After several years in gestation, and with the assistance of Elaine Anderson and Richard Bustin, I have distilled my ideas of how teachers may offer students ‘grounds for hope’ for their future and that of the world into an article for the Spring 2024 issue of Teaching Geography journal.
I have been inspired by many people, among them the psychologist Maria Ojala, who argues that fostering ‘constructive hope’ can enhance students’ engagement with issues of sustainable development, and David Hicks, who has written much on the topic of hopeful geography over the past couple of decades.
I take Hicks’ work further by drawing more heavily on global scale examples of ‘social progress’ to improve students’ aware of ‘big picture’ changes. I foreground Max Roser’s ‘three truths’ argument: the world is awful, the world is much better, and the world can be much better (see below):
The article also features resources which can help teachers to keep their understanding of global social trends up to date, including Gapminder, Our World in Data, and Pixels of Progress and in doing so it recognises the legacy of inspirational public health professor Hans Rosling.
A number of teaching resources which could be used by teachers wanting to engage with hopeful geography are featured in the article and as downloads; I have trialled all of them in schools (one example of a student’s future timeline is given as an illustration).
I give the threefold concept of hopeful geography, which can be taken further as the foundations of a hopeful education. I have written about this elsewhere in this blog, although my ideas evolve over time. I advocate for a curriculum which enables our students to do three things:
Evaluate progress
Believe in humanity
Create a sustainable future
Any approach to education should be open to criticism, and hopeful geography is no exception. I acknowledge several concerns, most notably the accusation that it could lead to complacency, and I try to address each one.
As the article went to press, Hannah Ritchie’s book ‘Not the End of the World’ was published, and whilst it too is not exempt from critique, the guiding message of that book chimes with mine: it is helpful to open the possibility to our students that they might be “the first generation to build a sustainable planet” – and as geographers, there is no better opportunity than now to inform and inspire this generation.
My article in the February 2024 edition of Geography Review outlines culture-led regeneration, assesses its impacts, and evaluates the need for regeneration in Bradford. It also outlines plans for Bradford’s year as the UK City of Culture in 2025. I’m proud that the editorial team made it the cover story (see above).
In this article, I differentiate between regeneration structures (the long term conditions necessary for areas to thrive, such as physical and social infrastructure, and policies such as taxation and immigration) and regeneration strategies (which tend to focus on one area for a time-limited period). The UK City of Culture scheme falls into the latter strategy. Culture-led regeneration is an increasingly popular strategy: it refers to attempts to use arts, music, literature, and often sport too, to attract people and investment to an area.
The success of Liverpool’s year as the European Capital of Culture in 2008 encouraged the UK government to launch its own City of Culture competition, the winners of which are shown below:
Year
City
2013
Derry-Londonderry
2017
Kingston-upon-Hull
2021
Coventry
2025
Bradford
Winners of the UK City of Culture Competition
The UK provides cities (or regions) with funding to prepare a bid, and winners receive several million pounds to make their plans into a reality (Bradford will receive at least £3 million).
Plans for Bradford include making the most of the revitalised City Square, Bradford Live arena, the Alhambra and St George’s Hall, and many more venues across the borough. Themes will include ‘City of the World’, ‘Coming of Age’, ‘STEAM powered’ and ‘Welcome Home Sexy!’ – the latter refers to grafitto which visitors to the city could see when they arrived at Bradford Interchange train station (see above).
Critiques of the culture-led regeneration include discussions of the ethics and efficacy of spending money on cultural offerings when social needs may be more acute, and concerns that the laudable aims of culture-led regeneration may have been taken advantage of by big business. Oli Mould’s critique is featured in the article.
Mural reading “Hope Reveals the World” on Newcomen Street, London SE1 (source)
12 brief reviews of books about hope
You will surely have experienced moments where a literary evangelist has brandished a book in your face and said “You must read this!”
Whilst not all will share my fascination with whether or not a hopeful worldview is justified, I remain ever the optimist, hence this online brandishing of not one, not two, but a whole armful of books.
The occasion for this post is that I have been working with my school librarian, Alison Park, to assemble a book display around the topic. The intended audience is children from the ages of about nine to eighteen (and their teachers!), which explains why the reviews are pithy, enthusiastic and broadly positive (although I have made some edits for this post). Deeper critiques relating to my teaching and research on the topic are deserved, but this is not the place for them!
1. ‘Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World – and Why Things are Better than you Think’ by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund (Hodder and Stoughton, 2018)
Read this to kick-start your hopeful journey! Most people systematically underestimate the advances that humans have made in recent decades, and this book (and accompanying web resources) argues that such ignorance means that we do not believe that we can change the world. It is also a personal account of Rosling’s career in medicine and public health, and his anecdotes illustrate the various advances that humankind has made in his lifetime, so if you are interested in a career in medicine, then this is well worth a read. Whilst it does acknowledge the very real threat of climate change, it underplays it, and it also fails to communicate the persistence and scale of the extreme economic inequalities in the world. Nevertheless, it is the one book of all the ones covered here which I recommend the most highly.
2. ‘Hope in the Dark – Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities’ by Rebecca Solnit (Canongate, 2016)
Do you think that taking action is futile? Think again! Read this to be get roused to fight for social justice. Solnit attacks defeatism and draws upon several successes which you may or may not have heard of, from racial to gender rights and plenty of other battles. Rich in anecdotes but thin on statistics, Solnit gets the tone just right to give your levels of hope a boost!
