sample chapter from the sapience curriculum

 welcome to now 

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. 

H.G. Wells

Have you ever wondered why you and the people around you are suffering? Don’t you find it strange that you’ve landed here in adulthood, in the midst of a wicked planetary crisis, with minimal preparation to meet the challenges of our day? Have you ever suspected that your education may have been an exercise in futility and a waste of precious time?

As a literate person, you’ve spent plenty of time in schools of various sorts. You’ve worked your way through the primary grades and high school and maybe even done some time in college and beyond. Maybe you were a good student, dutifully learning the material that was handed to you, all under the belief that someday, all the hard work would pay off and you’d be ready to excel, or at least make a decent go of it in the grown-up world.

But when the day finally arrived, you were shocked to discover a world in chaos. The realities of looming ecological disaster, social injustice, pandemics, and other systemic ills suddenly came into focus and you began to feel radically unprepared, even incompetent. To be sure, you’re well equipped with specialized knowledge and you may have even performed well on standardized tests, but suddenly, none of that seemed to matter. What you really need is a perspective and an orientation, a philosophy that can see you through the chaos, uncertainty and ambiguity of our time. But no one ever seemed to teach that.

So maybe you’re wondering: Why isn’t there a school, a course or a program that speaks directly to the human predicament as it is and as it will be? Why do we spend so much time learning various subjects only to discover on graduation that those subjects may be entirely irrelevant to the conditions that we inhabit? Why didn’t anyone teach us about activism and how to change our dysfunctional world? Why didn’t anyone teach us how to recover our continuity with the planet and one another? Why doesn’t our educational system teach us about the root causes of our distress?

The disconnect is striking and extremely upsetting. For many, it may well feel as if we spent our entire young lives preparing for a world that doesn’t actually exist. Even worse, it sometimes seems that the education we did receive was more of a distraction than a conscious, intentional preparation for reality. And worse still, we might even come to suspect that conventional schooling, far from being a solution to our predicament, may actually be a root cause of our suffering. Maybe our standard curriculums actually create the culture that’s proving so destructive to both people and the planet. In other words, we aren’t just unprepared, but actually disprepared to meet the real-world challenges of our age. You might even feel duped.

panorama

This book is a guide for teachers, trainers, coaches, health professionals, parents and anyone who works with the human animal. It’s designed as a remedy for our discontent and an antidote to education-as-usual. It’s a set of ideas to recover our lost wholeness and prepare ourselves for the world we actually inhabit. The central theme is relevance, especially the challenge of teaching our students, clients and patients how to adapt to the radical changes that lie in the near-term future. Think of it is the curriculum you never had.

This book is aimed at the common ground that unites today’s teaching professions, especially our shared interest in promoting the health and function of the human animal. In conventional settings, many people assume that teachers, trainers, coaches, therapists and health professionals inhabit significantly different worlds. Each has its own curriculum, its own professional organization, its own standards and its own practices. 

But when we look closer, the differences seem minor, even trivial. In fact, it’s the overlap between these professions that really matters. We have more in common than we might think and ultimately, our job description is identical: put the human animal back in touch with the continuities that sustain life. 

No matter your specific professional niche–teacher, trainer, coach, therapist or health professional–you can use the ideas in this book to empower your clients, students, or patients and bring them a greater sense of relevance, health, meaning and purpose. These ideas can function as supplements, as sparks for inspiration, or as starting points for class discussions and writing assignments. Or, you can simply use them to advance your own understanding of life and your preparation for the future.  

why we need this

In all likelihood, civilization as we know it is reaching the end of its run. The alpha issues of our day–social injustice, pandemics and ecological emergencies–are getting more daunting with each passing hour. We are face-to-face with deeply embedded, systemic problems that only seem to get worse with the passage of time. Our life-support systems are in sharp decline and humans everywhere are beginning to feel the stress. Our bodies and our spirits are suffering and in one way or another, many of us are traumatized.

Not only is this new era unprecedented, it’s highly dynamic and fluid. Much as we might like to pretend otherwise, we’re in unexplored territory now. We are, as the poet Rumi would have put it, “between stories.” We don’t know how to live and we’re confused about what to teach. Even worse, many of our educational institutions have failed in their basic mission and now function mostly as sorting mechanisms for moving students into academic and social pigeon holes. And most disturbing of all: we simply have no education for turmoil, resilience, crisis management or wise action in the face of existential uncertainty.

radical relevance

To get the most out of this book, it’s essential to understand the deep nature of human adaptability and the power of training. In this domain, the bedrock principle comes from the world of athletic coaching. As every experienced trainer knows, the body makes extremely precise, subtle and specific adaptations to the physical demands it encounters. And of course it would be this way; the human body is millions of years old and has survived precisely because of this nuanced ability to adapt. We have a long history of shaping our bodies to the conditions we experienced in natural habitats.

