzanam, did a deep study into this actually over the last couple years, and they put out a report called Foundations of Leadership and Governance Report, and they were really trying to look at everything Steiner said about leadership and governance, basically. One thing that they found is it wasn't much, which is important in itself because one of the things that they were responding to is that actually a lot of people in Steiner schools have strong opinions about what leadership is or isn't supposed to look like as though it came straight from Steiner. And they were trying to point out, yeah, there's a lot of myths, actually, there's a lot of myths and misunderstandings about what a Steiner school leadership structure is supposed to look like. But some of the basic findings that they had was that, well, first of all, Steiner was clearly a leader, right? There was some top-down hierarchical power there that's undeniable. And he was very clear, though, in many cases, that there's no strong preference for any particular structure. You know, he even talks about democracy, republicanism, like there's different ways to make decisions, and the underlying impulse, which actually is coherent and makes sense, is that it really is about what works for the local context, and that ties into this notion of self-governance, right? Self-governance is really the fundamental principle of people finding a way to be self-governed, and that does not mean no hierarchy. It doesn't mean no leadership. It means whatever government structure works best for that school is what that school should do. But the problem is self-governance is hard, and we want somebody to tell us one, to do we want Steiner to just tell us, no, do it this way. We want somebody to say, no, the College of Teachers is the way it's supposed to be, or no, you're supposed to have the head of school. And the thing is, we don't get off that easy, right? We actually have to figure it out for ourselves. And that impulse to fit into a system and to be told what to do is itself one of the pathologies of the modern machine that we're living in. And these norms of modern institutional bureaucracy that we mostly take for granted are a part of this bigger problem of the modern world and the modern machine. And throughout the world outside of Steiner's schools, it's really prevalent that people have created models of educational value and success that are becoming more and more divorced from the experiential reality of lived people. So we as Steiner schools have to come back into focusing on the qualitative, focusing on the experiential focusing on relationships, not getting too caught up in policies and practices. And at Steiner's schools, I think we're in a really unique position here in the sense that, you know, at the foundation of our educational philosophy, our season of insight and critique that really fundamentally undermines some of the things about the modern world. And we have to really understand what those things are and really lean into that and take that as an affirmation that it's okay for us to be different than what other people are doing. Another way I like to think about this is, you know, building on this notion of the art of teaching. So the art of teaching is a really, you know, important theme in Steiner's schools. And the freedom and the autonomy of the teacher. But we have to find, I think, a parallel idea for administrators. What is the art of administration? What is the autonomy and agency and creativity of administrators? Right? How do we sort of, you know, just as the artistic teacher has to balance between being scripted and being chaotic, between being prepared, and being flexible, between being organized and being spontaneous? Right? Freedom and responsiveness. There's all these just fundamental tensions that we have to balance in our freedom in our artistry. And as administrators, we're dealing with all those same tensions. It's just a bigger context and maybe a broader goal than just a classroom or students. But I think as administrators, we should be trying to live into that. We should be trying to think about what is the art of administration? How are we being creative and how are we utilizing our agency and leadership roles? So this means we strive to articulate bold and holistic goals that capture essential aspirations of our mission and vision. It means we commit to judging individual and collective actions based not on immediate short-term outcomes that can be easily measured, but based on the ongoing qualitative feedback that we receive from different people. It means we're focused on the things that matter most, which are human relationships, and that we accept the inherently subjective and qualitative nature of determining the value and health of relationships throughout our community. You're never going to find the perfect metric or the perfect data that shows you whether your community is doing well. It's subjective, it's qualitative, it's found in conversation. We just have to accept that. We have to resist the pressure to conform to external expectations and demands in the spirit of what Steiner conveyed in the impulse for schools to be self-governed. It means we, as much as possible, avoid time-consuming tasks that do not directly contribute to improving the quality of relationships and learning. Anything that orients our time and attention toward documents