3. ‘Good News: Why the World is Not as Bad as You Think’ by Rashmi Sirdeshpande (Wren and Rook, 2021)
Written in an informal, jaunty style, this is great for anyone from Years 5 to 13 – and beyond! Learn about why we should balance the bad news we see in the headlines with a huge range of good news stories from around the planet. It features not only facts and figures but also individual stories to inspire you to approach the world with hope. I learned a lot about the wide range of people and organisations who making a difference across the world to create a brighter future for us all.
4. ‘Enlightenment Now’ by Steven Pinker (Penguin, 2018)
In an era of uncertainty and with many crises facing humanity and the world, Pinker asks us to look at the improvements to our lives that have taken place in recent decades, which have been poorly appreciated and therefore poorly valued. He argues for the somewhat unfashionable concepts of ‘progress’, ‘reason’ and ‘enlightenment’, and he seeks to avoid the despair engendered by voices on the extreme right and left wings who argue that society is declining. Whilst his tone might grate, and his stance on inequality and environmental damage deserve a deeper critique, this is a very engaging and well-researched book.
5. ‘The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind’ by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer (Young Readers’ version from Puffin, 2019)
Sometimes, facts and figures can wash over us – we struggle to get a hold of big trends which are improving the lives of so many people around the world, such as the spread of vaccinations, reductions in infant deaths, and the vast reach of electricity throughout the world. At these times, human stories really hit home, and here is one of them. Also a hit movie, this is the true story of a Malawian boy who not only used his ingenuity to supply wind power to his household, but also to his village. A ‘younger reader’ version of this book is also available.
6. ’39 Ways to Save the Planet’ by Tom Heap (Penguin, 2021)
There is no ‘silver bullet’ which will fix the world’s ills, but if we weave together many programmes, initiatives and inventions, we can secure a sustainable and prosperous future for people and the planet. Written around the time of the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, this book summarises 39 ways in which we can solve the climate, ecological, and other crises facing the world. The book follows a BBC Radio 4 series of 15-minute podcasts, each one covering one of the ’39 ways’, which you can get from your podcast provider. The Royal Geographical Society have also made an accompanying set of educational resources for schools. It steers clear of total technological solutionism by including some more political and social approaches to a brighter – and greener – tomorrow. Read it – or listen to it – and be awed.
7. ‘There is No Planet B’ by Mike Berners-Lee (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
This is written in a very clear and understandable fashion, and it is really useful for those who recognise the necessity of active hope over passive hope and complacent optimism. Unlike many in this selection of books, most space is taken up by outlining the main environmental challenges that the world faces, but it then goes on to give some clear actions which we could all – individuals, companies and governments – could take. I dare you to read it and not be emboldened to take action.
8. ‘Not the End of the World’ by Hannah Ritchie (Penguin, 2024)
I am writing this in advance of its publication, so I hope not to be disappointed. I base my judgement on Ritchie’s output to date, whether it is in Our World in Data, her email newsletter, or her TED talk. The book is set to be one of the most hopeful publications of 2024. Ritchie is a data scientist at Oxford University who writes widely on issues of social and environmental matters. She is still in her twenties, and she identifies with many other young people in that she has experienced anxiety about the future of the world. She now counters this with a more hopeful worldview, built around a richly evidenced argument that we have already been making strides towards a more sustainable future (e.g. with regard to shrinking carbon footprints, increasing life expectancies and rocketing numbers of EVs). She says that hers is not the last generation on earth, but rather it could – and must – be the first generation to live truly sustainably.
9. ‘What We Owe the Future’ by William MacAskill (OneWorld, 2022)
This is the toughest read of this selection of books – the audiobook version (or this book review in The Conversation) might be a great ‘first time through’, before you pick up a printed copy – but it is also the most profound. When we think about the future we often think about the next generation, or perhaps two. But MacAskill says this is like a child preoccupied by the next sugar rush, when they have many years ahead of them. If, as seems likely, humanity survives, and even thrives, in the coming crucial decades in terms of overcoming the climate and ecological crises, then we could have thousands of generations ahead of us. MacAskill argues that we need to ensure that humanity needs to agree upon the best possible rules of morality and behaviour before AI ‘locks in’ such rules, possibly forever.
10. ‘Educating for Hope in Troubled Times’ by David Hicks (IoE Press, 2014)
You form so much of your worldview at school. This book looks at how you and your teachers can introduce a ‘futures dimension’ into your learning. The future is not set in stone – your generation will shape it – so we should always learn with the future in mind. Useful for those thinking of entering teaching, careers in sustainability, and those who are not afraid to talk to their teachers about the future! If I was to level one criticism at it (aside from it now being almost ten years out of date, and it shows, with references to ‘peak oil’ and the like), it is that, contrary to its title, it sometimes defaults to a pessimistic view of the future, and that it doesn’t pay enough attention to human ingenuity, scientific research, and the pace of change.
11. ‘Humankind: A Hopeful History’ by Rutger Bregman (Bloomsbury, 2020)
Rutger Bregman is a Dutch writer and historian, who is perhaps best known for pointing out the ‘Elephant in the Room’ at the World Economic Forum in 2019: that if the global 0.1% stopped avoiding tax then we may be able to take a bite out of global wealth inequality. He also supports radical social proposals like a Universal Basic Income. In Humankind, he revisits some of the commonly-held assumptions about how we behave, showing that in times of crisis, rather than reverting to a ‘Lord of the Flies’ state of selfishness and bullying, almost all of us look out for our fellow humans. Moreover, thinking the worst of others affects our politics and economy too: if we assume that most people are selfish and individualistic, then that can make us cynical and reduces our desire to work collectively for the common good. As such, this book is about realistic hope rather than about idealistic hope.
