Meaning Before Mechanics is how we articulate our approach to learning after five years of running our school.
And it’s such an interesting thing that AI is forcing this same reckoning across all walks of professional life.
What we have thought of as prized cognitive skills, that we have built identities around, are turning out to be the first things AI is automating.
It turns out that we put cognitive skills on a pedestal because they’re hard for us. But that’s just a 50-thousand-year film on the four-billion-year bedrock of life, clawing its way out of a soup of chemicals.
We think we forge meaning in our lifetimes, but really, it’s us standing on billions of years of life stitching meaning into itself.
And now this illusion of meaning tied to work and cognitive capabilities is being dissolved. We face questions that used to be staved off till the proverbial midlife crisis.
You are probably asking yourself now: What does my life mean? What makes my work meaningful?
For schools, the imperative is to make the making and discovery of meaning the central pursuit. It was always the right thing to do, which got thrown under the steamroller of measuring outcomes, whatever that means.
But now, the happy crisis is that we are forced to ask: Is this actually meaningful? Or will ChatGPT or a calculator rinse this out?
In an uncertain world, the answer is to play, in its truest sense!
Explore, ask “what if?”, don different hats, and also play with each other.
Our greatest achievements, speaking in the broadest terms of life itself, have come from coming together.
How can we play this game together? A beautiful, cooperative, non-zero-sum game in a world of abundance, where we forget the old anxious habits of competing our way out of scarcity.
Are our schools and educational institutions ready for this?