Nicholas Alchin (@nicholas_alchin) is Head at United World College of SE Asia, East Campus. A sino-celtic Brit who drifted into working on building sites, drifted into the actuarial world, then chose education, he has lived and taught in values-based schools in UK, Switzerland, Kenya and Singapore. He has also held a number of roles with the IB and writes, speaks and advises widely on educational matters. He enjoyed travelling with wife Ellie, and kids; also running, reading, writing, and baking bread.
The start of the school year brings several thousand children back onto our Campuses over an exciting few days, with many hundreds of them arriving for the first time. It’s hard not to feel the energy – new students and their families meeting teachers, everyone seeking out friends, all of them exploring what’s ahead. Mostly it is smiles and laughter, but there is also a very understandable nervousness: for some, a first day in an unfamiliar place; for others, a new year group and a teacher they have heard about but not yet met. All of them wonder whether this year will go as well as the last. And I don’t mean just on the part of the children. For parents and teachers too, there is a tension that comes from caring deeply about what’s coming.
The tension is, I would suggest, quite different to other situations. When my own children were at school, meeting their teachers wasn’t like meeting lawyers, accountants or other professionals – my kids were spending so much time with their teachers, away from me, that it made me feel vulnerable as a parent in ways that were not immediately obvious. Similarly, teachers can be anxious. They are meeting children they do not yet know and have very little time to get it right; and they know that those children will go home and talk about them.
The similarities may not always be clear to teachers with no children or to parents who aren’t teachers. And even as a teacher and parent for over three decades, I realised I had only been dimly aware of this when I read this fascinating comparison by Thompson and Fox Mazzola, on the symmetries of the anxieties here:
Parents
Teachers
Parenting is inherently difficult and intensely personal. Parents find it hard to know if they are doing a good job. The first child in a family makes competent adults feel helpless, and every subsequent child challenges us in new and unexpected ways. All parents are amateurs and we know it.
Teaching is an inherently difficult job that is hard to measure and intensely personal. No teacher can connect with all children or guarantee great outcomes for everyone. When things do not go right in class, we cannot say to an unhappy parent, “You should have seen my class last year. It was amazing.” This leaves teachers feeling vulnerable in front of parents.
Parents and parenting are on display through their children. As parents, we know that our children will reflect on the way we bring them up – our parenting, our values and our characters. This can sometimes make us feel vulnerable and exposed.
Teachers’ faults are on display in front of the distorting eyes of children. Teaching is a public, exposing job and the child audience is not always appreciative or kind. Teachers are discussed in many homes many evenings, and the discussions are based on the sometimes distorted impressions of children. This can sometimes make us feel vulnerable and exposed.
Parents know that teachers have immense power over children’s lives. Teachers have the power and opportunity to support or to criticise, to nurture or to crush. Parents are keenly aware of teacher power, because as children they too had teachers who made them feel wonderful or terrible.
Teachers are not accorded enough respect in some societies This manifests in different ways; from the way teachers can be spoken to by students and parents; to the profession as a whole relative to other professions. It can be difficult not to feel that in a personal way.
Parents may feel trapped by and with their child’s school. Schools are not commodities and are not easily changed, even when things are going badly for a child. For various reasons of geography, friendships, affordability there may be no other options. This can make for anxiety.
Teachers cannot always offer exactly what parents want Over recent decades schools have taken on more and more responsibility for what used to be done at home; but large institutions are not and cannot be families, and so cannot be as responsive to individual needs. This can cause tensions between school and home.
In important ways, parents and teachers may know children differently. As children grow up they do not reveal all facets of their personality to their parents. Adolescents, especially, show their teachers sides of themselves that they deliberately hide from their parents. When teachers and parents meet, this is uncomfortable on both sides.
The table looks symmetrical, and mostly it is. But there is one central difference. Whether they have one child with us or four, parents’ attention is appropriately singular — this child, in this moment. We care about each child in each moment too, but our attention has to be broader, because we also have to care about several thousand others, this year and in following years. That means what we decide has to work across thousands of different children, now and in the future, and so our decisions can never be shaped around any one of them.
Schools need to be honest about this. And that only amplifies the need for us to decide carefully, explain why, and listen when parents tell us we have got it wrong — knowing that sometimes, having listened, we will still reach a conclusion they would not have chosen. All of which is easy to accept in the abstract, and much harder when the child in question is our own (I have been there). But it is still the right way to decide, because a school that bent to whoever asked most persistently would be a worse one, and unfair besides.
Given how much we all care about our kids and our students, and the intensely personal nature of parenting and teaching, it’s not surprising that these tensions can exist. In fact, it’s far better than indifference. We should acknowledge that despite differing perspectives we have a common root of shared hopes for the children in our care. Perhaps the way to deal with anxieties such as those I have mentioned here is to embrace them as natural parts of a home-school partnership and respond to each other in line with our values.
Taking the biggest picture, this is another step along the path toward our aim of fostering a sense of Belonging for everyone in our community. We can never take it for granted – because there is always more to do, and with families and staff moving each year, it is always a work of renewal. Seeing that we all share the same hopes and fears will help.
I remember the public information films of the 1970s and 80s, when nuclear annihilation was treated as a practical household problem. We were told Stay indoors. Close your curtains. Place yourself under a table. The assumption that after a thermonuclear exchange, you’d want to get the curtains right was presented without irony. We lived with that terrifying background hum for decades. Thankfully the worst-case scenario didn’t materialise; not because it couldn’t, but because human beings made good choices that prevented it.
That memory came back to me this month, reading two articles that have been doing the rounds, suggesting that AI is an almost existential threat. In the first, AI entrepreneur Matt Shumer describes watching his own job disappear – not to a competitor, but to the very AI tools he helped build. The second, by the financial research group Citrini, is a fictional retrospective written from June 2028, in which AI-driven job displacement triggers a financial crisis that makes 2008 look like a rehearsal.
Both pieces are long, and in their own way, terrifying (if you haven’t already read them, they’re worth your time). But while they deserve to be taken seriously, so does our own track record of panic, because the pattern is familiar: A new technology arrives; early adopters say this changes everything and people who don’t understand it say that’s what they always say. So far, reality has always landed somewhere in between, but not before a period of genuine fear.