12. ‘The Glass Half-Empty – Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century’ by Rodrigo Aguilera (Repeater, 2020)
Aguilera adopts a critical stance towards notions of ‘progress’. He looks at the messages of Hans Rosling, Steven Pinker, and the like, and decides that they gloss over persistent inequalities, climate change, and the future of work. Worse still, he thinks that they foster complacency, so we are satisfied with the status quo (the way we live today) and feel less likely to take action to secure a sustainable future. What do you reckon? Read it and decide!
Over to you
I welcome feedback on these books (and even the reviews). Moreover, I would like to find out more about the books which have made you think about the ‘scope for hope’ (from either a boosterish or a more critical standpoint).
“The session was outstanding and incredibly thought-provoking. … I would definitely invite David back to deliver more sessions; he has a calm and inspiring delivery that makes you ‘hang on his every word’.” Mike Smith, Curriculum Director of Geography, Meridian Trust
Looking for inspiring CPD for your teachers? Or hopeful and hands-on sessions for your students?
Read on to find more about how I have worked with schools and trusts and how I might work with you.
I run sessions for students and teachers, highlighting how people have come together to overcome global challenges, and how your students might be emboldened to play their part in doing so in the future.
Testimonials
“A uniquely informative and thought-provoking initiative … A must for any school wanting to empower young people.” Houry Stewart, Assistant Principal, Fulneck School
“Unique and engaging… well-paced and interactive” Ross McOwen, Head of Year 13, Bradford Grammar School
“Hopeful Education provided us with some really eye-opening and thought-provoking Grounds for Hope sessions. The students were fully engaged and ready to take action after these very hopeful sessions.” Lisa Lott, English Teacher and Sustainability Co-ordinator, Hathershaw College, Oldham
“An excellent CPD session… a blend of theory and practical strategies on the art of being more hopeful… The feedback from all staff was highly positive.” Richard Hart, Assistant Principal (Research & Development), Dixons Academies Trust
What is ‘hopeful education’?
Hopeful education first involves listening to students’ hopes and fears for the future of the world.
It then encourages them to evaluate where humanity has come from, to celebrate its achievements (e.g. protection of rights, increases in nutrition and life expectancy, reductions in infant mortality rates, deaths from war and hazards), and to believe in humanity’s potential to solve current challenges.
Finally, it encourages students to play their part in creating a sustainable future for people and the planet.
‘Grounds for Hope’ talks and sessions are tailored to each audience. They can last from assemblies to a full day session, and they can be delivered to students from across the secondary school age range. Prior to sessions, I issue a simple Microsoft Forms survey to participants where I gauge their hopes, fears, and awareness of global trends.
In a typical half-day session, I voice and recognise the students’ concerns from the survey, then attempt to contextualise them in the ‘big picture’ of global patterns and long-term trends. I also look at how psychology, the media, and education all play a role in influencing young people’s worldviews. I highlight past successes in overcoming challenges, such as smallpox and polio, malnutrition, extreme poverty, acid rain, and several types of discrimination.
Example of student future timeline, Hathershaw College, April 2023 (Lisa Lott)
I accentuate the role played by a range of stakeholders in the way these have been overcome (such as the UN, scientists, and pressure groups), and, with the use of hands-on techniques such as group-created future timelines (see above for an example) and ‘future headline’ writing, students are encouraged to play their part in envisioning and creating a better future for people and the planet. I sometimes work with other teachers to deliver these sessions.
What about my CPD sessions to teachers?
I also deliver CPD sessions to teachers (whole-school and geography-only), to investigate the issues of worldview formation and to discuss the role of education in fostering ‘hopefulness’.
These have been between 30 minutes and two hours, and have been in-person and online. Most value is gained by in-person sessions of at least an hour’s duration.
What is my conception of hope?
In these endeavours, I emphasise that hope is active, and that it can be the tough option compared to despair on one hand and optimism on the other. I also take care to acknowledge the seriousness of the local, regional, and global challenges facing our young people and the world they will inherit. Nevertheless, following Rebecca Solnit’s lead, I seek to highlight ‘Hope in the Dark’ and believes that there are several positive global trends which should indeed give our young people ‘grounds for hope’.
What is my background?
I teach Geography and in my twenty years in the profession, I have held roles as Head of Department, Head of Faculty, and Head of Outdoor Education, as well as Sixth Form and Teaching & Learning positions.
Geographical Association Annual Conference and Exhibition, Sheffield Hallam University, April 2023 (Shaun Flannery)
I have written on ‘hopeful education’ and ‘hopeful geography’ for the TES, Impact, Geography Review, Teaching Geography, and on these and other themes in the Yorkshire Post and on alcock.blog. I run ‘Grounds for Hope’ days at secondary schools, and I present and train teachers on these themes via CPD sessions and materials commissioned by the Geographical Association.
I am undertaking PhD research at the IoE on the themes of progress and the future in geography education, I assist in the delivery of the PGCE Geography course at Huddersfield University, and I engage with academic developments in the field of curriculum, pedagogy, and futures education.
Do you want to find out more?
Please contact me: alcock_david@hotmail.com
Follow me on X/Twitter: @DavidAlcock1 / @HopefulEd
Please find below the full text of testimonials received for both Grounds for Hope sessions and CPD sessions for teachers.
