The revolution in education
Chapter 4 of the Open Conspiracy book
This is a very short chapter in which Wells vents his frustration with the education he received, which, he felt, did not prepare him for “the new world that dawns” and left him to his own devices to find the way to the open conspiracy.
“The new world demands new schools, … to equip everyone with clear ideas about history, about life, and about political and economic relationships…. A revolution in education is the most imperative and fundamental part of the adaptation of life to its new conditions” (pp25-26).
He thought of education as a means to “see that we have got the right mental habits and the right foundation of realized facts. There is nothing much to be done with our lives until we have seen to that.” (p 26) The statement echoes the ideas of Horace Mann that free public education is the route to a democratic society of equal opportunities.
In his call for a revolution in education, Wells understood that education is as much about skills as it is for ethics – the right mental habits. National education systems serve myths of nationhood [1] and play an important role in the socialization of young citizens through the transmission of “facts” about the past and the present, and the mental habits of understanding them. Facts that we learn at school and hold true for the rest of our lives are a very important source of identity as well as bias and bad judgment.
The Gapminder Foundation fights bias and bad judgment by correcting common misconceptions about the world we live in. I was raised in a world of 3bn people and was educated in mental habits that reflected the planet of 2bn people that my teachers grew up in. Are those mental habits appropriate for today’s world of 8bn people? Gapminder can equip me with the right facts, but can I really adjust my thinking to those facts? Have education systems, practices and habits adjusted to the world we live in?
Education is a space of continuous change, just like the world we live in. A great deal of it is driven by a search for an appropriate balance between skills and mental habits associated with employ-ability and social integration through employment. I will not discuss much of this, for the emphasis here is on civic mindsets and the way they are shaped by awareness of facts. So I will focus on the teachings of history and humanities and the role of the internet and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education. These are areas where education shapes the potential reception, and impact, of the open conspiracy.
In 2001, I heard an eminent anthropologist refer to a European history book, being written in Wuppertal, Germany, which did not mention war and oppression, but instead used words like contact and influence. "My mother tells a different story", he commented. For a while I was captivated by the witty commentary. Having lived the crisis of the Eurozone, the migration crisis, “Brexit”, and the COVID 19 crisis I have now come to believe that putting that book in every primary school in Europe would have been the best antidote for the crises of the European Union.
The facts carry their own narrative. This is inescapable. Narratives serve bigger causes, and those causes give narratives moral strength and moral consequences. Education narratives should serve respect, truthfulness and curiosity, and should oppose bias, bullying and subjugation.
Gapminder would not have been possible without the revolution in information sharing that has been enabled by the internet. The internet enabled unparalleled access to information thus facilitating education and at the same time undermining its functions and institutions. On the internet encyclopedic facts coexist with imaginary ones, bias promoted by advertising, and deliberate propaganda and misinformation. Social media channels are, at the same time, Ivan Illich’s dream of convivial networks of skills [3] - you can learn to make almost everything - and cesspools of lies and propaganda.
Trained on data, AI encroaches on the role of educational institutions to uncover and establish facts and ensure their transmission to younger generations. The European Educational Research Association, while recognizing the important potential of AI for academic work and writing, reiterates the concern that AI could undermine the development of critical abilities and other important skills in students [2].
Harari argues that AI, by virtue of its capacity to analyze and synthesize text, is a threat to the moral authority of humans and their institutions. AI can remember more text than any professor, priest or judge, the argument goes. So when authority is based in knowledge of texts, humans do not stand a chance. Recognizing this as a perilous state of affairs, he tells of conversations with leading creators of AI, who, at the same time are really scared and delude themselves that AI judgement can be morally better than human judgement.
There is no doubt that education affects moral judgement, and this is why education is at the heart of the open conspiracy. Understanding the global impacts of human activity, from climate change to pollution and loss of habitat for species that are do not fit inside the human economy needs to be central in the reflection about what “to do with our lives”.
The shaping of moral judgment by education is not understood only by open conspirators. During the past 15 years the New Yorker has been documenting the withdrawal of government from education in the US, and the rise of a conservative movement against “wokeness”, aiming to eliminate themes associated with discrimination. In a rare intervention of the Federal Government in primary and secondary education, Executive Order 14190 of January 29, 2025 titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling”, seeks to stop education from “imprinting subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on … children”, in particular “discriminatory equity ideology”, i.e. any “ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups”.
The idea is not to stop discrimination. Profiling – a practice that treats individuals as members of groups – is very common in areas as diverse as banking and security. The idea is rather to exclude discussions of such practices from educational settings, where people may awaken to the fact that, much like climate change, discrimination is not inescapable and should be challenged on moral grounds.
References
[1] Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism (Revised edition). London: Verso.
[2] Gerlich, M. (2025). AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking. Societies, 15(1), 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006
[3] Illich, I (1971) Deschooling Society, Marion Boyars, Sheffield
