Reflections on education, agency and learning in a time of meta-crisis 

Making sense of an uneven world 

Education is uneven, this is not by accident. Across classrooms, communities and global systems, access to meaningful learning, safety, dignity and opportunity remains largely unequal, notably for children and young people living within poverty, conflict and environmental disruption. 

This reflection emerges from a recent webinar hosted during the Learning Planet Festival titled The State of Educational Systems: Cultural Challenges of Our Time. Convened as part of the No Limits to Hope initiative, bringing together contributions from John Gilmour (Leap Institute, Education for Hope), Lilei Chow (Save the Children International) and Lucie Sauvé(Université du Québec à Montréal). 

Lilei Chow grounded this reality in data from the report ‘Racing Against Time: Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals With and for Children’, intentionally, without softening its implications. Drawing on the latest assessments of progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, she described the picture as “grim”. Only around 17% of SDG targets are currently on track to be met by 2030. In education, nutrition, energy access and social protection, progress is uneven, and in many contexts, it is stalling or reversing altogether. 

This unevenness lies within a distinct pattern. As Chow highlighted, it is the poorest children who are being left furthest behind, despite decades of global commitments to “leave no one behind.” In some contexts, increased enrolment masks declining learning outcomes, overstretched teachers and staff, and systems unable to respond to a compounding and complex crisis. While, from a distance, education systems may appear functional. On the ground, they balance on a fine line of fragility. 

This clarity matters. But it also introduces a familiar tension: understanding the scale of the problem does not automatically grant us the power to change it. 

Education as a cultural system 

Education systems are not merely technical arrangements. They are cultural systems. They shape assumptions about authority, value and the imaginaries of futures made possible within those systems. 

John Gilmour brought this to our attention with an honest and profound care. His critique of deficit narratives, the instrument of defining learners, communities or entire regions by what they lack, shows how language quietly shapes realities. When education is organised around compliance, correction and ranking, it may function efficiently, but it does so at the cost of dignity and agency. 

From this perspective, education is never neutral. It either nurtures the conditions for flourishing or constrains them. Gilmour believes that hope is cultivated through belonging, agency, meaning and dignity, reframing education not as preparation for life, but as life itself, a daily rehearsal of what is considered possible. 

When understanding burdens agency 

Across the chat, participants repeatedly returned to a shared experience: learning to see systems clearly while remaining excluded from the power to reshape them. 

Young people are increasingly asked to understand the climate crisis, inequality and systemic injustice, while being offered few meaningful pathways to act. Their awareness grows, but agency does not necessarily follow. 

Several participants named this gap directly. Education can sharpen perception while leaving structural systems untouched. This understanding then risks becoming another form of burdened weight, particularly for those already living with the consequences of broken systems. 

This tension did not resolve itself during the conversation. Instead, it widened the lens, pushing the conversation beyond questions of curriculum or pedagogy toward a more difficult inquiry: “What learning is actually for when agency is unevenly distributed, and power remains concentrated elsewhere?” 

Learning through practice and participation 

Attention was then shifted away from institutions altogether and toward practice. Drawing on decades of work in environmental education, Lucie Sauvé reframed learning through the lens of eco-citizenship. 

Eco-citizenship, as Sauvé described it, is not about individual behaviour change or abstract environmental awareness. It is about developing the capacity to act together, to read systems critically, contest injustice and care for shared conditions of life. Much of this learning already happens outside formal education: in citizen movements, community struggles and everyday encounters with environmental and social harm. 

This perspective challenges familiar reform narratives. It suggests that some of the most vital learning already occurs in response to institutional failure, not because of institutional design. Action, in this sense, is not the endpoint of learning but one of its most powerful processes of learning. 

Hope begins to look less like optimism and more like practice, something enacted, imperfectly, in real conditions. 

Holding urgency without collapse 

The conversation held a sense of urgency, and, alongside it, as one participant highlighted, an honest exhaustion. Not exhaustion from indifference, but from working inside systems that demand speed while resisting depth. 

The data Lilei Chow shared made clear that delay is not neutral. Children are already living the consequences of stalled progress: disrupted education, widening inequality, environmental breakdown and conflict. Hope, in this context, cannot be postponed. 

However, participants named the risk of collapse when urgency forces reflection to the side. The pressure to act quickly, to scale solutions, to demonstrate impact can reproduce the very dynamics that created the crisis in the first place. 

Speed without sense-making holds a risk of reinforcing fragility rather than addressing it. 

The paradigm question 

Much of what surfaced during the webinar suggests that the challenge is not only to improve education systems, but to rethink what learning is for. Paradigms shape what we notice, what we measure and what we consider realistic or desirable. 

John Gilmour’s articulation of hope as a practice, held through coherence across heart, head, hands, heritage and humanity, offered us one way of naming this shift. Not as a model to implement, but as a compass for navigating complexity without losing our bearings. 

• Heart: Does this cultivate compassion, dignity and care, especially for people who are most vulnerable? 
• Head: Does it encourage truth, critical thinking, learning and ethical discernment rather than misinformation or superficial gain? 
• Hands: Does it lead to meaningful action, service or positive change, not just good intentions? 
• Heritage: does it honour culture, identity, values and lived wisdom, respecting where people come from? 
• Humanity: does it strengthen solidarity, inclusion, justice and our shared responsibility to one another and the planet? 

From this perspective, education becomes a cultural practice that shapes how we relate to one another, to the planet and to future generations. 

Staying with the unfinished work 

What stayed with me after the webinar was not a solution, but a better shared recognition. We face a polycrisis shaped by a deeper meta-crisis. A crisis not only of environmental, economic or political but of meaning, relationship and imagination. This is what the Club of Rome has long described as the ‘human gap’, our power to act and our capacity to understand the consequences of that action. 

The webinar has ended; however, the insights remain. What we choose to do with them, how deeply we are willing to learn, unlearn and relearn, and which paradigms we are prepared to question, is still unfolding. 

If you missed it, you can still watch the webinar recording below: