Europe is warming at a rate that is twice the global average. According to the European Commission’s Climate Action statistics, there were over 60,000 heat-related deaths in 2022 and over 47,000 in 2023 in Europe alone.

Recent summer heatwaves have exceeded 40°C (104°F) in the UK, France, and Spain, causing widespread drought and devastating wildfires.

It has become impossible to pretend that this climate deregulation is not a result of human activity. We are in the Anthropocene era and all the graphs and projections show it is getting worse quickly.

Over social media, many have criticized the European continent’s inability to deal with the heatwave because of a lack of infrastructural preparedness. Buildings and infrastructure are outdated in terms of insulation, passive cooling, or ventilation. Air conditioning is rare, which is understandable given the amount of energy it uses.

What is the lesson in all this for us educators?

While greening the curriculum tends to focus on individual behaviors and understandings that can reduce climate change, such as reducing our carbon footprint and understanding ecologically compatible ways of being, there are two other questions to consider.

Affect and Systems Thinking

First, the notion that the deeper route to greening the curriculum is through an affective approach, developing pedagogies that put learners in front of the beauty of nature and nurturing a love of nature within them. If we can develop this deep-seated love, we will surely be planting the seeds within young people that will drive ways of being that respect the ecosystem and care for it. Ways of doing this include field trips, outdoor learning, greening the campus and making the splendour of the wild express itself in the curriculum and the site.

Second, it is essential to teach a systems thinking approach to ecology: understanding how trade laws, markets and legislation have the overwhelmingly greatest impact on the climate. It is not by changing the consumer habits of each individual within an ecologically negative, plundering system, that real change will be activated. The whole system needs to be revised and this requires leadership, coordination and socioeconomic and political change. The teaching of economics, history, science and politics needs to take this into account, without turning the curriculum into an ideological proselytisation but at the same time ensuring that students are empowered to understand fully the complexities, externalities and interrelationships that define climate change and could help stop it.

The contrast between the World Cup third-place playoff and the final was stark. In the former, England and France scored 10 goals in a palpitating, fluid game that kept spectators on the edge of their seats. Some of the goals were spectacular, there was a hat-trick, and at the end, a group of French and English players huddled together in a fraternal gesture. It was a fast-moving, dynamic game with an emphasis on scoring rather than defending.

The actual final between Spain and Argentina, on the other hand, was what so many finals have become: theatrics, diving, shamming, wasting time, red cards, and ending , of course, with a meagre scoreline after extra time. There was a lot that had nothing to do with the actual football while players spent their time exhorting the referee to give a yellow or red card to the other side and putting pressure on him at every play. The number of players who suddenly fell down, dozens of metres away from the ball while shamming a foul, was ridiculous. None of this takes anything away from a well-deserved victory by Spain, it is the style of play I am discussing here and what caused it.

So why was there such a difference in behaviour between these two finals?

One reason might be the difference in stakes. When you are playing in a final, the fear of loss is as great, if not greater, than the will to win, and this can create a sclerosis which essentially spoils the game, making it sterile and fundamentally negative. In the third-place game, on the other hand, the stakes are more symbolic, there is more risk-taking and free expression. You will rarely see players break down in tears losing such a match as they do in the finals.

This leads me to one of the most important principles in experimental psychology and the science of assessment: ecological validity. If a test is ecologically valid, it means that performance on it predicts behaviour in the real world. The more authentic an assessment is, the more natural the test-taking conditions, the higher the ecological validity.

If what we are looking for in forward-looking assessment systems is how to test 21st-century competences, such as creativity, criticality, intra- and interpersonal intelligence, systems thinking, and lifelong learning, then the conditions under which these are assessed should be as natural as possible. How do we ensure that students’ creative juices are flowing? How do we ensure that the test is not interfering with their critical thinking but allowing it to express itself? How do we ensure that the structure of the test-taking conditions does not distort the results?

The problem with high-stakes assessments, like the final of the World Cup, is that they bring out behaviours that are not actually the ones we are looking for, unless those engaged are able to ride above the stress and pressure and enter a flow, which can be done, but is very is difficult for experienced athletes to do, let alone high school students.

Perhaps the final was distorted by the stakes, which were so high that it was not an ecologically valid situation, if what is important to us is the beauty of the game and not the result and if what we wish to see happen in a football match is high quality football and not technical shenanigans . Ironically, the lower-pressure third place playoff, by being less stressful, created these conditions much better.

We should view the testing conditions we create more as a third-place playoff than a final, releasing students of the fear of failure that inhibits a joyous, free-flowing expression of competences. Let’s continue to work together in schools and universities to ensure high ecological validity so that the beauty of learning rather than the pressure to perform develops. Alternative assessments such as projects, portfolios, internal assessments, and other naturalistic, long-term tracking of competency development tend to do this better than the traditional high-stakes, narrow terminal assessment we have been using in schools for the last 200-odd years.

Recent meta-analyses and research have shown that reasoning-focused models (OpenAI’s o1 and GPT-4) outperform medical students on examinations, clearly and systematically beating the median score and, in most cases, the highest-performing humans’ scores too. The assessments in question were multiple-choice tests, the ultimate symbol of mass assessment.