In the world of athletic training and physical therapy, coaches often talk about the power of the SAID principle: Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands. No matter what you throw at the body, it will do everything it can to remodel itself to make future encounters with that experience easier. Challenge the body with strength training and it will immediately go to work growing muscle fibers, tendons, ligaments and nervous system support. Challenge the body with endurance activity and you’ll see microscopic tissue-level changes, perfectly specific to that kind of experience.

All of this makes sense at the level of athletic training and rehabilitation, but what most of us fail to realize is that this process of specific adaptation takes place continuously throughout our lives. The body–especially the nervous system–is constantly building new pathways and structures to meet whatever demands it encounters. This is why trainers everywhere are always on the lookout for ways to simulate real world challenges. Coaches don’t just give their athletes random drills; they study the detailed demands of the upcoming season, including the challenges of competition and the playoffs, then craft their training accordingly. The more precise, the better. 

We see the same process in all high performance environments. In medical school, trainers attempt to create precise simulations of surgery, emergency room encounters and other clinical practices, even going so far as to build detailed mock-ups of the physical surroundings. In the military, trainers prepare special-op teams by constructing actual full-scale buildings to mimic the conditions they’re expected to encounter in the field. Every detail of the operation is practiced in advance; the more specific the training, the better the adaptation and ultimate performance. The closer you can get in training, the better your chances of doing the right thing in real life.

This is precisely what ought to be happening in the world of education. In fact, we can think of the entire educational enterprise as a simple, two-step process:

First, determine as best you can the characteristics and qualities that your student, athlete or client will encounter in coming years.  

Second, train your people specifically for that anticipated set of conditions. 

If you get the first step right, the second step will mostly take care of itself: your assessment of future conditions will tell you exactly what to do with your students and clients. But if you ignore step one or make a poor assessment of the conditions your people are likely to encounter, then the second step will inevitably be flawed, irrelevant or even destructive. 

Which of course, is precisely what we’re doing in conventional education. Even as scientists give us well-founded assessments of our climate, biodiversity, and social crises, we continue to ignore, distract, minimize and above all, hope for the best. In this sense, modern schooling can be accurately described as a cultural case of magical thinking.

Ideally, all human education ought to follow a simple axiom: “Teach reality” or “Teach the truth.” Or as many young people are now demanding: “Teach the future.” In fact, one of the biggest mistakes a teacher, trainer or coach can make is to train students in skills and perspectives that don’t match up with the environment or setting they are actually going to inhabit. Obviously, reality and truth are open to interpretation, but there can be no dispute on this score: a failure to honor reality guarantees a failure of education. 

Getting education right means understanding and preparing students intentionally and specifically to meet the future. But as it stands, our current educational efforts might best be described as “Teaching for a future that we hope is going to happen.” In most modern high schools, the one big idea that drives everything is “get good grades so you can get into college.” And once you’re in college, the one big idea is “get an advanced degree.” But these are weak, artificial objectives that have little to do with actual challenges on the ground. By itself, a degree is no preparation for the psycho-physical challenges of rising sea levels, groundwater depletion, species extinctions and social chaos. We need something specific, targeted and relevant.

big history and hockey sticks

To make matters worse, the modern school system is utterly failing to heed the essential lessons of Big History, especially big human history. Most history books treat our indigenous, hunter-gatherer experience as an insignificant prologue to the glories of civilization, but in fact, the story of human prehistory holds vital knowledge about who we are and what we might become. It has immense explanatory power and is highly integrative–a big idea that wraps up disparate ideas into a coherent and extremely useful whole.

When human history is taught in modern schools–if it’s taught at all–it’s usually presented as a set of archaic curiosities. Our ancestors are described as primitive, brutish and unsophisticated. In our rush to celebrate the modern age of human supremacy and progress, we leapfrog over the vast majority of our time on Earth, ignoring the very paradigm that might help us find our way to a functional future. In other words, we are wasting one of the most powerful ideas in the human repertoire. 

