About the Book
Our world is currently undergoing major transformations, from climate change and politics to agriculture and economics. The world we have known is disappearing and a new world is being born. The subjects taught in schools and universities today are becoming irrelevant at faster and faster rates. Not only are we facing complex challenges of unprecedented size and scope, we're also facing a learning and capacity deficit that threatens the future of civilization.
Education in a Time Between Worlds seeks to reframe this historical moment as an opportunity to create a global society of educational abundance. Educational systems must be transformed beyond recognition if humanity is to survive the planetary crises currently underway. Human development and learning must be understood as the Earth's most valuable resources, with human potential serving as the open frontier into which energy and hope can begin to flow.
The expansive essays within this book cover a diverse array of topics, including social justice, the neuroscience of learning, deschooling, educational technology, standardized testing, the future of spirituality, basic income guarantees, and integral meta-theory. As an invitation to re-vision the future of schools, technology, and society, Education in a Time Between Worlds replaces apathy and despair with agency, transformation, and hope.
About the Author :
Dr. Zachary Stein is a writer, speaker, and transformative educator working to bring a greater sense of justice and sanity to education. Zak was educated at Hampshire College and Harvard University, during which time he co-founded Lectica, a non-profit organization dedicated to redesigning standardized testing infrastructures. He has taught classes at Harvard University and Meridian University, and has been invited to speak at a wide range of venues, from the National Security Agency to off-the-grid spiritual retreat centers. Zak currently serves as the academic director for the Center for Integral Wisdom, and offers human development and learning science consultations to schools, organizations, and educational technology companies. He lives with his wife in Vermont.
Review :
Advanced Praise for "Education in a Time Between Worlds"
Dr. Stein is right, schooling needs to change radically--and virtually every change that our worldwide culture needs at this time depends upon educa- tion itself. So there literally isn't a more important topic anywhere, which is what makes this book so incredibly significant. Education in a Time Between Worlds touches on all sorts of deeply important and urgent issues, takes a fair and judicious stand on virtually everything it discusses, and opens many areas too little discussed but too important to miss. This work stands on that extraordinary edge of history in which we all find ourselves moving and breathing, and the ways that it handles this staggeringly crucial topic are profound, inclusive, brilliant, and urgently needed.
--Ken Wilber, Founder of Integral Institute, author of over twenty books, including Trump and a Post-Truth World
Education is the cornerstone of democracy, not because it produces human capital, but because it enables participatory citizenship and the full actual- ization of self. During a time of global educational and humanitarian cri- sis, Stein's essays argue brilliantly for a vision of education that transcends reductive measurement tactics and genuinely empowers the world's youngest citizens, and the teachers to whom they are entrusted, to learn and live well.
--Mary Helen Immordino-Yang Ed.D. Associate Professor of Education, Psychology & Neuroscience, Brain& Creativity Institute; Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California
As is our education, so will be our civilization. Yet with innumerable factors shaping education today, to envision an appropriate education system for our time we need an encompassing framework and a big picture view. Education in a Time Between Worlds offers this and more: a vast integral view, a brilliant, incisive, and far-reaching analysis of the many factors misshap- ing education and society today, and a vision of what education and society could be tomorrow.
--Roger Walsh MD, Ph.D. Professor of Psychiatry, Philosophy and Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
Dr. Stein has given us a set of essays on education during the opening de- cades of the 21st century that soon escape their boundaries and overflow into the fabric of the entire culture. Not since William Irwin Thompson have we experienced such penetrating and richly engaging landscapes of cultural criticism.
--Allan Combs, Ph.D. Professor and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies, California Institute of Integral Studies
Not since John Dewey has the world seen a thinker with the perspective, knowl- edge, and foresight of Zachary Stein. There are few books that can be described as truly transformative, in the sense of immediately altering our perspective and action in this world - Stein's book is one of those few. Education in a Time Between Worlds is a timely masterpiece -- it illustrates to the reader both where we stand in the history of our cultural evolution and how design decisions in the field of education will be instrumental in shaping our future. Every school and university administrator, every government official, every teacher and every student of education should read this book, deliberate over its contents and work together with passion, perspective, knowledge, and foresight to transform the way we learn together in the future.
--Mike Hogan, Ph. D. Senior Lecture in Psychology, National University of Ireland, Galway