Grounds for Hope sessions
“A uniquely informative and thought-provoking initiative that helps young people recognise the hidden web of connection we have with nature’s systems and encourages them to think about the impact their choices can have on the future of humanity. A must for any school wanting to empower young people.”
Houry Stewart, Assistant Principal, Fulneck School, Leeds, October 2021
“For the past three years, David has led unique and engaging Hopeful Education enrichment and Personal Development days for our Year 10 and Sixth Form students. Always keen to ensure that he responds to the age-appropriate needs of our students at each key stage of their education, David has tailor-made Grounds for Hope sessions ranging from whole-school assemblies or year group focused sessions to smaller workshop carousels in both indoor and outdoor settings. David’s well-paced and interactive provision has addressed topics such as climate change and attentively responded to students’ hopes and fears about the future. I look forward to welcoming David to work with our students again soon.”
Ross McOwen – Head of Year 13 – Bradford Grammar School, June 2021
“Hopeful Education provided us with some really eye-opening and thought-provoking Grounds for Hope sessions. The students were fully engaged and ready to take action after these very hopeful sessions.”
Lisa Lott, English Teacher and Sustainability Co-ordinator, Hathershaw College, Oldham, May 2023
CPD sessions for Geography and other teachers
“David provided an excellent CPD session on Hopeful Geography and Active Hopefulness at our Dixons Conference in February 2022 to 30 geography participants from across all Dixons Academies in Yorkshire and the Northwest. The session was a blend of theory and practical strategies on the art of being more hopeful when teaching geography. The feedback from all staff was highly positive. The session has enabled us to review and refine our curriculum offer through small tweaks, but with impactful results on the narrative that we are communicating within geography.”
Richard Hart, Assistant Principal (Research & Development), Dixons Academies Trust, W Yorks, Feb 2022
“David delivered his session: “Grounds for Hope in Geography” to all of the Geography teachers in our multi-academy trust. The session was outstanding and incredibly thought-provoking. David provided excellent resources and practical examples of how the theory around being more ‘hopeful’ in a subject that often has to discuss ‘doom and gloom’, could be implemented with students, either as whole-school activities, or in a classroom setting. I was impressed with the amount of knowledge David was able to impart, whether than was knowing a variety of examples of ‘individual stories’, to the wider body of literature that has been written about this subject. It was also impressive that David was able to communicate the critiques of his research, articulating that he really has thought of alternative viewpoints. I would definitely invite David back to deliver more sessions; he has a calm and inspiring delivery that makes you ‘hang on his every word’. Thank you David.”
Mike Smith, Curriculum Director of Geography, Meridian Trust, Nov 2023
“The world will be violent … the world will be in a worse state than it is now … Everyone will only care about themselves … The governments are going to be corrupt … There will be no greenery left … Everyone will be sad. There will be no love.” (Belinda)
“There will be more street fighting… bigger gangs, more street deaths. Life will be three times more dangerous than it is now … Hoping it won’t happen, but it will.” (Ann)
“The city is full of skyscraper buildings and police officers with helmets on and riot gear … The streets are packed with people … It has become like the Bronx, survival of the fittest.” (Anthony)
If you had asked me at the age of sixteen, I may well have given similar views to these three respondents. Although rather extreme, their responses were representative of around eighty per cent of nearly 650 Australian upper secondary school students, from a range of socio-economic backgrounds, surveyed by Francis Hutchinson. Asking students what they think the world will be like in the future is a common activity for those of us who are involved in education for sustainable development, and these apocalyptic scenarios are not uncommon.
The twist is that these quotations are from 1992, when not only were the respondents sixteen years old, but so was I. I unearthed them during research into visions of the future held by young people. And I am conflicted about what these now historic testimonies tell us.
Biased towards the worst case scenario?
Do they tell us that most teenagers will always be biased towards worst case scenarios? Perhaps. After all, many of the worries of those teenagers have not come to pass to the extent that they feared.
More violent? But deaths from conflict and terrorism have stayed steady since the early 1990s at around 1 per 100,000 deaths. More corrupt governments? But the number of democracies around the world – granted, they are not always a hallmark of anti-corruption – has held steady at around 40%. Survival of the fittest? But global life expectancy has risen from 64 in 1992 to 71 today. No greenery left? The history of deforestation is a tragic one, but temperate regions have had a net gain in forest since 1990, and whilst tropical deforestation is still occurring at a deplorable rate, this rate is slowing, and 31% of the world’s surface is forested, compared to 32% in 1992.
More at stake for teenagers
And yet the more sensitive part of my character empathises with those young people, and, by extension, with the young people of today. They are willing to question the world more deeply than many adults, particularly those of us who are fortunate enough to be well insulated from economic and environmental challenges. There is a greater deal at stake for teenagers, because they have many more decades ahead of them to live, and perhaps even to thrive, in this world. And some might say that if we don’t worry about the future, then we won’t act to ensure that we thrive in it.
How we react to this piece of historic research is to a large extent academic. But current research on the concerns of young people deserves more of our attention. Surveys show that eco-anxiety is on the rise: a report published in 2021 by Caroline Hickman and colleagues reported that over 50% of young people surveyed felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless and guilty about the future.
Reassure and listen
Again, part of me wants to reassure them, to point to hopeful trends – to development indicators which show that poverty and hunger have decreased, that discrimination of all kinds has declined, and that we are beginning to turn a corner in terms of our attitudes towards the environment. This is the same part of me wants to say that every generation has its worries, and that ‘Generation Z’ is no different.