To put it bluntly, most educational programs fail to set people up for success. This stems from a failure of our imagination and our inability to appreciate the nature of social, cultural and technological change. Most educators work under the assumption that their students will encounter a world substantially the same as the one we inhabit right now. We assume that tomorrow will be just like today, but we are tragically, spectacularly wrong about all of this. 

In fact, our immediate future is best described by the hockey stick, the classic graph of radical change over time. This acceleration is most obvious in climate models and in human population growth but today we see a similar dynamic everywhere we look: technological change, destruction of habitat, species extinctions, soil degradation to name a few.

For hunting and gathering tribes in the Paleolithic era, change was extremely slow and it would have been safe for elders to assume that conditions for future generations would be more or less the same as their present day. And even through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early days of the 20th century, change was slow enough that education-as-usual would suffice. But today, radical change is a non-negotiable fact of life. 

Sadly, modern education makes no attempt to address this reality; it’s easier to simply assume convention. We seem to believe that our systemic, planetary problems are nothing more than temporary, intermittent set backs; if we just try harder, everything will get back to normal and our students will succeed. But radical change is not going away. Acceleration is here to stay–at least until something breaks.

The hockey stick presents us with a monstrous psycho-physical challenge, the greatest in human history. Human life is hard enough as it is, but now it’s going to change in ways we can scarcely understand. We are psychologically and spiritually unprepared for what’s about to come. It’s no wonder we’re so stressed and fearful.

assumptions and predictions

So what exactly is the specific nature of our near-term future? What kind of world will our students, athletes, clients and patients actually inhabit? Opinions vary, but a preponderance of the evidence suggests that the following events will unfold in coming decades. These consequences are not inevitable, but highly probable:

Human impact will continue to wreak havoc on the biosphere and life-supporting systems.  

Substantial, even catastrophic increases in sea levels will inundate coastal cities and poison fresh water aquifers around the world. Mass migrations involving millions of people will become commonplace. 

More people will compete for increasingly scarce resources, including fresh water. Continued degradation of soil, habitat and biodiversity will lead to ecosystem crashes, with serious impacts on agriculture and food supplies. 

Energy will pose an enormous challenge. Poisonous fossil fuels will remain in widespread use, but green energy is unlikely to be an adequate replacement. 

Plastics, toxic chemicals and endocrine disruptors will continue to be produced and will pollute soil, water, oceans and human bodies.

Human contact with the microbial world will increase. Viral pandemics and antibiotic resistance will become increasingly problematic across the human population. 

Social inequality and racism will continue to divide society, and the gap between rich and poor will continue to hamper efforts towards social justice. Gated communities of various sorts will become increasingly common.

Global supply chains will become unreliable, leading to shortages of food and products that we’ve come to rely on.

Corporate power will continue to dominate government, public life and cultural narratives.

Lifestyle diseases such as obesity and diabetes will continue to plague a large percentage of humanity, putting continued pressure on health and medical resources.

No matter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, various forms of Trumpism–the right wing embrace of authoritarian power and tyranny, backed up by violence–will continue to wield influence in America and abroad.

This assessment may sound like defeatism, but it is not. The facts are clear. Even with massive, unified, coordinated efforts across society, we are unlikely to avoid major systemic shocks and a possible failure of civilization itself. And none of this should come as a surprise. Most of this was predicted by William Catton in his 1980 book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. In short, Catton’s thesis was that humanity has been living beyond the carrying capacity of the planet for quite some time and now, we’re due for a reckoning. 

We hope for a quick fix in the form of green energy, but no amount of technological innovation is going to solve our crisis. On the contrary, more technology will simply do what technology has always done: provide a temporary reprieve from ecological reality, kicking the can down the road. So yes, our predicament is real. As author David Wallace-Wells has put it, “It’s worse than you think... no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough.”

overlapping crises

In 2020, the coronavirus epidemic and the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake dominated our attention and rightly so. But the degradation of the biosphere didn’t slow and the bad news continued unabated. Headlines in the summer of that year included: 

“Earth accelerating towards sixth mass extinction event that could see the disintegration of civilization” 

“Earth’s carbon dioxide levels hit record high, despite coronavirus-related emissions drop... more carbon dioxide in the air now than at any time in 3 million years”

“Warmest May on record, Siberia 10C hotter”

“Climate worst-case scenarios may not go far enough, cloud data shows”