and policies and not toward actual embodied experiences. We have to be vigilant with our time and attention. Just like kids are getting sucked into TikTok, we're getting sucked into spreadsheets and emails and policies. We need to be vigilant with our time and our attention. It's sacred how we spend our time, the sacred, more conversation, less email, ideally. I was going to say a little bit about Steiner education itself. Maybe we all appreciate Steiner education in itself. One thing I just want to double click on is just. There are so many simple fundamental things in Steiner education that really get at the root of some of these problems that I'm trying to talk about. And one to highlight is really just the way that early childhood education has been transformed outside of Steiner schools is heartbreaking. And more and more young people are on tech too soon. They're being forced into overly academic cognitive learning too soon. Early childhood education has become an indoctrination into a left hemisphere orientation into the world. That's one of the connections I think we need to see. This overall sensibility to be abstracted, to be divorced from your sort of holistic embodied play-based intuitive connection to your environment, the certain ways of thinking. We're pushing kids into that sooner and sooner and earlier and earlier. And we're just exacerbating the pathologies that we're seeing as kids get older. And the way that we protect childhood, the way that we keep it play-based, the way that we keep it nature-based is essential. It really is essential as we heard from our living legend yesterday. It couldn't be more true. And also the sense of just the sequence of learning in Steiner schools, how we go from a media-ceo experience to the ripening of experience. through art and then the crystallization of concepts, right? There's a sequence, there's a developmental sequence there that's important and beautiful and essential. We need to appreciate it and help people understand it. We need to help our parents understand the value of the way that we do things and how it connects to these broader issues and broader problems. The reverence, enthusiasm, and sense of guardianship that we bring. This is what Steiner called the magic remedy for education, right? These are the things that really, really matter. These are the things that actually are the medicine for the social sicknesses that we're facing. And just as Steiner's schools, I think, are clear embodiments pedagogically for what children need. My hope and I hope that our hope is that we can also be embodiments of organizational leadership in the same way. We can be networks of accountability and trust where everyone is interdependent and co-evolving, right? We can create models of how to be an institution where the adults are in relationship to each other that is also an island of sanity and coherence just as we are pedagogically for children. You see what I'm saying? Like we already are, I think, an island of sanity for how to raise children. And now we need to figure out how can we also be an island of sanity for how the adults relate to each other for how we educate parents, right? For how we host and hold meetings together. I think we're already doing a lot of this, but it's something that we can just keep living into and breathing into. So lastly, I want to just talk about our relationship as Steiner's schools to this broader world. Right? How do we go from nurturing our little community to creating a revolution? And one framework that I'll borrow is from an organization called Life itself, which is trying to sort of articulate what it would mean to have a second renaissance, right? What would it mean to have a social cultural renaissance that sort of spreads outward? And they use this frame of, you know, this sort of like this sort of fractal of scope and scale of different forms of community, which they call pocket, Sangha, and a broader movement. Right? So the initial phase of a conscious cultural transition involves cultivating networks of people and initiatives in which new paradigmatic thinking, being and acting, can flourish. Paradigm shifts don't occur in whole big populations at once, right? It just can't happen that way. Not everyone's not just going to wake up and agree with what we're feeling right now and just change. It's not going to happen that way. New structures of thought have to first emerge in little pockets, right? And each Steiner's school can be like a little pocket, a small dense group of people engaging in conscious culture making and experimenting with new with new or renewed ways of being thinking and acting together. And these islands of coherence are still surrounded by mainstream culture, right? We're going to be engulfed in the craziness and the chaos of the technological world that we're living in. But we can be a source of leadership for others. And we can pioneer new cultural models while engaging in advocacy to try to broaden participation. And in Buddhism, the word Sangha, which is a polyward refers to a community of practice. And in this frame, we're using Sangha to think about that broader network, right? So if each school is a pocket, the Sangha would be the regional Steiner's school, right? So we are a Sangha. Your school is a pocket. This is already a Sangha here. This is a community of practice and we can support each other. The