Zak Stein talks to Jim about, societal change, intergenerational transmission, the nature of education, teacherly authority, parenting, schooling, and much more...

Zak Stein has a wide-ranging talk with Jim about our culture's dwindling capacity to understand & address today's increasingly complex problems. Zak starts by defining this moment as a time between worlds & draws its connection to societal transformation. They go on to talk about the meta crisis, intergenerational transmission, negative educational impacts of reductive human capital theory, the culturally integrated & interdependent nature of education, education vs information, the importance & broad reach of teacherly authority, postmodern influences on academia & educational reform, regenerating parental education, pharmacological impacts on schooling, raising vs designing children, the developmental necessity for unsupervised play, and much more.

Episode Transcript

Mentions & Recommendations

Zak's Website

Zak's book, Education in a Time Between Worlds

The Future of Human Nature by Jürgen Habermas

Zachary Stein is a writer, educator, and futurist working to bring a greater sense of sanity and justice to education. He studied philosophy and religion at Hampshire College, and then educational neuroscience, human development, and the philosophy of education at Harvard University. While a student at Harvard, he co-founded what would become Lectica, Inc., a non-profit dedicated to the research-based, justice-oriented reform of large-scale standardized testing in K-12, higher-education, and business.

He has published two books. Social Justice and Educational Measurement which was based on his dissertation and traces the history of standardized testing and its ethical implications. His second book, Education in a Time Between Worlds, expands the philosophical work to include grappling with the relations between schooling and technology more broadly. He writes for peer-reviewed academic journals across a range of topics including the philosophy of learning, educational technology, and integral theory. He’s a scholar at the Ronin Institute, Co-President and Academic Director of the activist think-tank at the Center for Integral Wisdom, and scientific advisor to the board of the Neurohacker Collective and other technology start-ups.