“Physicists: 90% Chance of Human Society Collapsing Within Decades”

“By 2070, More Than 3 Billion People May Live Outside the ‘Human Climate Niche’”

“Canada’s Last Fully Intact Arctic Ice Shelf Collapses”

“Warming Greenland ice sheet passes point of no return”

“Record Arctic blazes may herald new ‘fire regime’ decades sooner than anticipated”

What’s sometimes lost in the conversation is that issues of social justice, racism, viral pandemics and the health of the biosphere are radically interdependent. All of these problems stem from a common root–our dysfunctional relationship with the natural world and with one another. If we’re to make progress in any of these domains, we need to take a comprehensive, systemic, inclusive, and relational approach. Above all, it’s essential that we keep our eye on the ball, which is to say, the planet. Because if the biosphere fails, nothing else matters. As Naomi Klein put it: “When your life support system is threatened, all other problems fit inside that problem.” In other words, the state of the biosphere remains and will always be the alpha issue of our day.

education for the near-term future

No matter the details, we can say with certainty that the near-term future is going to be marked by high levels of uncertainty, ambiguity and stress, if not outright chaos, suffering and desperation. And so the obvious question: how do we prepare our students, clients and patients for this unprecedented reality? Clearly, tweaks and refinements to conventional schooling aren’t going to do it. Fancy new “teaching techniques” aren’t going to do it. What we need is an entirely new approach to education at all levels, one aimed directly at the realities of the human predicament

Our near-term future will demand a unique skill set, one that is certain to diverge from our conventional academic subjects and familiar professional roles. In the face of systemic break down and episodic chaos, we can say with confidence that practical skills will become increasingly important for survival. As global supply chains begin to break down, people will have to take on tasks that we formerly took for granted: growing and preparing our own food, fixing our own houses and machines for example. 

There’s plenty of instruction available in these practical arts and we’d do well to take advantage of what’s out there. But as things grow increasingly uncertain, it will be our perspectives, philosophies and spiritual orientations that will ultimately carry the day. In the decades to come, our students, clients and patients will need psycho-spiritual skills such as resilience, creativity, flexibility, relational intelligence, and narrative fluency. These arts will not only make us more functional and effective, they’ll also keep depression, anxiety and despair at bay, a challenge that is bound to become even more acute in coming years. 

In particular, our students and clients are going to need a sense of wisdom or sapience to see them through. With so much ambiguity in the air, we can’t simply revert to established convention or formulas that might have worked in the past. Intelligence is all well and good, but we need something more. We need to make sense of our predicament and find our balance, even in the face of radical uncertainty. With systems crashing all around us, the question of the day becomes “what would wisdom do?”

Even more to the point, we’re coming to the astonishing realization that intelligence–the most revered of all human qualities in the modern world–doesn’t seem to be delivering as promised. Challenged from every direction by a multiplicity of crises, we double and triple down on rationality and computer processing, all under the assumption that more intelligence is going to get us out of the hole. But it’s not working. We have more knowledge than ever before in human history, but try as we might, we keep falling behind. This is not to say that intelligence is wrong or maladaptive or that we should abandon it in favor of irrationality and impulse. It is to say that we should put down the calipers for awhile and start looking at the attitudes, perspectives and relationships that might serve us better.  

where’s the sapience?

Unfortunately, conventional education also fails in this respect.  Haven’t you ever wondered about the fact that we call ourselves Homo sapiens (the wise animal), and yet spend almost no time discussing or cultivating wisdom itself? When wisdom is spoken of at all in modern education, it’s usually in the context of a philosophy class or religious studies. Likewise, we rarely attempt to teach these perspectives to children, assuming perhaps that wisdom is something only for the elderly.  

To make matters worse, the conversation around wisdom seems to be declining in our culture at large. A search on Google’s Ngram page shows a declining use of the words wisdom, patience, humility and modesty over the course of the 20th century. As a hyper-active, technological culture, we now show more interest in artificial intelligence than in organic, body-based wisdom.  

But how do we educate people for sapience? We know how to train people for practical skills and knowledge, but how do we give them a sense of balance, dignity, modesty, and humility–the traits we associate with wise action in the face of radical ambiguity? No one knows for certain, but we do know this: if we don’t attempt it, we are sure to fail. And as it stands, we are scarcely even trying. 

the future is dangerous

Whatever the future holds, we can be sure of one thing: It will not be safe. Big trouble is ahead. The simple, inconvenient fact is that our modern industrial-capitalistic system appears to be incompatible with a habitable planet and the creation of a functional future. To survive, many of our foundational ideas, systems and relationships will have to change, substantially or even radically. They might change incrementally and voluntarily, but more likely they will crash and have to be rebuilt in some new form.