Why this time feels different
What I have written so far may sound reassuring – we’ve seen this before and it’s been OK. But reassurance and complacency are easily confused, and I’m reminded of Bertrand Russell’s fable of the chicken who, having been fed every day of its life, concludes that it will be fed tomorrow too. And it is, until the day the farmer wrings its neck. Russell’s point was that the chicken’s confidence in the future was based on perfectly good evidence – until the day it wasn’t. The alternative to being Russell’s chicken is not, however, to be the ostrich – head buried firmly in the sand, convinced that if you don’t look at it, it isn’t happening. I’ve spent enough years in education to know that this is a popular strategy among teenagers and Heads of College alike. It may not end well.
One reason this feels different is that there is something about AI that cuts in a different way to other panics. Freud famously argued that humanity has suffered three great wounds to its self-image: Copernicus showed we’re not at the centre of the universe; Darwin showed we are animals; and Freud himself (modestly) showed that the animal is sick. Each was met with fierce resistance, because each threatened something fundamental about what it means to be human. AI may be the fourth wound. If a machine can write, reason, create, judge, and even show something that looks remarkably like taste, then it feels like there may be nothing left for us.
The evidence backs the feeling. Data from research organisation METR shows AI capability has been doubling roughly every seven months, and suggests it may be accelerating even further. AI systems are now contributing to their own development, and the people building them talk seriously about a point at which AI improvement becomes self-sustaining and potentially beyond human control. Whether this materialises or plateaus may be the most important empirical question of our time. Nobody knows the answer. But the possibility that the trajectory holds is what makes this different from previous moral panics. Previous threats – even the nuclear one – were about the destructive application of human intelligence and held out the possibility that applied more carefully, our own intelligence might solve them. This one is about whether human intelligence itself remains the scarce and special thing we’ve always assumed it to be.
And yet. I gave a talk recently in which I shared some data that I think matters here, drawing on the wonderful Fix the News website
Every single country in the world today has a lower child mortality rate than it had in 1950.
In the early 19th century, 85% of the world lived in extreme poverty; today it’s 9%.
Global life expectancy has gone from 30 to 72 in two centuries.
Literacy has risen from 12% to 83%.
The number of people in extreme poverty has fallen by an average of 118,000 every day for 25 years.
We may be on the brink of a genuine energy transition – solar is now 41% cheaper than fossil fuels on average, and China alone added more solar capacity in the first half of 2025 than the United States has in its entire history.
These are six facts from a million other equally good ones. Now, you could argue this is Russell’s chicken again. Perhaps. But a track record is still evidence, and ignoring it is to be an ostrich in a different way. These things still happened not because the future was guaranteed, or that arriving here was in any way inevitable, but because enough people made good enough choices, often enough, over a long enough period of time for us to arrive here (despite all our flaws and failures) at a genuinely better point than at any point in human history.
The Citrini problem
The predictions of the Citrini piece are dramatic, but it’s the structural argument that matters most. The scenario describes a negative feedback loop with no natural brake: AI gets better, companies cut staff, displaced workers spend less, companies invest more in AI to protect margins, AI gets better. Each individual decision may be rational, but this spiral has no floor and the outcome is catastrophic. And this time, it’s intellectually and morally dishonest to wave this away with the standard ‘Technology destroys jobs but creates even more’ argument that has been true for two centuries. However painful it was (and it has proven to be very painful) previously displaced workers could retrain for the new roles that technology created and so the net effect was more and better jobs. But if AI is a general substitute for cognitive work, then the new roles will also be done by machines and the usual escape hatch may not exist.
Now, the Citrini piece is explicitly a fiction, not a prediction, and it privileges clean narratives over messy reality. Real economies are more resilient, more adaptive, and more surprising than any model. The 2008 financial crisis, for all its devastation, did not produce the collapse that some predicted; COVID-19 was met with a vaccine developed in under a year. Humans are good at muddling through.
But muddling through is not a strategy; it’s a description of what we do when we don’t know what to do, and there is no guarantee it will always work. Nobody will muddle through an asteroid strike. So is AI disruption more like a storm we can weather or an asteroid we need to deflect? The honest answer is that no-one knows. What we do know is that the Shumer piece – with its personal, visceral, this-happened-to-me-on-Monday quality – should unsettle anyone who thinks this is still abstract. The asteroid may or may not be coming, but something is getting brighter in the sky.
So what do we do?
I’m not going to pretend I have a structural answer to the Citrini problem. If the retraining escape hatch is genuinely closed and there is widespread displacement then we need economic and institutional responses that don’t yet exist – and building them is work for economists, policymakers, and political leaders. What I can speak to is the human piece that any structural solution requires.
The quality we will all require. Nerve. Which is not confidence or optimism, but something harder and more demanding: the agency and determination to act when the outcome is genuinely unknown, because action is precisely what makes good outcomes possible. Nerve in this sense is not the belief that things will work out; it is the discipline to act well regardless of whether they do.
The Stoics understood this. Their position is not passive acceptance, despite the caricature – it is the most disciplined form of agency there is: radical clarity about what you cannot control, followed by total commitment to what you can. Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations while commanding an army and managing an empire in the middle of a plague. He knew a thing or two about holding his nerve, and he did the work not because he knew how things would work out, or even that they would work out – but because the work was his to do regardless. We can’t control what OpenAI or Anthropic build; we can’t reshape the global economy from the outside, but we can make determined choices about how we raise the next generation, and how we think about what it means to live a good life in uncertain times. That is not a small thing; it may even be the whole thing.
And there is evidence that nerve works. Those six facts I cited earlier – infant mortality falling in every country, extreme poverty collapsing, life expectancy doubling, literacy rising from 12% to 83%, 118,000 people lifted out of poverty every single day – none of them were inevitable or even obvious beforehand. They happened because enough people, over a long enough period, made good enough choices often enough for the trajectory to hold. That is the track record. Not of blind hope, but of human beings repeatedly holding their nerve under pressure, across centuries.