Last year, the Stanford Human-Centered AI Index tracking data showed something else: when AI is given more time to “think” on examination-style tasks, previous human benchmarks are destroyed. On an International Mathematical Olympiad qualifying exam, an optimized AI model with more “reasoning” outperformed standard AI models (which already outperform humans) by over 60%. In other words, AI will outstrip humans even more on classical assessments if given more time.

Should it worry us that AI can outstrip humans easily on examinations and that enhanced AI will outstrip us even more?

To me, the answer is yes, but not so much because of AI and more because of the type of assessment we have been using to sort students at exit and entry matriculation points for centuries.

In my book Changing Assessment, I explain the main problems with high-stakes, narrowing assessments. Essentially, authentic learning and genuine critical or creative thinking are superseded by timed performance and the ability to cope under a certain, artificial type of pressure. Furthermore, sociologically advantaged students almost always do better, suggesting that examinations are not actually that meritocratic (wealthier students use extra tutors and have access to more test-taking-engineered environments). Finally, the massive scale and standardized nature of these assessments relegate most of the learning outcomes to the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, favoring knowledge retention and proof of understanding over judgment and analysis. Hardly any analyses of 21st-century competencies see these as particularly valid for the needs of the future.

Now that we know that AI can outperform humans on examinations, what exactly are we examining for? The deeper mechanism behind examinations has always been to classify individuals and groups, which fits the financial model of late capitalism built on scarcity rather than general distribution: the idea is for some to come out on top and others at the bottom. But AI now comes out on top, so where does that lead us in an already somewhat broken model?

The answer is, in my mind, actually much simpler than we might think, and it applies to all assessments, not just examinations.

First, much more emphasis is needed on oracy, discussion, and interview-type assessments. AI cannot be used in these, and they are far more indicative of the type of life-worthy assessment we should be developing in young people, preparing them for job interviews, presentations, and social exchanges.

Second, if we are to test written production, knowing that students can and will use AI (perhaps even inadvertently given its ubiquity), assessments need to take this into account and allow students to use AI openly, to cite that usage openly, and to integrate their own thinking into the work. I asked AI to give examples of what an AI-integrated examination question might look like, insisting that such an assessment push students to think for themselves and not just to rely on AI (which is a slightly ironic scenario), and this is what it came up with:

What’s interesting is that each task is much higher up the rungs of critical and creative thinking than traditional assessments, even though (and this is my human critique of AI’s generated solutions), with access to AI, the AI-integrated responses could potentially be done uniquely using AI. On this, at some point, there must be faith in the test-taker’s deontological code, and this should be made clear in the school’s academic honesty policy. Presuming that this is the case, these answers will show greater cognitive application than traditional examination items and also allow students to use AI in formulating their responses, which is something that is happening in the world of work already.

If AI can pass the examination, it’s not AI that should be the focus of our attention, but the way we design the exam. This is a focal point for all educators designing assessments in today’s fast-moving era of VUCA for the long-overdue valorization of higher-order thinking skills.

Recently I found myself at the Broad museum in LA, dwarfed by massive household objects as part of an exhibition by the late Robert Therrien. As I wandered under giant tables, stooped under colossal chairs and looked up at 10-foot-high stacks of plates, two thoughts occurred.

First, how the defamiliarisation of an object forces one to deconstruct it and examine it much more closely.

One reflects differently about banal household objects when they are removed from their context, distorted and isolated. From an educational point of view, it remains an essential trait of the teaching of critical thinking to go into great detail, to unpack and spend the time to really analyse elements of thought.

However, the conveyor belt of volume-heavy curriculum we are still on makes this difficult. How often do we have the time to slow down to unpack threshold concepts, to journey into an odyssey around a single work of art, scientific concept, historical fact? Consider the arts in most middle schools; how much time do we spend really going deep into performing arts, music and visual arts? Does the timetable allow for it?

If we scuttle along the surface in a race to get through the curriculum, when do we find the time to inspect and investigate things deeply? And surely such a slowing down of thought, such a journey into detail, is all the more necessary in a hyperactive age where we consume thousands of images per day and process almost none of them? We need to magnify essential concepts in the curriculum and deconstruct them to truly teach them and hope for a critical appreciation of them. Hence, critical thinking, one of the pillars of the 21st Century, becomes clearer: it needs time.

Second, Therrien’s work reminded me of the famous Torrance creativity test in the 1960s. Participants were asked to brainstorm all the possible uses of an object, like a brick. The highest number of possible uses indicated the more creative minds. In order to truly consider potential uses of the object, the more creative minds would radically shift perspective and even dimensions. What would the brick do if shattered? If broken in two? If augmented in size? If miniaturized? It is by stepping out of what seems obvious into those creative pastures of the unknown that we begin to dream up new notions, new ideas and potentialities.

