Zak Stein talks with Jim about existential risks of our education systems, revolutions, attention, educational tech, standards, 4 quadrants of systems, and much more...

Zak Stein talks with Jim about the existential risk of oppressive & unjust education systems, the inefficiency of injustice, how Zak sees social justice, Rawls veil of ignorance, creating new types of people, dynamics of revolutions, limitations of cognitive science & neuroscience, the power of attention & imitation in education, educational tech dangers, four quadrants of systems, complexity science, the difficult problem of official knowledge & educational standards, teacherly authority, changing how people think, rethinking digital affordances, and much more.

Episode Transcript

Mentions & Recommendations

Part 1: EP57 Zak Stein on Education in a Time Between Worlds

Zak’s Website

Zak’s book, Education in a Time Between Worlds

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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.