I love this elegant post by Bayo Akomolafe. It beautifully illuminates the kind of thinking mistakes we create when we simplistically use numbers to consider wicked problems. The post is equally clear about how we go wrong when we elide similar sounding concepts with quite different meanings: White people and Whiteness are not the same thing. Bayo’s subtle nuanced writing could never be created by AI and sadly does not make good click bait. Yet we need this quality of thought more than ever. How will our students learn this if they rely on GenAI to make their studies easier? Transformative learning lives in struggle and pain, well at least some of the time.

This is where wicked education needs the teacher’s passion. Some of our students will find great thinking themselves, driven by their anger at injustice and ecological destruction. Some will be inspired by friends and relatives. The students who do not find these paths are the ones that need us most. How easy is it to drift through some degree programmes without learning to question the status quo? How many of these graduates go on to chase big salaries, consumer comfort and numbing while treating their employees like interchangeable disposable human “resources”. How many of them will believe the stories politicians tell to scapegoat the most vulnerable people in our world? How many of them will continue to believe that technological tweaks to the status quo will be enough for a liveable planet?

These are the students who need the art and craft and energy of teachers who can bring them to new ways of seeing and feeling they do not want or think they need. Are our institutions supporting these teachers to flourish?

Photo by Branislav Herc on Unsplash