At a recent conference on flourishing in the Anthropocene, I found myself sitting with two feelings that are not always easy to hold together: intellectual curiosity as well as deep discomfort.

The conference brought together urgent and necessary questions. What does it mean to flourish in an age where human activity has become a geological force? How might education respond to ecological collapse, climate grief, social fragmentation, and the exhaustion of systems built on extraction? Social, economic, educational, or political systems that survive by taking more than they give back. How do we reimagine education beyond competition, hyper-individualism, marketisation, and the narrow metrics of success that have shaped modern schooling?

These are important questions. They are questions educators cannot afford to avoid.

And yet, as I listened, another question began to form within me: who is being invited to answer them?

Much of the discussion returned, understandably, to colonization. Coloniality was named as a legacy we continue to carry: a way of thinking that separates humans from nature, privileges Western knowledge systems, reduces complexity by categorizing, and positions some people as knowers while others become objects of study. There were calls to disrupt colonial frameworks, to center marginalized voices, to rethink flourishing through relationality, land, community, ecology, and justice.

But as a person shaped by colonized histories, I felt a familiar unease. Too often, the colonized appear in such conversations as evidence, as metaphor, as moral urgency, or as intellectual raw material. Their histories are invoked to critique dominant systems. Their suffering becomes the foundation for reform. Their knowledge is referenced as a solution. But are they present as equal architects of the future being imagined? Isn’t that the urgent need?

This is where my discomfort sat. Is it enough to speak about colonial harm if the people most marked by that harm are not invited or consulted into the centre of the conversation? Is it possible that even well-intentioned reform can reproduce the same hierarchy it claims to resist? Could the message unintentionally become: we colonized you, and now we will teach you how to heal from colonialism?

This question is painful, but necessary. At a systemic level who should lead on this solution-the colonizer or the colonized? Does this feel I am segregating communities into categories, if it does, then I have succeeded in giving you an idea of how I feel sitting through these conversations.

Education has always been deeply implicated in colonial projects. It has classified, ranked, corrected, civilized, assimilated, and erased. It has taught some children to inherit the world and others to doubt their place in it. It has privileged certain languages, literatures, histories, epistemologies, and ways of reasoning, while treating others as local, informal, indigenous, spiritual, emotional, or anecdotal.

So when education now turns toward decolonization, sustainability, relational wellbeing, and the Anthropocene, it must do more than change its vocabulary. It must examine the architecture of participation itself.

Who designs the conversation themes?
Who frames the questions? Who is answering these questions? Who leads and who is led?
Who is cited as theory?
Who is invited as testimony?
Who is present in the room, and who appears only in the slides?

The Anthropocene is often described as “the age of man,” a term that captures the unprecedented impact of human activity on the Earth’s systems. But even this framing demands scrutiny. Which humans? Whose activities? Whose industrial revolutions, empires, economies, and appetites? To speak of “humanity” as a single factor risks erasing histories of responsibility. The farmer in India displaced by extractive economies, the Indigenous community in Africa defending land from business giants, the child/ren dying in war zones, and the corporation profiting from extraction and war are not equally responsible for the planetary crisis. Even allegiance makes a difference. Hence I sit in my confusion in these conversations.

At the same time, I wonder whether the Anthropocene should limit us only to the binary of oppressor and oppressed. That binary is necessary for naming injustice, but I strongly think it is not enough for imagining flourishing. If we remain only within the context of harm, colonized vs colonizer, oppressed vs oppressors, we may diagnose the system without learning how to truly live as equals.

I am grateful for the conference that reminded me that flourishing cannot be understood as individual achievement alone. It is relational. It is ecological. It is cultural. It is spiritual. It is linguistic. It is intergenerational. A flourishing student is not merely one who performs well academically, but one who is rooted, connected, purposeful, emotionally alive, critically conscious, and able to imagine futures beyond inherited limits.

But for education to nurture this kind of flourishing, it must resist the temptation to turn relationality into another fashionable framework. Land-based pedagogy, Indigenous knowledge, community epistemologies, photovoice, storytelling, and decolonial thought cannot become decorative additions to an unchanged system. They cannot be extracted from communities, translated into Western academic language, and then re-presented as innovation. That would not be decolonization. It would be epistemic recycling.

The deeper work is not simply to include marginalized knowledge in existing systems, but to ask whether the system itself is capable of being changed by that knowledge. This is particularly important for international education. Our schools often speak the language of global citizenship, intercultural understanding, sustainability, and human flourishing. Yet we must ask whether our curricula genuinely disturbs inherited hierarchies of knowledge, or whether they merely add diversity to a fundamentally Western frame. Do students learn that knowledge lives in many languages, landscapes, bodies, histories, and relationships? Or do they learn that some knowledge is universal while other knowledge is “context”?

Perhaps the real learning from the Anthropocene is not only that humans have damaged the Earth. It is that certain ways of living on this planet have been made dominant at great cost. For me, the most powerful question emerging from the conference was not simply, how do we educate for flourishing in the Anthropocene? It was: who gets to define flourishing, and for whom?

If the answer is still shaped primarily by those historically positioned as the definers of knowledge, then we have not gone far enough. To speak ethically about colonized histories, educators and institutions, the colonized cannot remain the subject of reform. They must be co-creators, critics, theorists, leaders, and designers of the educational futures being imagined.

My understanding through some insightful discussions with colleagues leads me to think that the Anthropocene asks us to confront planetary crisis; decoloniality asks us to confront historical and epistemic injustice; humanistic education asks us to hold onto hope, dignity, and possibility.

The work ahead is not to let the language of decolonization become another performance of institutional virtue, another woke word. It is to create educational spaces where those most affected by colonial histories are not merely remembered, referenced, or researched, but genuinely heard, trusted, and followed. Irony is that we have not even begun to have frameworks for listening, trusting or following, because the solution is always offered not co created. Only then can flourishing become more than a theme. Only then can education begin to repair what it has helped to reproduce. Only then can we ask, with honesty, not just what we learned from the Anthropocene, but what kind of humans we are willing to become first and shape later.