We Are Worldbuilders

A generation ago in The Parable of the Sower, visionary science-fiction author Octavia Butler imagined the future United States of America, our present, as a country descended into chaos; predicting disastrous impacts of social inequality, climate change, and the collapse of government institutions. Despite living through the worst tragedies a human can face, the protagonist leads a small band of traumatized people toward an imagined hopeful future, embracing change as a constructive force to build something different. Several years later, Butler had an interaction with a college student who asked whether Butler believed in her “doomed” predictions about America’s future. Butler’s response was rooted in the study of history shaped by a pragmatic humanism, “I didn’t make up the problems,” she replies, “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.” Relieving the student’s concern about the trajectory of her dystopian predictions, she offers, “...There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”(*)

As Octavia Butler recognized, world-building is not just a project of science-fiction. Through intention or its absence, built by us or built for us, the very real and shared world we inhabit is built bit by bit each day. So is our work in education a world-building project. Through the structures and systems we create and the pedagogies and practices we cultivate, we can either foreclose possibility, concede to inevitability, or become builders of a better imagined future. This was also John Dewey’s charge from the ascendent fascism of his time—the very period that informed Butler’s fictional dystopia—to our own today.

Few people in 1937 could imagine what the next decade held for them. That same year, Dewey—a founder of progressive education—and his colleague, Goodwin Watson, co-authored an essay, The Forward View: A Free Teacher in a Free Society, in which they described the relationship between education in the struggle for power and the shape of their world. “If there be any teachers who chose this profession because they imagined that in it they might stand securely aside from the turmoil of battle for power,” they wrote, “they will probably find the next decade or several decades very dismaying.” National identities curdled around rigid hierarchies, and where they weren’t dismantled, schools and state-sponsored clubs became closed sites of fanatical ideological reproduction for the students and teachers alike who remained. Some of the most highly educated and ambitious people of the twentieth century put their education to work building an infrastructure of deliberate dehumanization that began with law and terminated in death squads, gas chambers, and gulags. Fearing this transformation would come to the United States, Dewey and Watson challenged our collective purpose in their clear-eyed vision of a “free education” for a free society rooted in social cooperation and thriving democratic practice, sustained by active interdisciplinary inquiry and shared experience, and with teachers, students and schools as its living, beating heart. Or as they put it bluntly, “A free education is incompatible with fascism.” They understood that the worlds of possibility we build through our work in schools become the shared world in which we live, and the ways we learn become the ways we are. 

Today, Dewey’s ideals of a “free education” face a dual threat: overt censorship by would-be authoritarians and the more insidious distortion of education as an economic transaction. While authoritarian political threats to a free education can be seen in the gaps on library shelves, the infiltration of economic values into education risks reducing human beings to human capital in policy and practice. Through privatization, children and parents are treated as consumers of exclusive education products instead of citizens with rights to a free appropriate public education. The demands of testing in core content areas narrows the curriculum and devalues arts, world languages, and “specials”, or what we might otherwise call the humanities. Treating public schooling as primarily a workforce development project also leads to troubling conclusions about what it means to be educated and who gets to have an education: "What good is it to Walmart or Amazon if their employees read poetry in their spare time or understand American history?,” ask Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, “What use is it for the affluent class if lower- and middle-income earners can paint or play an instrument?” (*) “College and Career Readiness” even trickles down into early childhood and elementary grades, where developmentally appropriate learning through play gets displaced by direct academic instruction. At every step, schools get punished for serving already underserved communities, teachers get told to do more and more with less and less, and children get put into boxes, where they are subsequently measured and tracked as “outcomes” on a data wall. 