Sangha supports the pockets. And as different pockets and communities become established and aware of one another, they develop a sense of collective identity, right? So we need a shared identity. We need a shared story to connect to a bigger movement, which becomes potentially the whole Steiner Waldorf movement, right? So you have each school as a pocket, regional networks like this, which are a Sangha. And then we already have a global Steiner Waldorf movement, which is already in process. It is already in a process of becoming. And as it grows and gains invisibility and participation and awareness, the hope I guess is that that can choke out into the mainstream as we make our signal clear and louder, right? It's a part of our work here that we're endeavoring toward is to clarify our signal. Like Andrew talked about having a really clear and coherent sort of picture of like how are we talking about the value proposition of what Steiner education is and then cultivating that work together and letting it spread outward. But as bio-accomalofy reminds us, the times are urgent, so let us slow down, right? We really have to focus on our local communities. We have to focus on building the culture foundations at our own schools and developing leadership through clear and compelling stories and practices. So in some, you know, big picture framework, we're thinking about this very big, big, big, big context that we're a part of. I think we have to disabuse ourselves of the idea that things might just settle down after a while, you know, like maybe the world's just a little crazy at the moment, you know, it's going to be all right. Things will get back to normal. So no, no, no, I don't think that's going to happen. Right? Well, this is bigger than that. It's bigger and more transformative than that, what's happening right now. We are in a very transformational time. We can't go back. It's not going to get simple again. We can't put the genie back in the bottle. We can't put AI back in wherever the hell came from. We have to keep going forward, right? We just have to do it. And we have to protect and nurture our human capacities to navigate this transition. We're in a transition. We're coming face to face with the degradation of the very things that make us human, right? Our ability to pay attention, our ability to form healthy attachment with other people, our ability to protect the long and extended childhood that we've been blessed with, right? These are the things that actually make us human. The capacity for shared attention is actually a quintessentially human thing. If there's studies of humans versus even like chimps and apes and other primates, it's actually a key difference is our ability to pay attention to something together and therefore learn together. And that is actually the engine of cultural evolution is shared attention. We have to be paying attention to the same thing and tuning into each other in relation to trust in order to grow and evolve. That's what allowed humanity to get as far as we've come already. Our hearts and minds evolve to attune to the needs of a family and a tribe not to hundreds or thousands of individuals reaching out to us from around the world, not to the image saturated exposure of overwhelming planetary complexity. We're exposed to suffering at scales that our nervous systems were just not designed to hold. So how do we keep our hearts open in this context, right? How do we feel and respond to the world and the needs of the world without burning out or shutting down? It's a genuinely new challenge. Our ancestors did not have to deal with this. But the developmental pressures of this time between worlds is actually enabling, I think, an evolution of love and relationship. So the capacity for love and relationship has to evolve in accordance with the demands that our environments are placing on us. The appropriate response is not to close our hearts or to burn ourselves out. It's to channel the grief and the intention toward the appropriate context and container, which is our local community, our pocket, our sangha, our school, our movement. The most precious thing we have to offer is the gift of resonance and attunement to the people in our communities who can actually feel it, right? It's literally the most we can do. So it's what we should be focused on. Shared experiences built on shared values and shared stories, helping each other meet our most basic needs. We can then share that health outward in concentric circles. So maybe I'll learn to attune to each other, maybe find resonance in community with each other, maybe tell the story that needs to be told, a story that includes everyone and everything. Maybe inspire each other to grow the Steiner School movement around the world. And maybe appreciate the value and the goodness of our shared desires and endeavors and service of humanity and the planet. Thank you. Find out more about Steiner Education. Visit our website, SteinerEducation.edu.au. Here, you'll learn about every Steiner School in Australia and their exciting work in delivering the Australian Steiner curriculum framework. If you're a teacher, you'll learn about Steiner teacher training pathways and about finding a position in an Australian Steiner School. If you're a parent, there may be a Steiner School near you for your child. Thank you for listening. This is a piccolo podcast production.