And so this book is intentionally and explicitly counter-cultural. It points to the folly of our planet-hostile world view and when possible, exposes its oversights and extremity. It recommends that we throw off the myopic focus on single individuals and concentrate instead on relationships, systems and processes. In the process, it will challenge convention, assumptions and tradition. 

Some of the ideas in this book might be described as “radical,” but in the larger view, it’s actually quite the opposite. The status quo is radical. Business-as-usual is radical. The destruction of our life-supporting systems and relationships, the stratification of society based on race; in the context of human history–especially our indigenous history–these are abnormal, extremist, even suicidal positions. In contrast, advocating for ecological preservation and social justice is primally conservative, pro-health and pro-future.

So be forewarned: This is not a safe book. There are no promises here for a seamless transition into a functional future, no formulas for guaranteed success, no inevitable path to sapience, no slam dunk model for personal health. If you adopt the perspectives in this book, you’re going to meet resistance and you’re going to get into trouble. So be prepared; the future is not for sissies.

organization and application

As you’ll see, this book consists of a series of essays, lessons and campfire talks. Whatever you call them, the organization is non-linear and can be accessed in whatever order you choose. In conventional education, administrators like to imagine that learning must come in a linear sequence, laid out in a textbook and delivered by teachers or computers. Step one, followed by step two, all the way to the Ph.D. Like much of what we do in the modern world, the emphasis is on order and control.

To be sure, some skills do require disciplined, sequential training, but humans are highly irrational creatures. People learn in fits and starts, making connections between ideas as they see fit. Experience–the most powerful teacher of all–comes in its own time. Like it or not, education is a messy, even chaotic business. Insights come when the brain and spirit are ready and everyone is different. 

This is particularly the case in learning to adapt to our modern predicament, a thoroughly unprecedented condition in which there are no experts, no authorities, and no best practices. Historians can tell us a lot about our trajectory and we’d be wise to listen, but no one has ever been here before. It would be folly to assume some sort of methodical, linear progression from beginning to mastery. 

In learning to live in the face of ambiguity and radical uncertainty, there can be no standardized sequence. It’s a bricolage art; take whatever you have on hand and make something meaningful. Start where you are and grab what you can. Try for sequential learning if you like, but be aware that students and clients are constructing their own path, based on their own experience and values.  In this spirit, the essays in this guide can be read in any order. They all overlap and feed off one another. Start where you like and take it from there.

In any case, there are a number of ways to use this book. If you’re a big reader, you can simply dive in and metabolize it from start to finish. If you’re a dabbler, it’s easy to drop in here and there, read an essay and reflect on what it means for you. If you’re a teacher, you can assign the whole book or particular essays as part of a class experience. One essay each week might well carry you through an entire season or semester. 

Even better, you can make these readings part of a complete whole-body experience and combine the readings with physical activity. Gather your friends, clients or students and do some physical movement, then read together and discuss. See the appendix at the end of this book for ideas about games and movements. You can also consult The Exuberant Animal Experience for a complete description of team-building games and functional movements.  

Many of the ideas in this book are appropriate for young people, even children in the right circumstances. Of course, our normal impulse is to protect children from harsh reality and keep them protected from troubling ideas, at least until their bodies and minds are fully developed. This is what parents and teachers typically do. 

But these are not normal circumstances. Protection and comfort are vital for the developing mind and body, but it’s also true that young people deserve the truth, as well as training for the world they are about to inhabit. There is no need to terrorize them with apocalyptic images of a failing world, but they deserve to know the facts. They deserve a relevant education that prepares them for actual conditions on the ground. So use your best judgment. If you need to tone down the gravity of our situation, do it, but don’t neglect the prime directive of our day: prepare to meet reality.

Your job as a teacher, trainer or coach is to interpret, metabolize and translate your own experience into something that others can use. Take the raw material in this book, put it in your own words and share it with your people in a way that works for you. You are the tribal elder and the leader in this effort. This book may help you find a path, but you are the one who will do the vital work. You’re about to send your students on a grand voyage into the future. Give them the best lessons you can.