A changing world requires new educational foundations. Students today will make decisions and build their lives within ecological, social, economic and technological systems whose consequences extend across communities, countries and generations. Education needs to prepare them to understand these relationships, recognise where they have agency, and participate thoughtfully in shaping what happens next.
Education Foundations for Thriving Futures presents a curriculum designed to meet this need. The curriculum is organised around the long-term goal of Regeneration Transitions: maintaining, renewing and strengthening the ecological and human systems that enable life to thrive across generations as conditions change. Learners investigate these changes and their consequences, develop the knowledge and skills to understand them, and gain experience participating in regenerative practices where they live.
The River System of Human Time, the narrative presented in this book, provides a historical context for an education system organised around Regeneration Transitions. Many familiar accounts of human progress emphasise expanding production, settlement, technology, wealth and economic growth. The River follows these developments alongside human capacities and relationships, regenerative histories, ecological and social consequences, and changing ways of developing and sharing knowledge. Beginning with our deep evolutionary history, it draws on research, teachings and experience from different disciplines, cultures and generations and extends through the Anthropocene present towards probable and possible futures.
The River forms the Narrative Learning Path, one half of the Education Foundations curriculum. Beginning with our Source-evolved common ancestors around 100,000 years ago, learners follow the development of economic, social and knowledge systems through human time. They investigate how these systems developed, how they changed human relationships and possibilities, and how regenerative strategies emerged and adapted under different historical circumstances. They can follow the evidence, compare interpretations and knowledge traditions, and question and develop their understanding along the journey.
The Experiential Learning Path, developed through the Global Care Packs programmes, forms the other half of the curriculum. Learners observe and work with living systems, cooperate with others, make decisions, share responsibilities, practise skills, investigate questions and participate in communities. Knowledge encountered through the Narrative Path can guide what they investigate, while direct experience develops knowledge and skills and allows them to observe consequences.
Learning moves between the two paths as questions raised through the River are explored through experience, and observations from experience lead back into accumulated knowledge. The Education Foundations organise this learning through relationships with the living world, other people and communities, and wider human knowledge and experience.
Education Foundations for Thriving Futures can be read independently or used as the Narrative Learning Path within the Global Care Packs programmes developed through Thriving Futures 2100. The programmes develop the Experiential Learning Path alongside it for students, teachers, community members and regeneration stewards. Together, the two paths provide an educational structure for Regeneration Transitions from childhood through adult and community learning.