The nuclear threat is the case in point, because the parallels are closer than they might seem. That threat didn’t vanish because it was imaginary. On the contrary, it was sufficiently serious that we acted, and the problem became the raw material for the solution. Slowly, unglamorously, it was contained over the decades by diplomats who sat in rooms with people they didn’t trust, by scientists who argued for restraint when their governments wanted escalation, by activists who marched when marching seemed futile, by politicians who chose negotiation over posture. None of them knew it would work; many probably doubted that it would. They did it anyway, not because they were optimists but because they understood that the alternative to acting was not safety but surrender. That is what nerve looks like in practice.
The question with AI is whether we can summon the same collective will, and whether our institutions are capable of moving fast enough. That is genuinely uncertain, but the capacity is there and this is where the work of parents and educators must be. Any crisis must ultimately be navigated by people who think clearly, act collectively, and hold their nerve. Developing those people is, therefore, an essential part of the broader solution to the problem. Every treaty that contained the nuclear threat was negotiated by someone whose parents and teachers helped form their judgment. Every march was joined by someone who had learned that showing up matters even when the odds are long.
This doesn’t mean controlling the next generation or telling them what to think, still less pretending that we have the answers. It means having the kinds of conversations that develop curiosity, judgment, resilience, intellectual humility, and the disposition to contribute to something larger. Not because these qualities are nice to have, but because they are the operational requirements for navigating what’s coming. Education at its best allows younger generations to draw on the hard-won wisdom of older ones, rather than assuming they need to start from scratch – or worse, move fast and break things without understanding them first. We can’t inoculate our children against an uncertain future – but we can develop in them the capacity to meet it.
In his marvellous Culture novels, Iain M. Banks imagined a post-scarcity civilization where benevolent AI had long ago surpassed human intelligence, solved the resource problem, and liberated people to pursue meaning, art, adventure, and connection. Citrini also imagines a world where AI makes humans economically redundant, but the result is catastrophe. Same starting point, opposite outcomes. So the sky may be falling – it’s fallen before, and we’re still here. But which version of ‘still here’ we get depends on the choices we make, and on us having the nerve to make them.
Banks, I. M. (1987-2012). The Culture series. Orbit/Macmillan
Citrini Research & Shah, A. (2026, February 22). The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis: A thought exercise in financial history, from the future. Citrini Research. https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic
Freud, S. (1917). A difficulty in the path of psycho-analysis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XVII, pp. 135-144). Hogarth Press.
I have been very much struck by one of the most powerful and counter-intuitive but compelling books that I have come across in a long time. Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy seems to suggest a ridiculous idea; how can empathy be a bad thing? But the sub-title The Case for Rational Compassion raises the nuance of emotional response, and I think he raises some very easily misunderstood issues.
Bloom defines empathy as the ability to feel to some degree what others are feeling; and he notes how many have argued that this is at the root of moral behaviour – indeed, how lack of empathy is at the root of many evils. He notes that empathy has a lot going for it: “One of the best arguments in favour of empathy is that it makes you kinder to the person you are empathizing with”. Lab experiment bear this out – but as Bloom points out, lab experiments are by their nature short-term, immediate and constructed. The real world is so different to the lab – and this is Bloom’s argument – that the effects of empathy in the real world are completely different; so much so that empathy actually erodes rather than supports the behaviours we would want to see. For me, this was initially hard to swallow – but Bloom gives plenty of examples.
We often feel empathy for children – and we know that this empathy can motivate real concern and action. Many orphanages around the world have been the beneficiaries of this concern. But the effect here has not always been what we would hope – and longer term, Bloom argue that empathy has enabled the creation of an tourist-orphanageindustry and created pressure on poor parents to put their children into orphanages – often to make money for the ‘orphanage’ owner. Another example is giving money to child beggars. I have done it myself after my heart was tugged by the dirty ragamuffin carrying his baby brother and asking for a dollar. But by allowing myself to be swayed by my empathy, was I perpetuating his time as a beggar? Was I inadvertently giving him and his family a strong incentive for him to remain on the streets rather than get an education? Worse still, might I even have been contributing to the well-documented cases of gangs kidnapping children to create more beggars? Perhaps, in fact giving money was one of the worst things I could possibly have done for this child. Never mind my motivation; what was my impact? (TED talk on this topic)
This is tough stuff to read, as it holds up a mirror that is not always comfortable to look in. What is boils down to is that our good intentions, our deep empathy, our commitment to care, are not by themselves enough to make a better world. They are starting points but they must be combined with careful and critical attention, and while empathy can – must? – be a motivator, sometimes we get to better solutions if we can strip out the raw emotion. But don’t just take Bloom’s word for it – Ou Virak (@ouvirak), President of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights in Phnom Penh writes “Cambodia needs to get out of the beggar mentality. And foreigners need to stop reacting to pure emotion.“
Bloom is with Virak here, and he powerfully draws on his own experience of parenthood to make what was for me a compelling point; that while our empathy for our own individual children is natural, the very depth of that very specific and highly directed empathy can blunt our feelings for others. In what is perhaps a troublingly honest passage – at least for me – Bloom writes that “hearing that my own child has been slightly harmed is far more moving to me than hearing about the horrific death of thousands.” Parents, if we are honest, we know this is true. And his point is that our empathy naturally falls on those closest to us – relatives, friends, those like us, perhaps of the same nationality, race, gender, sexuality, tribe… in other words (and he runs through the evidence here) empathy actually opens us up to biases that are better left behind in civilised society. Now, none of this is to deny the important of family, but as Bloom acknowledges, anyone dealing with anyone outside immediate close circles cannot afford to indulge the natural biases to look after our own; to do so “would be fine…for a father, but… terrible… for a policy maker” and a poor moral guide to shape social choices. Looking around the world today, where this seems to be a driver of far-right behaviour, surely, this is wisdom that we need to pass on to our children and students.
If Bloom stopped there, this would be a valuable book. But he goes on further, and it’s hard not to go with him. Having dismantled the role of empathy at a policy level, he also eviscerates it at some professional levels. His basic point is a familiar one; that professions are rational at root – even (especially?) those involving high emotions. Anyone who think it is important for an empathic therapist to feel anxious or depressed while dealing with anxious or depressed people is missing the point of therapy. While it is quite possible that some prior experience of mental illness would enrich the therapist’s insights (which Bloom would say is compassion), for therapists to empathetically experience the maelstrom of depression when meeting patients would grievously impair their ability to help. So also for a doctor, teacher or parent. Bloom writes that “my worst moments as a father are not when I do not empathise; they are those when I empathise too much and cannot disengage from my children’s emotions to give them what they need – even when they do not realise it themselves.” Any parent knows this – we need people who counterbalance our emotional states, rather than dive right in with us. We need those who care about us to meet our panic with calm and our gloom with good cheer.