And what are the outcomes of an education system so closely aligned to economic values? A 2022 Gallup survey reported K-12 workers had the highest rates of burnout of any industry in the United States. (*) In another national survey of over 21,000 students, tired, stressed, and bored were the most common words they used to describe how they feel at school, and in an in-depth follow-up, “75% of all feelings students reported...were negative." (*) Even the rate of child suicide increases dramatically during the school year compared to the summer months. (*) If the purpose of a system is what it does, the purpose of American schools would seem to be to inflict unmanageable levels of stress, burnout, and disengagement on the adults and children who encounter it day to day. But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Much of what we value in our children’s education, and is essential to our mutual health and well-being, resists a precise dollar amount or direct connection to future earning potential. We are musical, poetic, artistic, historical, and often joyously inefficient tinkerers just as much as we are participants, willingly or not, in the economic and political systems of our times. And which practices in school communicate to kids and adults that our spiky, messy, complicated humanity is a group project worth taking on? In an age where generative AI can do just about anything quickly and efficiently, if we want students to do more than prompt AI-generated essays to be fed into the robo-grader back and forth forever, we must start by openly asking: What is worth thinking, writing, learning, and discussing? What are we going to build with this time we have together? 

The stakes of schooling grow even greater as we consider the damaging relationship of our economic and political systems to the sustainability of the planet. Environmentalist David Orr insists that all education is environmental education. The planet “needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane,” he argues, and that “knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world.” We must be vigilant that even progressive pedagogies engage critically with social and economic systems, distributions of power, and their relationship to our environment, not merely reproduce them in the classroom. 

If you feel like this is a lot to take on by yourself, you’re right, and organizers Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba remind us that, “Life will be a scramble, but we will not scramble alone. Together, we will fight for this world, to keep it.” (*) The present borders of the “real world”, the limits of our grammar of schooling, and the metaphors we use to think about teaching and learning are constraining, but these constraints are not the result of natural law and there is nothing inevitable or inherent about them. Where world-building predominates, inevitability gives way to possibility, and stultification gives way to reimagination. “Teaching is a radical act of hope,” history professor Kevin Gannon urges, “It is an assertion of faith in a better future in an increasingly uncertain and fraught present. It is a commitment to that future even if we can’t clearly discern its shape.” (*)

Not only is it possible to act on that radical hope to change the grammar of schooling, that humanizing grammar already exists within even the most traditionally structured schools: in electives, clubs, and extracurriculars at the periphery of the school day. Where students may not identify as “math kids” and brag about their latest test score, they’ll proudly wear jerseys to class on game days, feature their art club mural at the school entrance, and diligently practice their upcoming speech performance over lunch. What these spaces offer aren’t fads or gimmicks but, as Sarah Fine explains, “the hallmarks of a learner-centered system: trust, safety, and authentic care, where learners and educators co-design coursework.” (*) Each of these hallmarks can be used to transform the core experience of school, and it’s a commitment best taken in solidarity with the students we teach. To build trust, students must be trusted. To build safety and authentic care, they must feel safe and cared for in their full authentic selves. Anyone who has spent time with children understands, like it or not, they are world-builders. 

Near the end of Octavia Butler’s Parable, in the year 2027, after fleeing another tragedy our band of survivors weighs the risks of settling down and starting their community anew. Allie, a young woman who burned her house down to escape her abuser, opens herself to the invitation, “I want to build something, too,” she offers, “I never had a chance to build anything before.” As the group coalesces around this seed of hope, discussing the logistics of shelter and planting a winter garden, a man in the group, a father and former slave, adds that he’s built slave cabins before, but he’s “eager to build something better, something fit for human beings.” And so we, too, must ask about our work in communities, in schools, and with young people, even in the face of disastrous loss and an uncertain future: What is it about the world that is worth building, and are we dedicated to the work of building that better world alongside them? 

The work of the teacher remains thus, forever, a frontier task. Always the teacher must deal with life at its point of becoming. What has been and what is are the raw materials out of which students and teachers must create what is to be. Teaching will continue to be an adventure on the social frontier, where each new generation presses its advance toward an ever-growing American dream.

— John Dewey and Goodwin Watson, The Forward View: A Free Teacher in a Free Society, 1937