But then a more empathetic, caring, part of me wants to listen more carefully to their concerns, to fully admit to the harms that mine and other recent generations have wrought on the world, and to join them in a movement which really does challenge the status quo.
Perhaps Rebecca Solnit strikes the right tone on this front – she writes that “We have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that yes, we can change the world because we have, many times before.”
Young people will always be uncertain about the future. But this is all the more reason why adults should be open to having open and honest conversations about it. After all, our children will be spending longer on this planet than we will.
The whole world in their hands? Educationalists are considering how they might embrace AI as closely as their students are. (Image source: Adolfo Eliziat)
ChatGPT is here to stay – so how might we embrace it?
Their hands rose tentatively at first.
But the secret was out: some of my students had already come across the artificial intelligence app Chat GPT, and a couple of them were even willing to admit using it to help with their studies (not in my subject, of course!.
If you are a secondary school teacher and you haven’t tried it yet, then I advise you to “wake up and smell the AI”.
Since its launch at the end of last year, educationalists have been wondering about how their practice might be impacted by this free, online, Artificial Intelligence application. For those who aren’t aware of it, it allows you to type in a question and within seconds it produces a tailor-made answer. Several teachers have reflected on how it might help teachers work (more on that later). But how will it affect the tasks that we set our students, and what might the longer-term implications of this technology be?
Sober analysis
The initial frenzy of speculation about ChatGPT has now subsided as teachers and school leaders have embarked on more sober analysis of its implications. This has been assisted by the fact that the ChatGPT application was been overwhelmed by in January and was offline for much of the month. It is currently being eased back into operation so it can cope with users of all shades and stripes (including, yes, numerous students). And the tone among educators has already shifted.
Yes, there has been an acceptance that we will have to move away from setting students recap and past exam paper questions to complete at home. But this should have been the direction of travel for years, thanks to the increased sophistication of online search engines and the common practice of students sharing responses with each other, not only in person, but also via social media.
And yes, the current model of coursework, let alone qualifications which are largely or wholly based on written reports, such as Extended Project Qualifications, will have to be significantly rethought. Examination boards will need to grapple with increased urgency whether they can reform their qualifications, perhaps moving towards intensive ‘in-house’ write-ups of geography and history investigations.
Workarounds and opportunities
But there are several other workarounds, and indeed opportunities, that teachers and schools can employ in the light of ChatGPT. Some involve meeting its challenges and circumventing the risks of plagiarism. These include:
Adopting ‘flipped learning’ more wholeheartedly. Its benefits are already well known, but this might be the time to embrace it. Flipped learning involves asking the students to research, consolidate, and tackle simpler tasks at home, freeing up class time for higher value-added and/or interpersonal tasks such as evaluation, discussion, and decision-making.
Flipped learning frees up classroom time for more active learning opportunities (Image source: Teachers with Apps)
Setting tasks which are bounded by local and up-to-date limits. This is because ChatGPT is, at the moment, fed by data which was online in 2021. For example, these four tasks stump it:
“Write up today’s experiment”
“What three things did you learn from today’s lesson?”
“What were the geopolitical challenges of 2022?”
“To what extent is Ilkley economically inclusive?”
Changing the format:
Holding more discussions – for example, Harkness discussions – and consider setting oral assessments
Trying alternative formats for work, such as sketching, photos, paired work, and videos
Running students’ answers through an AI detection software – the pre-eminent one is Edward Xian’s ‘GPT Zero’, which gives a ‘perplexity score’ – the higher the score, the more likely it is that text has been written by a human; GPT-2 Output Detector is another.In OpenAI (the creators of ChatGPT) also say that they are planning to run a ‘watermarking’ scheme so that AI-generated answers can be flagged up to consumers.
Additionally, as commentators such as Daisy Christodoulou and Evan Dunne have pointed out, we can also use ChatGPT to help us with a variety of our everyday tasks, and to enhance our teaching. We can use it to help us to mark, set quizzes, and write lesson plans and assemblies, and so on.
We can also encourage students to critique answers generated by ChatGPT, and discuss how they might be improved. Might we even see a return to examination boards adding the word ‘flair’ to their mark schemes for longer answers? This is something that a chatbot cannot easily demonstrate – yet!
The human side of education
Image from the Eco-Capabilities project (Image source: Nicola Walshe, via EcoCapabilities)
Let’s take a step back for a moment, though, and look at how the wider educational landscape may be shaped by this app, and by its later iterations – not to mention the products of competitors like Google’s DeepMind.
Like it or not, AI will probably end up taking some of the control away from how we help students encounter knowledge about the world. In response, educators should take the opportunity to develop – and shout about – the human side of what we do. What a world of opportunity this could open up! We could develop into an army of well-respected teacher-facilitators, ushering in the next generation of critical thinkers.
We could also open curriculum breathing space, freeing up time from unrelenting knowledge transmission, and directing our energies into developing more rounded young people. They could be given more time to pursue the arts, sports, and outdoor learning, and to develop ‘eco-capabilities’ to reconnect with nature.
Let’s be bold as we contemplate how we might harness ChatGPT’s powers, not only to make teaching more efficient and relevant for our students, but also how we might work towards a more humane, caring, and sustainable future for everyone.
This post was developed alongside a presentation given to staff at Bradford Grammar School on 18 January 2023.