We do not need empathy to act. When my baby is scared of thunderstorms but I am not, I can understand her fear though I do not feel it myself. When my students are stressed, I understand why, even though I know it will be OK. That doesn’t mean I don’t care; it means I have rational compassion – not empathy. And it means I am better able to help than if I am in emotional turmoil myself. Compassion is feeling for and not feeling withand if Bloom is right, we should cherish it more than the easy and obvious empathy.
I have taken a while to get here, as Bloom’s claim is so counter-intuitive. But I think he is right; and furthermore, I believe he has helped me better understand some issues that I have been thinking about for a long time – for example, why Service is about so much more than just raising money and ‘doing good’ and also Why Critical Thinking is central to proper Moral Thinking. So there are immediate and practical applications of these ideas, and they can inform thinking in schools – and much further afield – on a daily basis.
This is not just a beautifully written, funny and moving book. Nor is it simply the application of deep thought to reach a surprising conclusion, or even a masterpiece of profound ideas packaged in a deceptively simple manner. More than that, this is an important book to anyone interested in making a better world – and all the more so as it jolts us out of our usual views, and nudges us towards deeper understandings. Bloom may not be entirely right (I have a hunch that empathy is the pre-cursor to compassion for example) but looking for cracks in his argument is a reward in itself.
References
Bloom, P. (2016) Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Ecco Books.
Every May, I watch them leave. They cross the stage, collect their diplomas and walk out carrying everything they have learnt – and earnt – with us: the confidence, the university places, the carefully cultivated ability to read a room, assess what’s needed and deliver it. They are, by any measure we use, well prepared.
Is this enough? I’m less sure than I used to be. Because what we prepare them for is the morning of their lives – the years of building, achieving, proving themselves. We are very good at the morning, but recently I have been thinking more about the afternoon.
We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning, Carl Jung observed. For what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. I don’t mean the midlife crisis of cliché – the sports car, the affair, the sudden urge to learn pottery. Jung’s point cuts deeper: the skills which make you successful in the first half may, if left unexamined, become the source of unhappiness in the second.
At school, we reward adaptability, resilience, the ability to move between cultures and feel at home anywhere. And for a while, often a long while, it works. Our students get the university places, the jobs, the career success. They shape-shift with remarkable skill, adjusting to each new context, apparently seamlessly. From the outside, it looks like flourishing.
Sometimes, anyway. I recently met a former student, call him Andrew, at an alumni event, about eight years after he’d graduated. He’d done everything right: top university, competitive graduate scheme, rapid promotion. So I was surprised when he said I’m not unhappy, I just don’t recognise myself. He wasn’t in crisis, but he was experiencing something perhaps even more unsettling: the realisation that the person he’d become was a reflection of other people’s specifications. Andrew was describing what the artist Dipa Halder calls the exhaustion of constantly working against your own grain – shaping yourself to fit what you think people want until you can’t tell the performance from the person. From the outside, everything looks fine, but you’re quietly disappearing inside a life designed for someone else.
I say this not as a critic of my own school. At UWCSEA, we think a lot about the question of who our students are becoming. We build programmes around character, service, self-knowledge; we talk explicitly about purpose and identity and we do not treat exam results as the finish line. It’s been central to what we do for decades. And still Andrew came back and said what he said.
But then there’s Vik. Vik was not, by any conventional measure, a success story while he was with us. He was the kind of student everyone liked but nobody quite reached. Bright enough, but he floated through school in a way that frustrated his teachers. He was all there as a person – you couldn’t miss Vik – but he coasted. By the usual metrics, he underachieved and left without the gleaming trajectory that Andrew carried so effortlessly. Life after school was uneven for many unexpected reasons, but he stumbled into business, found his footing – and then, somewhere in his twenties, something shifted. When we spoke, he had a different sentence: I think I finally know what my purpose is. He’s now building something in sustainability that matters to him in a way his earlier success never did. What strikes me is that while some seeds were planted at school, nobody engineered, or could have engineered, this. If anything, Vik’s morning was defined by friction – and maybe the friction itself was what saved him. He never built the seamless performing self that eventually trapped Andrew, so there was nothing to dismantle.
Two students, two very different paths to the afternoon. Andrew did everything the morning programme asked of him and lost something of himself in the process. Vik resisted the programme and took much longer to find his footing. But both arrived, eventually, at the same question: what is this actually for? Which suggests the question isn’t whether we’re doing it right or wrong. It’s whether any school can do more than set the conditions – and then wait. I wouldn’t want to let us off the hook entirely – I am sure we could do better, and perhaps I’m rationalising. But I suspect the deeper truth is that the afternoon is not a knowledge problem. Life will happen to everyone regardless of what we teach; we can give people the language to recognise the afternoon when it arrives, but we can’t live it for them.
So what can we do? Not, I think, deliver more talks about finding your purpose. We’ve been doing it for years already, and in any case teenagers tend to be allergic to that kind of thing (the rolling eyes are not only confined to parents). What we can do is something both simpler and harder: cultivate the habit of self-examination. Know thyself was carved into the stone at Delphi not as a suggestion, but as a prerequisite for entering the sacred space. It matters not because it solves the afternoon, but because without it you won’t even recognise the afternoon when it arrives. Andrew’s problem wasn’t that nobody warned him – it’s that he never developed the reflex of asking whether the life he was building was actually his. That’s a self-awareness gap, not an information gap. And self-awareness is something schools can genuinely cultivate – through the right questions, the right conversations, the right relationships – even if we can’t guarantee the outcome.
