Future Serious Resources for February 16, 02025
No. 8: Progress? ⊗ Microschools ⊗ "Solving" the Metacrisis
Hey,
Hope you are doing well wherever you may be in this crazy moment in history. Keep breathing.
I just want to start with a quick programming note…
I’m seven weeks in to this new Substack site, and very happy to have over 400 of you reading. (Thanks this week to Kate K., Jess M., and Martin M. for their generosity as paid subscribers!) I hope you’ve found the posts here useful, and, if so, I hope you’ll tell your friends! The more we have joining us on this expedition through chaos, complexity and collapse, the stronger and better we’ll become in navigating it.
Which leads me to the name change that you might have noticed on the site and on the newsletter. I decided originally to take the title that I had used for my manifesto and just port it over here, but I’ve since realized that a) it’s a mouthful when it come to the name of a newsletter, b) that really this work is more about becoming “future serious,” both in our personal and professional lives, and c) I might as well stay true to the domain name I chose at the start (futureserious.school). So, that’s the new (and hopefully permanent) name of this site from here on out.
The focus will remain primarily on “confronting education” and on how we much rethink the schooling experience for our children. But all of us need to get more future serious, whether we are inside of schools or out. That is the work, right now, and my goal is to support all of us in that. I hope that all makes sense.
Either way, it was another week of too much good stuff to read than space to share it. But here are some of the most important links I found for you this week.
~Will
This is “Progress”?
As we careen further into the “Three Cs,” (chaos, complexity, and collapse, for those new to this conversation,) it seems more and more people are starting to interrogate (to put it mildly) our current narrative of “progress,” especially the one held near and dear in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) countries in the Global North.
My favorite (and very lengthy) deconstruction of that narrative was written by the Consilience Project last summer under the title “Development in Progress.” It was one of about a dozen links that I tagged “mustread2024,” as in one of the most mind-expanding of the year.