Zombies as portrayed in the movie Night of the Living Dead (Source: Wikimedia)
How many zombie ideas prowl our minds?
There are many stories about the undead, rising from the grave to threaten us when we thought they’d gone away. All entertaining enough, and darkly comedic too.
But there are other zombies too – zombie ideas. As Australian economist John Quiggin notes, “Some ideas live on because they are useful. Others die and are forgotten. But even when they have proved themselves wrong and dangerous, ideas are very hard to kill. Even after the evidence seems to have killed them, they keep on coming back.”
It’s tempting to believe that all of what you learnt at school still holds true today. This may be correct in most cases. But whatever age you are, so much of what you learnt is out-of-date, yet it re-emerges as a zombie idea later in life.
Zombie ideas in education
As a Geography teacher, I am acutely aware of the need to slay these zombies and to keep up to date with developments in the human and natural world since my own school days. So, for example, the idea that the world is split into a rich ‘north’ and a static, impoverished ‘south’ should be replaced with a more dynamic and complex picture. Similarly, my understanding of why tectonic plates (slabs of the earth’s crust) move has, thanks to educators like Alistair Hamill, moved beyond simplistic models of ‘convection currents’. And whilst many teachers (like me, until recently) like to portray Thomas Malthus as a pessimist who saw population growth forever curtailed by famine and war, he actually had more nuanced views.
In education, teachers have been subjected to several discredited initiatives. These include the notion of ‘learning styles’, which categorises pupils as either ‘visual’, ‘auditory’ or ‘kinaesthetic’ learners. Veteran teachers will regale you of lesson plans which needed to address all three styles of learning, or even of pupils wearing badges indicating their status. The ‘zombie idea’ of each pupil having a preferred learning style has since been dismissed, yet it persists in some corners of the system.
Why do we accept certain ideas?
We shouldn’t be too harsh on ourselves, as it is very tempting to accept certain ideas. Some of them seem to be ‘common sense’, and therefore they appeal to us, as we often default to the simplest explanations. Other ideas remain with us because we are wary of challenging them, as we were introduced to them by a figure of authority, such as a teacher or a parent.
Some ideas become accepted because they are repeated so many times, and in so many places, that we find it hard to believe that so many people can be wrong. One of these ideas, Quiggin writes, is ‘trickle-down economics’: the idea that policies that benefit the wealthy will ultimately help everybody. This idea had its heyday in the Reaganite and Thatcherite 1980s and 1990s, and this zombie was briefly resurrected by Liz Truss, despite being rejected by most economists.
Often, though, ideas persist because there is no reason to challenge them: they don’t seem to interfere with our daily lives, and so we just carry on living with them. But it is important to continually reassess our ideas, to see which ones are zombies, and which ones deserve to live on. This is especially applicable to the most persistent zombie ideas – those that are still with us because it takes a lot of time and effort, and a readjustment of our worldviews, to believe otherwise.
Slaying the ‘It’s natural!’ zombie idea
One such persistent zombie idea is that contemporary climate change is natural and that we are powerless to act. Most of us now accept the ‘inconvenient truth’ that human activity has caused the recent extremely rapid rise in air temperature and the number of extreme weather events. However, hardly a week passes when a columnist, letter writer, blogger, or ‘professional contrarian’ like Julia Hartley-Brewer resurrects the zombie idea of natural factors being behind recent changes in our climate.
Yes, our climate has changed significantly through the ages, but the pace of change in recent years is unprecedented. It is incredible to still be writing this in 2022, but the climate science is clear: humans are behind the most recent period of warming – according to the IPCC, “Observed increases in well-mixed greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations since around 1750 are unequivocally caused by human activities” – and excess carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere mean that rises in temperature are baked into the atmosphere for decades to come, threatening civilisation and the biosphere alike.
Whenever and wherever you see the zombie idea of ‘natural climate change’ raise its ugly head, ask yourself why it is being expressed. Is it to achieve notoriety and payment for expressing outrageous views? Is it to protect vested interests in a certain way of life? Or is it because insufficient time has been spend critically examining the idea?
This autumn, let’s launch this zombie onto the bonfire and reset our conversation towards two more urgent aims: how can we control our emissions before we get to an irretrievably awful climatic situation, and how can we ensure that all parts of the world can adequately adapt to the changes that are already underway, and that will be with us in the future?
Is doomscrolling making us fear the world? Source: Charles Deluvio
Do you ever find yourself ‘doomscrolling’?
Bad news has always tended to hit the headlines, but our consumption of it is no longer restricted to a small number of daily doses: it happens almost every time we pick up our smartphones. On the surface, this is just another irritation of modern life. But could doomscrolling have more profound impacts on society?
Media outlets understandably accentuate dramatic and negative stories. After all, it makes commercial sense: bad news sells. A less cynical view would credit news outlets for bringing to light financial and political scandals in the hope of keeping check on those in power, so I am not claiming that all such news is unwarranted. And only a fool would castigate the media for documenting contemporary crises. Citizens need to know about the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, climate change, the impacts of Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine and the floods in Pakistan, for example.
But today there appears to be unusually high levels of uncertainty and fear in the public sphere, characterised by what the Germans call ‘weltschmerz’, or world-weariness. And this has been accompanied by a rise in challenges to our mental health and the rise of eco-anxiety.
What does this have to do with doomscrolling?
A media landscape which feeds our appetite for doomscrolling allows little space for the reporting of planet-wide and centuries-long social trends. This impacts upon wider public discourse: people are becoming increasingly distrustful of those in positions of responsibility and therefore, I posit, they are less likely to be able to conceive of a brighter future for humanity.