I still worry, though, because I know it won’t be enough. The real difficulty is that the afternoon can only be understood by someone who is already in it. We can’t expect young people to prepare for a version of themselves that doesn’t exist yet – not because they’re not listening, but because they would need to be a different person to understand it, and becoming that different person is precisely what the next twenty years will do to them. As Kierkegaard put it, life is lived forward and understood backward. There’s a freedom in that, if we let ourselves see it. We can give young people a great deal: knowledge, skills, confidence, even the language of self-reflection, but we cannot give them a self to reflect on. Nor should we want to – the self is theirs to build. It is assembled slowly, through experience, friction, loss, and the accumulating weight of choices made and not made. The identity you build in the morning – competent, adaptable, impressive – may become the very thing you need to escape in the afternoon. And no one can tell you that in advance, because the person who needs to hear it is still in the process of becoming.
I find this consoling. It means that the limits of what we can do for our students come from what it means to be human. Every generation of educators and parents has watched young people walk into lives that will reshape them in ways nobody can predict, and every generation has had to make peace with the fact that whatever happens in formal education, life will do its own teaching. We let them go, trusting that the same life which will unsettle them will also, in its own time, teach them what school couldn’t.
Jung, C. G. (1969). The stages of life (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Structure & dynamics of the psyche (2nd ed., Vol. 8, pp. 387 – 403). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1930)
Kierkegaard, S. (1938). The journals of Kierkegaard (A. Dru, Ed. & Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1843)
I have said to my own children many times: don’t put yourself under so much pressure. They invariably point back at me and my habits, and also their friends’ habits, and the competitive systems we all swim in. It’s a sharp response — and a perceptive one. What looks like a personal struggle, they seem to understand instinctively, is also located in our social structures.
It’s an issue worth sitting with. As parents and educators, we spend considerable energy asking how much pressure we should be putting on the young people in our care. We ask it less often the other way around: why do they put so much pressure on themselves? And why do we? Korean philosopher Han Byung-Chul has a clarifying and genuinely uncomfortable answer. In The Burnout Society, he argues that modern societies have shifted from being disciplinary — enforcing conformity through external institutions like schools, factories, hospitals, prisons — to being achievement societies, where the enforcement has moved inward. The architecture is different: fitness studios, open-plan offices, financial institutions, progressive schools, social media. But the logic is the same. Systems of power still depend on individuals internalising their place within them. We have simply moved, in his terms, from being obedience-subjects to achievement-subjects.
The crucial difference is that no one is making us do it anymore. We do it to ourselves — freely, voluntarily, and even with considerable enthusiasm. In the language of our moment, we are all entrepreneurs of ourselves. Sociologist Helmut Rosa captures what this looks like in practice: paramedics attending to people who have collapsed, who refuse to go directly to hospital because they have urgent matters at the office, and who demand their laptops once admitted to the clinic. I read that and felt the discomfort of recognition.
Han’s conclusion is stark: Disciplinary societies produce madmen and criminals. Achievement societies produce depressives and losers. The psychiatrist Alain Ehrenberg reaches a similar place: depression’s rise maps almost precisely onto the cultural shift from fixed social roles and inherited obligations to the demand that each of us become ourselves — take initiative, fulfil our potential, live up to the person we could be, become our full authentic selves.
I find that language increasingly difficult to sit with. Best self. Full potential. Not wasting your talents. I have used all of it — with my students, with my own children, and on myself. But when I read it back slowly now, it is the language of perpetual inadequacy. That view points to the gap between who we are and who we could be, laments it, and urges us to close it. The gap, however, never closes. It is designed to be unclosable.
Han’s sharpest insight is that no one is forcing us. ‘The achievement-subject’, he writes, ‘is lord and master of itself. However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom. Excess work and performance escalate into self-exploitation. This is more efficient than exploitation by others, for the feeling of freedom attends it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Perpetrator and victim can no longer be distinguished.’. I wince to wonder if Han is right when he says: ‘Individual competition… escalates into absolute competition. That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow. This self-constraint, which poses as freedom, has deadly results. …In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside them’
In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside them.
Han Byung-Chul
What might this mean for schools, and for families? Is it a coincidence that the search for improvement is now evolving into pathological perfectionism among many adults and children? I have long told students that they are working for themselves, not for me. I meant it as liberation but Han makes me wonder whether it simply relocates the pressure somewhere no one can see or question it, and calls that growth.
But I don’t think the answer is to abandon the values we care about — growth, resilience, creativity, critical thinking. These matter. The question is what relationship we model with them. Right now, I think many of us – and I include myself – treat them as permanent obligations, a checklist of self-improvement against which we are always falling short. What if we held them more lightly? Not as destinations, but as tools. Useful for now, appropriate for this moment, and possible to put down.
That is a harder thing to teach than any curriculum – and it begins, I suspect, not in the classroom but at the dinner table. My children already seem to understand something about the system we are all inside. The least I can do is be honest with them – and with myself – about what it costs, and what it would mean to want something different.
I read somewhere that New Years Resolutions should really be called New Year’s Absolutions – where we forgive ourselves for all our previous weaknesses and start afresh. I love the idea of absolution (that’ll be the ex-Catholic in me emerging) but there seem to me to be some questionable assumptions in there.
The idea, I think, that often seems to float in the back ground here is some sort of moral culpability about things that have gone ‘wrong’ (why else would we need absolution?). It kind of suggests that had we simply done things differently, we might have got what we wanted:
Not doing as well as you want in school? – not working hard enough!
Spending too much money? – not enough self-discipline!
Eating too much? – show some restraint!
Underneath all these things seems to be the notion that our problems have a simple solution – self-control; and if we can just master that then life will get dramatically better. Just say no! is the useless advice I was given so many times as a child. Now, nothing wrong with self-control, or saying no, of course, but experience suggests that simple exhortations from others, or simple promises to ourselves, are delusory. And so I have two thoughts about New Years Resolutions.
Firstly, we should balance our resolutions with some kindness to ourselves, and some realism about the way the world really is. For example, I went through a phase of always looking at my weight. I’m not sure why this was, as I know I am pretty healthy in this respect. But then, everywhere I look I seem to see fitter, leaner people than me – and I suspect that’s what’s driving this; some unhelpful comparative urge that is more based in vanity than anything else. And of course once I begin to see the world this way, I end up not seeing the vast majority of people who manage perfectly well with normal bodies (and I know it’s much worse for women – almost the whole of the advertising industry is designed to make them feel bad about their bodies). So body shape may be one resolution to flush away, and I suspect many others are the same – based in some fantasy notion of ‘better’ that’s as much a product of marketing as anything else. Some things are just fine, and we can accept them. No absolution needed.
