In 2024, We Must Shift to the Right

It's not what you're thinking -- and that's the problem . . .

What are the most valuable elements of a meaningful education in 2024 (& beyond) -- the things that might actually prepare young people for their future, as opposed to our past?

I’m thinking about that question a lot as 2024 gets underway -- a year that’s sure to be rife with election-year innuendoes and increasingly astounding (and human-like) technologies. And although it’s safe to say that questions of digital or educational innovation will not exactly be headline-grabbers in the coming months, the nexus between the two will surely determine how well (or poorly) we reimagine education for a changing world.

Consider this: the world’s fastest supercomputers can now perform more than an exaflop’s worth of calculations (yes, I said exaflop: it’s a 1 followed by 18 zeros). An AI-generated voice of Taylor Swift just convinced thousands of people to purchase Le Creuset cookware. And ever since Open AI first released a free web app called ChatGPT a little over a year ago, anyone with an Internet connection can easily access one of the most powerful neural networks ever built -- ushering in a new chapter of human history, and sparking more questions than answers about what our modern relationship to knowledge must be. 

As the MIT Technology Review put it, “2023’s legacy is clear: billions of us have looked artificial intelligence in the face. Now we need to figure out exactly what’s looking back.” 

Therein lies the opportunity, for schools and educators everywhere. And based on two recent books I’ve read -- one that’s about education, and one that isn’t -- whether we take advantage of it may hinge on our ability to bridge a different left-right split than the one you’re thinking of. 

The first is called The Future of Smart, by Ulcca Joshi Hansen, a self-described “third culture kid” with deep expertise in neuroscience and human development. According to Hansen, the seeds of our modern worldview were first sown almost five hundred years ago, when, as she puts it, “the foundational idea of an organic, living and spiritual universe (a worldview universally shared by indigenous cultures across the globe) was displaced in Europe by the vision of the world as a machine, a metaphor that has influenced the western world and its socio-political and economic systems ever since.”

It was the Scientific Revolution, a short period of time during which the legacy of scholars like Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton profoundly altered our collective sense of the world -- and our place in it. And although Hansen acknowledges the many advancements that came from the discoveries of that period, she suggests “something just as important was lost” -- our ability to see ourselves as part of the world, rather than apart from it.

For Hansen, it is more than coincidental that this split parallels our bi-hemispheric brain, each side of which invites us to see and interact with the world in different ways. “In more concrete terms,” she explains, “the left hemisphere pulls things out of context to identify features and give them names, while the right tends to see things in context, to experience connections between things as much as the things themselves. The left tends to make things abstract while the right makes things vivid and concrete. The left seeks to know what to do, what things mean, while the right is attuned to how things feel, how they simply are.” 

For anyone that’s spent time in a school over the last two centuries, it’s clear which hemisphere has shaped the way those schools have been designed. “By its very nature,” Hansen explains, “the left hemisphere’s ‘way of being’ is more culturally contagious than the right hemisphere’s. The left wants to turn the dynamic and complex into the simplified and systematized; it tends to bypass what is unique and unknown, searching for whatever can be standardized and described.” 

Consequently, Western culture has thrived for generations “by emphasizing the individual over the collective; objectivity over felt experience; and dominance over symbiosis. The energy of that shift propelled the industrial revolution, colonization and the establishment of what would become the United States, but much was lost in the process, including indigenous and collective ways of being and knowing.”

In recent years, the extent of this loss has become more widely understood, whether it’s the rising rates of teen depression and anxiety, the looming implications of our impact on the climate, or the growing popularity of previously obscure books like Braiding Sweetgrass or The Body Keeps the Score. But for Hansen, this is where a future path starts to become clear. “Just as we chose to define learning in left-hemispheric terms when mass/factory schooling began in the 18th century,” she contends, “we can now choose to reconceive it” by prioritizing an approach that is less about fixed bodies of knowledge and more about adaptability and “preparation for an uncertain future, one in which artificial intelligence will be increasingly capable of replicating the aspects of human cognition and capacity that are left-hemispheric in nature.”

Which leads to the second book, God, Human, Animal, Machine, in which essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn seeks to understand how our ever-deeper search for the God in the machine has reshaped our understanding of what it means to be human -- or, as the MIT Review put it, required us to figure out exactly what’s looking back.

“As computers increasingly come to take on the qualities we once understood as distinctly human,” she writes, “we keep moving the bar to maintain our sense of distinction.” At the same time, however, “the metaphors of our time are all, for the most part, technological. Today artificial intelligence and information technologies have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers: the mind’s relationship to the body, the question of free will, the possibility of immortality. All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.” 

This has sparked an identity crisis of sorts for homo sapiens -- one in which we instinctively feel the gap between our inner longings and our outer priorities. And O’Gieblyn identifies the same source of this malady: Descartes and his ilk, whose work led to the overturning of a more enchanted cosmology “we must now restore and recenter.“

But how?

O’Gieblyn wonders if the black mirror itself might provide an unlikely way out. “Meaning is an implicitly human category that cannot be reduced to quantification,” she says. Meaning is what drives the engine of our right hemispheres. And meaning will always reside more fully in the physical, relational world -- the one our ancestors rightly understood us to be an inextricable part of.

“It seems only right,” she adds, “that technology should restore to us the enchanted world that technology itself destroyed,” by leading us to re-engage with the natural world we have been steadily destroying, and doubling down on our essential humanness.

Perhaps, as she puts it, the only way out is through.

In reality, though, what does that mean for us in 2024 -- whether we’re a parent struggling to manage our children’s screen time, an educator struggling with stultifying state standards (and roomfuls of bored and/or traumatized kids), or a solitary individual struggling to resist the endless dopamine-inducing hits of our algorithmically determined online content? 

The simple answer is that we must shift to the right — by reconnecting to the world and finding ways to live and learn together that are less empty, and more meaning-full.

But the longer answer is that I’ll spend the coming year using this space to highlight examples of this idea in practice: in schools, in organizations, and in our common public world. 

“This is a unique moment in America,” Hansen writes. “We are far more aware now of what happens when a mechanistic, left-hemispheric view of the world becomes dominant. Old ideas are breaking apart all around us now, leaving a vast uncertainty that will either paralyze or catalyze us. The choices we make now will have an impact on the future of the climate, our economy, our criminal justice system, the weaponization of race in America, and our definitions of human well-being. And education sits at the heart of it all.”