Martin Luther King popularised Theodore Parker’s saying that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, and in this age of ‘big data’, there is ample evidence of the historical progress that King referred to. However, the ‘long arc of social progress’ is poorly documented, let alone reflected upon, and this applies to both traditional and social media outlets.
In the 1990s, George Gerbner coined the term ‘mean world syndrome’, referring to the correlation between high levels of news consumption and attitudes of cynicism, misanthropy and pessimism. This syndrome has become more entrenched in today’s era of rolling news, consumed on smart devices. A 2020 report from the European Commission examining the influence of online technologies on political behaviour points out that algorithms that are designed to promote attractive and engaging content exploit people’s predispositions to orient towards negative news.
Moreover, once pessimistic worldviews develop, they can make people despair with democracy and drive them towards supporting populists and extremists in elections. And even when such populists do not gain power themselves, the fearful narratives that they thrive on still influence policy and discourse, leading to an erosion of tolerance and even a threat to democracy, human rights, and internationalism. One need only look back to the rise of fascism in the 1930s to see where such fear might eventually lead.
Where are the headlines about the incremental gains in education, healthcare and access to energy that have occurred in most countries over the past few decades? There are so few of them, because good news does not sell; good news does not generate clickbait; good news does not get us talking to each other the way that tragedies and armed conflict (or the threat of it) does. And whenever long-term, hard-fought, stories of social progress do make it into the media, they are soon swamped by the next wave of drama, threat, and despair.
How might we overcome this? Yes, we should fund and publicise investigative journalism and send reporters to disaster zones. But we should also give more space to analysing social and technological progress, so that voters and media consumers can consider the benefits of open, democratic, societies, and indeed of multilateralism. We need reminding of the fact that international co-operation and progressive activism has, for example, conserved the Antarctic, combatted acid rain, enhanced the rights of women and minority groups, and almost removed the scourges of polio and tapeworms from the face of the earth. As Rebecca Solnit writes, “We need litanies or recitations or monuments to those victories, so that they are landmarks in everyone’s mind”.
Waiting passively for this shift to occur is not an option. We can’t just wait for ‘mean world syndrome’ to morph into a ‘hopeful world syndrome’. It is incumbent upon everyone in the public sphere – whether that be the media, politics, or education – to write a new narrative.
This is not an encouragement of blind optimism. It is a plea for wider global contexts and long-term trends to be considered, and it is a reminder to anyone involved in shaping public discourse that tone and balance matters. What a shame it would be if persistently highlighting malign influences out of the context of more widespread social progress ended up pushing more and more despairing citizens into the arms of the populist despots who feed such malignancies! The media should acknowledge its role in perpetuating this syndrome and play a more active role in its reversal.
Architect’s view of Bradford Live (credit Tim Ronalds Architects; source: Bradford Live)
Progress, industry, humanity.
Bradford Council’s motto had passed me by until recently. Then I saw it adorning the scaffolding of the city’s old Odeon building, which is soon to be reborn as the city’s biggest indoor music and entertainment venue, Bradford Live.
In some respects, the motto seems to hark from a different era – perhaps the Victorian age, in the boom times for ‘wool city’? Or maybe it would have been more apt in Edwardian times, when the city hosted a Great Exhibition in Lister Park, attracting 2.4 million guests, and whose star attraction was a vast Industrial Hall?
But no – the words were adopted as recently as 1976.
The motto summarises what Bradford stood for then, and it was retained when the crest was updated just five years ago, when the council stated that it “still chimes with our priorities”[1]. But reading it on such a flagship development made me think: what relevance might the concepts of progress, industry and humanity have today?
Whether it is taken to mean manufacturing, or hard work, the term ‘industry’ sums up both the heritage and grit which many see as characterising the city. Whilst a more competitive global environment, a move towards synthetic materials, and a change in government priorities led to deindustrialisation, Bradford hosts the national and regional headquarters of several large companies in both the manufacturing and service sector, so its inclusion is relatively uncontroversial.
Similarly, few would argue against the place of ‘humanity’ in the city’s motto. Bradford is a diverse city which has welcomed outsiders throughout its history, and especially so since the 1950s. This has been cemented by it being awarded City of Sanctuary status in 2010, recognising the role that it has played in providing a place of safety for people who have fled dangerous circumstances. Whilst the city, like many dynamic places, has experienced challenges, its diversity is also a source of its strength and vibrancy. Moreover, with a quarter of its population being under 18, and with an average age of 37, recognising and investing in Bradford’s humanity is crucial.
That leaves ‘progress’.
A place of progress?
From around the sixteenth century until just a few decades ago, the concept of ‘progress’ was rarely questioned in the western world, outside of the realms of certain branches of philosophy and literature. Victorian Britons had a particular fondness for the idea that there was an inexorable drive towards ever advancing material, social and moral conditions, and that there was great pride to be had in promoting its cause. Ideas of progress went hand in hand with those of ‘civilisation’, and, driven by the Industrial Revolution and a widespread increase in living standards during the nineteenth and twentieth century, it is no surprise that the authorities in Bradford embraced the term in the 1970s and continue to do so today.