But there are things that are worth striving for – being kinder, being more content, standing up to injustices and so on. My second thought is on following these aspirations, and that takes me back to self-control. After years of failing on the self-control front, I have come to think that relying on self-control is a mistake, at least in the obvious way. If I had the self-control already, I wouldn’t need the resolution. As Brian Resnick writes, if the aim is to eat fewer sweets, and then you find yourself in front of a pile of cookies, [then] the pile of cookies has already won. In other words, the best way to achieve your goals is not to exercise self-control, but to create situations that avoid the need for self-control in the first place.
That’s what Hofmann et al found in a study which asked participants about what desires, temptations, and self-control they were experiencing (using mobile phones to ask at random times across an average week). The findings were surprising; that people who reported themselves as having high levels of self-control reported fewer temptations over the week. That is, the very people who said they excel at self-control seemed least disposed to use it!
So this means that the alternative to the obvious ‘just say no’ self-control is to have the less-obvious self-control to set systems up to avoid temptation in the first place. The simplest examples are familiar:
want to get up early? setting the alarm on the other side of the room so you have to get out of bed requires a different and easier sort of self-control than saying no I will not go back to sleep
want to eat better? ensuring that you shop for food when you are full requires a different and easier sort of self-control than saying no to those cakes when you are hungry.
want to stay off your phone? turning off all the notifications on your phone requires a different and easier sort of self-control than ignoring the notifications when they happen. Switching your phone to black and white requires a different and easier sort of self-control than resisting the designed-to-hook interface on an ongoing basis
want to eat less? buying small rather than large plates requires a different and easier sort of self-control than not loading up plates when you are hungry (and has been shown to be very successful)
So the thing is to think carefully not just about the outcomes you want, but also the systems and structures that will help you get there. The examples above are quite transactional, but there are probably similar things for even the loftiest of goals:
want to be kinder? Avoiding scare-mongering news and social media (which are likely to generate anxiety and fear which do not support kindness) requires a different and easier sort of self-control than simply trying to be kind
want to be more content? Keeping a daily journal where you track all good things that happen to you requires a different and easier sort of self-control than just telling yourself you should be more grateful for what you have.
want to stand up to injustice? Joining and attending a group of similar minded people requires a different and easier sort of self-control than just hoping you’ll have the courage if and when the time come
[This third point is generally valid – surround yourself with the people who are most like the person you would like to be, because we tend to become like the people we spend most time with] Brian Galla sums it up nicely when he suggests that people who are good at self-control … seem to be structuring their lives in a way to avoid having to make a self-control decision in the first place. Perhaps it’s those structures and systems that we should be paying attention to, rather than the resolutions themselves.
There are few things more energising than feeling connected, part of a group, accepted, liked; and there are few things as dispiriting as feeling rejected, isolated, excluded. As parents and teachers, we see this play out time and time again with our children and our students, sometimes heartbreakingly so. In schools, some of this can centre around talk of the ‘popular kids’, who can seem to define the in- and out-groups. It has often struck me as deeply ironic that as far as I can tell the ‘popular’ kids are not actually very popular! When I put this to a few students, they responded with ‘like, duh!’, and so it’s hardly a new idea. But it is intriguing, and the title of psychologist Mitch Prinstein’s The Popularity Illusionjumped out at me.
Prinstein makes a fundamental distinction between two types of popularity. The first type, he argues, is closely related to status; that is whether someone is widely known, often emulated and able to bend others to their will. That’s status popularity. The other type, he suggests, is do do with how likeable someone is – it’s about people to whom we feel connected and whom we trust; the people we want to spend time with. That’s likeability popularity.
In-group and Out-group behaviour appears in most social networks. source
So ‘popular kids’ have one type of popularity, but not necessarily the other. They may be influential and have high status, but they may not be trusted, or very likeable. This simple distinction, Prinstein argues, is not just a school thing; it echoes across the adult social hierarchies as well and reflects our culture’s current relationship with popularity. Society has become fixated on status and all its trappings, fame, power, wealth and celebrity.
Prinstein’s survey of the literature and his own research indicates that seeking high-status is the wrong game to be in; it seems to be inversely related to health, happiness and career success, and he is blunt in his warning: Much as we might warn them about the dangers of substance-abuse, or risky driving, we should also offer our strongest cautionary messages to teens about the perils that come with excessively pursuing high status popularity in high school.
Prinstein suggests a plausible explanation as to why ‘popular kids’ do not seem to enjoy corresponding status after they leave school; because while the ‘most popular’ might enjoy power and influence in high school, [they] will quickly face a world where their aggressive tactics, their use of others to elevate their own standing, and their incessant focus on their popularity, ultimately lead to a lifetime of unsuccessful relationships. Conversely, the ‘non-popular’ kids rise up because the social struggle that many teens experience in high school… offer[s] lifelong advantages, as we need adversity to grow and to deal with the hardships in order to learn new skills. Because popular teens escape so many of the normal travails of adolescence, they pay the price in adulthood.
There are lots of nuances in Prinstein’s work. It is, for example, possible to have high status popularity and high likeability popularity – but it’s not common; only 35% on those with high status are also high in likeability. There are also interesting cultural aspects – in the USA status and likeability were very distinct; whereas in China adolescents with high status were far more often judged to be the most likeable. One might speculate that the individualist / collectivist paradigms might go a long way to explain this; this is certainly consistent with the finding that in the USA high status is often associated with high aggression whereas in China, high status is more often associated with low aggression.
A critical part of the book was where Prinstein turns to parenting. He’s a bit anodyne here, but the advice is sound:
Perhaps most important is that parents teach their children empathy as [a way to] embrace likeability instead of, or in addition to status. Teaching moments can present themselves routinely by asking children each day how they made others feel welcome happy or valued. Talking with your kids about the way you felt when you were a child also can help them understand emotions of others, as well as how short-term experiences evolve over a lifetime.
Interestingly, he notes that while supportive parenting is the key here, over-supporting is a danger – having parents who are hypersensitive to their child’s emotions and over protective is a strong predictor of unpopularity.