In a world already saturated by AI, where people are no longer writing their own ideas but all relying, more and more, on algorithms to do it, creating a flat, dehumanised and unoriginal landscape, who will stand out? Where will those emotional hooks and truly original ideas come from? And from an ideological perspective, what will it take to step outside of a thought silo, perpetuated and nourished by self-enclosed loops of confirmation bias? To do this, we must exercise considerable powers of creativity: think not algorithmically but inferentially, act not through exhausted generalisations but through brilliant and totally novel insights, flashes of originality. Who would think to create giant plates and tables? And when lost in such a gargantuan landscape, the sensations are wholly new and refreshing. Therrien’s art dramatises creativity, which is not just thinking outside the box, but distorting the box itself.

As we step back into our schools and universities, let’s continue to evoke the power of criticality and creativity in learners by shifting perspective, deconstructing the obvious, plunging ourselves into the unfamiliar and rendering the mundane extraordinary, the household extraterrestrial, the common uncommon.

Death Valley is no ordinary place. In 1913, the air temperature was recorded at 56.7°C, the hottest in the world ever. Furnace Creek lies 282 feet below sea level. The perpetual micro sand avalanches of the Mesquite dunes cause them to sing a low frequency hum, like the Om of ancient Vedic texts. The Devils Hole Pupfish lives at the pit of a 500 foot deep cavern reaching into the prehistoric, unchanged bowels of the earth. Hematite, Limonite, Celadonite and Chlorite dapple the rock formations with pink, gold, purple, green and teal. The Black Mountain that dominates the salt-lined Badwater Basin is nearly 2 billion years old. As you walk through the valley you see the strata of time torn and mangled by tectonic forces, geological tears of prehistory twisting and turning as they are broiled and mangled by the inexorable force of the earth. Here rocks seem to scream out in jagged formations of expression; they are alive.

Nothing is dead here, all is alive, but the scale of life is so gigantic that as you stand on its expansion like a mite on the back of a whale, you are not aware of it, and the stillness lulls you into a hypnotic eye of a storm.

There is no Wi-Fi connection out in the desert.

The silence is so thick at the foot of valleys enshrouded by sheer rock that even your own breathing and heartbeat is no longer detectable. I never understood the phrase deafening silence until I came to this miraculous place, for the whole paradox is there: the silence is so thick, so voluptuous, that it covers every other possible noise. And what you are left with is an overwhelming sense of inner peace that diaphanates outward toward a cosmic peace: the alpha and the omega. Nothing seems to matter anymore, all is insignificant but for the power of the ever-crumbling sandstone and sodium borate white gold that towers above you and protects you from any vain or destructive thought.

When the French philosopher Foucault came here in the 1970s, he stood at Zabriskie Point at sunset and, beholding the Milky Way in that manner only a desert can evoke, spoke of the sky exploding above him and stars raining down. The beauty caused him to weep and from that moment on he changed his philosophical direction completely, writing now on the way society conditions us to think. There are those who attribute this turning point to his taking drugs, but what need of drugs in a place so illuminated? The turning point in Foucault’s philosophical positioning must have been due to the Spiritus Mundi of the Golden Canyon below him and the warm night air with its eye winking to the heavens.

If George Lucas chose Death Valley for the planet Tatooine in Star Wars, it was because the place literally lifts you out of reality into another realm of being. That sensation of being on another planet is strong in Death Valley, and I think it is tremendously profound, because what it is doing is putting you directly before your own limits and natural surroundings, forcing you to consider the entity of your being as it is contrasted by a place that is utterly defamiliarizing. Paradoxically, this creates a feeling of existential freedom, for in seeking a point of commonality between your hot-blooded flesh and the salt, rock and dryness, you realize that what connects you is not mere existence, it is something greater, more transcendent, the elemental truth of star dust.

If Stanley Kubrick filmed Spartacus here it is because there is an eternal whisper of freedom in the air, like a silent song dancing across the multiple ripples of sandstone.

Camus spoke of the benign indifference of the world in his novel The Outsider; it is in the closing paragraph as Meursault lies on his deathbed contemplating the stars from his prison window: a highly symbolic image. However, when in Death Valley, the sensation is very different. The world is benign, yes, but not indifferent, for in the overwhelming power of mass and force, in the toiling battle of rock against sand, in the salt-strewn plateaus and rose-dappled skies at sunset, for some ineffable reason, some elusive truth of being, there is a love for us as creatures of the earth that emanates from each moment.

What Death Valley brought to my senses was a philosophical and educational reflection: it is quite simple. At some point in your life, it is imperative to travel somewhere where the primal elements of nature dominate you totally and invade your being. It is a spiritual cleansing, like standing under the stars, by a giant waterfall or in a jungle, swimming in the ocean or trekking through the desert. Such an experience reinvigorates your imagination, your sense of being and above all, reminds you of how wonderful and sacred it is to be alive on our planet earth, how blessed this planet really is and how little everything else means.

To live with hope and to feel invigorated, we must recharge our inner self with this presence, this power, this love. This is not death, it is the essence of life itself, a place of imagination, of dreams, of the soaring and indomitable cry of space and time, strewn across the horizon of the cosmos today and forever.

  Furnace Creek, 27th of February. Early evening.