Industrial Hall, Great Exhibition, Bradford, 1904 (source: PicClick)
The dark side of progress
However, progress, does, of course, have its dark side. Domestically, the Industrial Revolution drew many millions of people into cities across Britain, and whilst conditions eventually improved, squalor and pollution led to disease and premature death for many. Notions of progress would have rung hollow to those working long hours in ‘dark satanic mills’, let alone the men, women and children who toiled underground in the early days of mining, as I was reminded of in a recent trip to the Welsh museum of mining at Big Pit, Blaenavon. Rural life was no bucolic idyll, but for many, the move to the city must have seemed like a step backwards rather than a step forwards.
Environmentally, not only did ‘progress’ turn many parts of cities into dirty, smog-ridden, Dickensian hellholes, but its voracious appetite for raw materials led to the denudation of forests, the loss of biodiversity, and the industrialisation of farming. Fossil fuel-led economic development has resulted in climate change, and colonisation, enslavement, and the oppression of indigenous peoples and cultures can also be linked to western notions of ‘progress’. Such concerns reverberate today, and the very concept has fallen into disuse.
So, in this era of recognising historical wrongdoings, should we campaign to expunge the word ‘progress’ from the council’s motto?
A reformed notion of progress
No. Instead, we should rally around a reformed notion of progress. Yes, we must recognise that many ‘steps forward’ have hidden costs which may not fully manifest themselves for decades. And yes, the framework of ‘sustainable development’, as adopted by the United Nations, is useful, but does it stir up the passions needed to meet the challenges of the future with energy, hope, and action?
Believing in ‘progress’ and the capacity of humankind to improve our lot has helped most of humankind to become wealthier, healthier, more educated, and, believe it or not, more peaceful, over recent centuries. But whilst many of us in more affluent countries have met our material needs, many both at home and abroad have not, and we shouldn’t give up on ideas of progress whilst such inequalities remain.
Humans thrive on having goals to aim for, and starting conversations about what our shared ideas of progress might involve will foster an atmosphere in which we can share such goals and work towards meeting them.
Painful family separations have been a frequent occurrence in Ukraine (Source: AP)
Images of people on the move, destroyed hospitals and victims of war have appalled me. But whenever I see footage of a child’s palm on one side of a departing train’s window and their father’s palm on the other, it hits home, it hits hard, and I well up: that could be me and that could be my child.
Faced with this and other heart-breaking scenes from Ukraine, as with other crises both at home and abroad, many of us will feel helpless. Students will also be reacting to the war in schools across the country; many of them will be feeling increasingly uncertain and anxious as the situation develops. Teachers have been impelled to respond, and some of these responses are also worth considering by parents and others with concerns about the welfare of our young people.
The role of schools
School leaders and form tutors alike have been preparing and delivering assemblies and activities to help young people navigate the crisis, and these have been shared on social and traditional media alike. In the short term, we can also point to the highly valued role which pastoral and counselling teams play as students seek emotional guidance and support. And it is easy to forget the crucial role played by the mere fact of attending school, which gives our students a well justified sense of security.
The war will also be used as a contemporary reference point by teachers of history: parallels and connections with previous European and world conflicts are already being drawn. Moreover, the powerful media content emanating from Ukraine will sharpen our senses and remind us of the self-destructive capacity of certain members of our species.
Politics teachers will be able to help their students understand the contemporary context of the conflict, whilst war poetry written over a century ago will, in the expert hands of English teachers, have renewed power and poignancy.
It’s also about time that geography teachers – and I write as one – become more forthright about the value of their subject in understanding energy security and geopolitics. And how many people realise that superpowers and international governance is an integral part of A Level Geography?
Belief in humanity
But all of us – inside and outside the world of formal education – can respond more profoundly too. We are all exposed to a daily barrage of stories about the world. We live in an era of 24-hour media access and rolling news, but how many of us are equipping our young people to survive, let alone thrive, in such a context? The concept of ‘doomscrolling’ – working through a depressing stream of bad news on a smartphone – was first used in the age of Trump, Brexit, and the pandemic, but it can now be applied to news about Ukraine, and our students will be at risk from the despair it engenders.
To counterbalance the sense of doom, we should encourage young people to take a ‘big picture’ of the world, both in terms of long-term trends and a global context. Whilst it is imperative that we consider some of the responses to the Ukraine crisis outlined above, it is also crucial that we draw young people’s attention to the better side of humanity: the side that, in recent decades, has led to a huge rise in global life expectancy, a massive reduction in infant mortality, a fall in malnutrition and levels of extreme poverty, the eradication of smallpox, and the near eradication of polio.
It’s also the collaborative and co-operative side of humanity that has given us a largely peaceful world since the end of the Second World War. Young people should be told that the rash actions of one dictator and his cronies must not undermine their faith in human nature that we will eventually overcome this challenge, just as we have overcome challenges in the past.
The power of education
In the longer term, we should remind ourselves just how powerful education can be: teachers and other citizens alike should continually be asking what should we teach, and more importantly, why are we teaching it? Over the last decade there has been a growing concern with what Gert Biesta calls the ‘learnification’ of education. He argues that education has primarily become a system of knowledge transmission, rather than as a way of preparing our students for roles as critically thinking, democratically informed, and active citizens in a changing world.
A reformed educational purpose may involve engaging young people in discussions about conflict escalation and resolution and involving them in opportunities for deliberative democracy. Teachers should have the courage to move away from being just facilitators of learning, into preparing our students to live in and shape a better – and more peaceful – world in the future.
None of us can change the world straight away, but whilst robust shorter-term responses attempt to disempower Putin and steer the crisis away from becoming a global catastrophe, we should harness the power of education to lay the foundations for the world we’d like to see.
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