So this is a readable and thought provoking book; with the initial distinction about popularity being the big takeaway, because popularity is somewhat of a paradox; it is fundamental to human nature to desire to be popular, but that doesn’t mean that being popular is always good for us.
It’s not often that I read a book and question it, but still want to recommend it widely, and indeed to re-read it immediately. Dr. Madeline Levine’s The Price of Privilege is one such book. Though based largely on her clinical experience in California – and hence arguably very culturally specific – the anecdotes resonate with my experience as a teacher, principal and, I have to admit, as a parent in Singapore, Kenya, UK, USA and Switzerland. If you are an affluent parent, buy it, read it, and discuss it with children, partners and grandparents. This could be too important to miss.
Levine addresses the at-first-sight-baffling statistic that America’s newly-identified at-risk group is preteens and teens from affluent, well-educated families. In spite of their economic and social advantages, they experience among the highest rates of depressions, substance abuse, anxiety disorders, somatic complaints and unhappiness of any group of children in the country. In many cases their futures are far from clear, despite all the advantages that money can buy . Having grown up as a teacher and citizen to be thinking about the under-privileged and poor, I initially found this astonishing; but then I thought about my own experience in privileged schools that now run teams of counsellors which struggle to meet demand – not to help with violence or gang issues (as one reads in the news), but to deal with disabling anxiety and severe depression in students.
The phenomenon is relatively little researched. With high levels of parental involvement and high expectations, it is perhaps not unreasonable to think that ‘students like that don’t have problems’, as I was told by one headteacher a long time ago. But whatever our intuitions may tell us, we have to make sense of the stories and statistics that Levin highlights so powerfully, recognise the facts about children from affluent families in USA, and wonder what lessons we can learn in our own contexts.
It’s a rich book that defies easy summary but Levine’s central argument is a familiar one; that a culture of materialism arises when we (and she herself, as she makes abundantly clear) as parents are under-involved in the right things and over-involved in the wrong things. She is rightly careful not to give definitive lists of right and wrong, but what emerges are issues about high expectations spilling over into impossible pressure, and modern-lifestyles and plenty of resources allowing us to buy easy short-term solutions for our children when perhaps they would be better earned by our children. She also mentions the potentially damaging roles of retail therapy and domestic help.
I found her argument on the effect of materialism compelling. She is correct that materialism is not the same thing as having money; rather, it is a value system that emphasises wealth, status, image and material consumption – and of course is not confined to the affluent. High levels of materialism predict a lack of happiness and satisfaction (here is some interesting research) and it seems that materialistic kids have lower grades and higher rates of both depression and substance abuse than non-materialistic kids . This has to be right -and it’s why good schools place such emphasis on service to others, emphasise community over individualism and stress intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation. It’s also why seeking. comfort over all else, and meeting every individual preference is not a healthy thing to do for children.
Levine is wise not to fall into easy answers. She notes that connecting with our children is key; but as a mother of three acknowledges that there’s no formula for connection. Her stories – of school grades and of drunken parties – nevertheless illuminate the issue well. She also addresses a critical issue of the solidity (or otherwise) of the home. Using analyst Selma Greiberg’s haunting lyrical phrase ‘ghosts in the nursery’, she asks that we as parents identify the leftover, unresolved parts of our own childhood that still influence how we parent in the present. There is deep wisdom here. We all need to know what’s under the surface of our own psychological icebergs before we can be the people our children need us to be.
The argument is is not equally convincing across the board. I hesitated over her chapter on mothers and work (which some may find incendiary), and I wonder if there’s a broader social malaise here, one that may be technology related (which might explain why the tech-rich affluent suffer more). Do we expect life to be perfect and that our problems are solvable by the right upgrade? Do we see any irritation, disappointment or discomfort as an outrage against us personally? Does this feed and foster the materialism and perfectionism she decries, and thereby create a vicious circle? Others have certainly said so (see refs below). I am, however, convinced that this book has deepened my own thinking about parenting. Whether you agree or not; this is a book that all parents – especially affluent ones – should read.
We all know that examination times can be fraught. Even when they are not public ‘high stakes’ exams, everyone wants to do well, and so things can feel pressured. When they have not done as well as they would have liked, students can sometimes feel, that they are not making the progress they want, or even that they are moving backwards. That can be uncomfortable.
I think, though, that in supporting our students and children, there are some helpful attitudes we can adopt and do our best to convey to them, and these are to do with the very ways we think about progress. There may be some underlying hidden assumptions that are worth examining. Because learning is by nature intangible, we tend to think in metaphors to help us, and the most common metaphor for learning is as ascending a ladder or a staircase; the higher we go, the more we know. That feels like a natural way of thinking, mirroring as it does our students’ heights as they get older. The upwards model might involve passing through stages, as some psychological theories suggest, and it is essentially linear and unidirectional. It is of course reinforced by apparently even grading scales, like 1 – 7, or A* – E. In his now famous book Metaphors we Live By, George Lakoff argues that metaphors work not just by helping us in specific instances, but also by shaping our thinking in ways we do not anticipate. In this he is surely right; that’s the power of metaphor – but its also the danger.
If we think of staircases or ladders then we might expect learning to be steady, constant. A moment’s introspection, however, and any knowledge of the reality of how students actually learn, suggests that this staircase metaphor is not an accurate way to think about cognitive change. When we learn we know that we can make sudden breakthroughs, flounder around, or even regress in our understanding. This famous cartoon captures another model – and there is a lot to be said for it – but I came across something that really resonated with me as a better way of thinking about the whole process.
In his book Emerging Minds, Robert Siegler, professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University argues for a metaphor of overlapping waves. He argues that rather than stepping evenly from one stair to another, learning is more akin to “a gradual ebbing and flowing… with new approaches being added and old ones being eliminated… To capture this perspective in a visual metaphor, think of a series of overlapping waves” as the tide comes in. Sometimes, the waves come in strong and fast; but sometimes they don’t quite make it as far up the beach. Sometimes, there is a gap when the waters are quiet. These aren’t regressions – that’s just the way it is sometimes. So progress is not linear, and while we may want the waves far up the beach, sometimes we need to allow a period of retreat, and wait, confident that there is a rhythm to things.
Photo by Nathan Tran: https://www.pexels.com/photo/overlapping-sea-waves-16387808/
I like this metaphor; not only is it a more accurate view of learning than the staircase image; it’s also a more humane and forgiving one. Journalist Annie Murphy Paul asks “How many of us have felt distressed to see our children, or ourselves, “slipping back” into ways of thinking and acting we thought we had outgrown? What a difference it makes to see such episodes not as a failure to ascend to the next stage, but as part of the natural movement, the ebb and flow, of learning. “Slipping back” isn’t a shameful retreat from our goal—it’s part of the process of getting there.”
If the students themselves grasped this, then those who struggle might be kinder on themselves, and those who seem to be nailing things now would not fall into trap of thinking they have somehow ‘arrived’ as ‘finished products’. Critically, they might not be surprised if things do not go so well in future.
If we see learning and assessment in this sense, then perhaps we might find the grace to allow this approach to extend a little more broadly – to Colleges, relationships and perhaps even life itself. I hope we can move toward this more generous model of thinking.
The world is reacting to the war in Ukraine in an unprecedented manner. Moral condemnation, political outrage and commercial isolation of Russia is overwhelming (though not yet unanimous; and there are disturbing questions to ask about why this conflict is being treated differently to, say, the conflicts in Yemen, South Sudan, Ethiopia, South Sudan or Nigeria). Abhorrence of unfolding events is widespread and I know many have made personal contributions to, for example, the Red Cross or other charities supporting Ukraine. Organisations and individuals of all sorts are moving to action – which has to be a good thing. What might this mean for schools? Here I want to argue that hard as it may be, not picking sides is the right thing to do .
As a College, we have educated for peace for 50 years, and the way we do it is woven into our curriculum (see this white paper for details) But what should this look like today? I have a great deal of respect for the view that we should, as a school, be asking students to wear Ukrainian colours, posting support on our Instagram feeds, condemning aggression. These immediate and visible manifestations come from a place of solidarity and support – excellent. I wonder, though, if there are other considerations at play.
We have been asked about getting each of our PS, MS, HS schools (each under 1000 for Singapore social distancing still!) into the plaza for a show of solidarity, and pictures. I can imagine some striking images there – with our iconic globe in the centre – and it would have been a strong symbol. And there is certainly a place for symbolism (see this lovely piece from our College President, for example) but it can be hard to distinguish between symbols and token gestures, and I worry that events organised by teachers, where students come in groups that are too big for meaningful discussion, can indeed be tokenistic. I would worry that students attend these because everyone is attending; and that they would feel good they have “done something” and made statements, without due attention to understanding events or learning about complexity. The analogy with fundraising for a disaster is apt; we never simply pass a bucket around and ask people to chip in a few dollars; we look for understanding before meaningful action. Similarly, in this case we need to do more than ask for specific – even mandated – action.
The most worrying aspect of adult-run events is that they run the risk of presenting adults’ answers; they ask students to turn up and follow a predetermined course. These events can avoid the need for students to think for themselves, and to show the initiative needed to do something themselves. Our Mission is to educate for peace – not to demonstrate, lobby or post on social media for peace. So while demonstrations, lobbying and posts may emerge, they are not our goal as a College. Most importantly, we want students doing these things from a sense of internal conviction.
If we want to teach students to think for themselves, to be aware of the pressures on them to think one way or another, to think morally and critically then we need to resist the temptation to tell students what to think, no matter how strongly we feel (and just to be clear, I think we can all feel pretty strongly here). Anything else would be to set students up, in the long term, for lives of compliance, conformity and submission – which is not, in the long run, likely to lead to the positive peace we seek. Of course, exactly the same events, organised by well-informed, caring and determined students, have a completely different feel and message. They aren’t just things they have to turn up to; they are then substantive and authentic expressions of commitment to peace, and we are 100% behind the various ideas that have emerged from students and which will appear in the student-led focus week being organised. So while there are some things we choose not to do as teachers, we do encourage and support pretty much whatever students want to do for peace (without breaking any local laws)
What, then, does the College response look like?
1We’ll look after the children and adults in our care.
David Sobel famously argued ‘no tragedies before fourth grade’. He was talking about climate change, but the principle applies more generally and the underlying message is clear: first and foremost, do no harm. We need to look at the individuals in front of us; consider how they are reacting and plan in light of that – and that’s not just for our youngest students. We do not want to send anyone into disarray; so we’ll tread carefully, avoid the social-media lure of live-streamed disaster feeds, avoid crass national stereotyping; and monitor the mental health of our students. This is our first moral imperative.
2 We’ll educate ourselves and our students about the situation
If students are to stand for something, they cannot fall for anything. No one has a monopoly on truth, so we won’t be telling students what to think, or parroting any countries’ propaganda. We’ll draw on a range of sources and help them make informed, principled conclusions. We’ll examine traditional and social media critically; we will resist easy and self-serving moral outrage. That doesn’t mean automatically taking a neutral position (neutrality is a definite judgement that the evidence in a particular case is equally balanced on both sides – that’s not the case here) but any position needs to be an outcome from, not an input to any discussion. And in any case, picking a side is not educating for peace.
3 We’ll make education a force to unite people… for peace
If students feel safe (step 1) and the “What?” question has been answered (step 2) and then experience shows that there will be responses to “So what?” – which is to say, action. These may be statements, fundraising, collections, letter-writing, demonstrations, contact with schools in affected countries… all driven by students who want to enact the Mission, not just be told about it by adults.
So, to support all this to happen, we’ve constructed this document – Learning about Complex Issues in Current Events across the K-12 Continuum to scaffold teachers to open discussions in structured, intentional ways with the individuals in front of them (parents can use these too). It answers the question in the title of this post: What to do – by educating for Peace.
With thanks to many colleagues especially Gemma Dawson, Damian Bacchoo, Carla Marschall and Ellie Alchin for conversations here.
Sharing stories, expertise, and experiences from international educators around the world. In the spirit of amplifying diverse voices. TIE's blog space is not subject to editorial oversight. TIE bloggers have a long history in various aspects of international education and share their thoughts and insights based on personal experiences.
