Learning, Leading and Loving in Complex Times - A Conversation with Brad Kershner

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

My question is, so how does Waldorf education, and how does education in general, now respond to postmodernity and heal those pathologies that have arisen? And it's sort of cumulative in the sense that we're still dealing with the materialism and the relativism and the cynicism. So I think the problems have gotten worse and And therefore the education has to get better.

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me for another episode of the podcast. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. This week's episode is a fantastic conversation with Dr. Brad Kirchner, who draws on a huge range of experience as an educator and school leader in public, private, Montessori, Quaker, and Waldorf education. We talk about a lot of these progressive educational traditions and the wisdom that they have to bring to the current conversation. About how education responds to complex times. He's currently serving as the head of school at Kimberton Waldorf School in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. And his research, writing, and expertise cover a broad spectrum of topics from leadership and parenting to integral theory, complexity, and developmental psychology. Brad combined a lot of these themes in his first book, Understanding Educational Complexity: Integrating Practices and Perspectives for 21st Century Leadership. Brad is also the co-founder of the Reconstitution Project, a metapolitical think tank Brilliant. Thank you, Brad. It's been a really interesting experience just getting to know you via other people like Zach Stein and then Rachel Anderson. And you know, there's some connections and I'm also super interested by the variety of work you've done in the progressive education space currently now as the head of school in Waldorf Steiner School, but also your background and then also your deep dive into complexity and you've written this amazing book about education and complexity and leadership. So there's a huge amount, probably too much for one conversation, but thank you so much for connecting firstly.

Yeah, thank you, Tim. I really appreciate your, your interest and you're looking into some of what I've done and thinking about. And as you've mentioned, we have some connections in common and there's a lot of good people out there doing, doing good work that I'm really grateful to know.

100%. Yeah, no, me too. So I'd love to, if we can start kind of where you are currently sitting, I mean, quite literally in your, I think a day off from your, your current role as the head of day off school?

Yeah, we have a day off today. We are honoring Yom Kippur. And I just, as I mentioned to you off recording, I just got back from a nice trip. I did a week in Maine with a group of, uh, high school seniors from Waldorf schools all last week. So that was a really powerful experience and just got back from that on Saturday night. So kind of a little R&R before jumping right back into a regular school week next week.

Yeah, great. Well, I'd love to just talk to you a bit about, about that I know it's relatively new to you. You've only been in, in that post, I think, a couple of years, but learning a lot, I think, about Waldorf Steiner education. And then you've got, as I say, a background in, uh, Montessori, Reggio Emilia, Quaker education. So you've got a really interesting overview of the whole space of progressive education in different ways. And I heard you talk about this idea of responsible innovation, cuz obviously you're connecting deeply to a tradition there with Waldorf Steiner education. But then also thinking about how does that evolve for the needs of the contemporary world and all the challenges we're facing, etc. So yeah, I'd love it if you could just maybe talk a bit about what that means, obviously in the context of— for people who aren't aware, maybe just a little bit of an overview of what Waldorf Steiner, kind of some of the principles might be, but then how does that kind of evolve?

Yeah, definitely. That's, that's a lot of what I'm thinking about and working through right now. And one important thing to understand about Waldorf education, I think, is that it's helpful to think of it as a very conscious response to the problems of the modern world. You know, Rudolf Steiner was somebody who 100 years ago, he was very aware of some of the pathologies of modernity. And he was actually trying to establish an educational approach and environment that would help humans to be able to be fully modern and scientific, but also not swept along by some of the negative and unfortunate and unhealthy aspects of modernity, in particular, the materialism that he saw becoming really prevalent after World War I and after the Industrial Revolution, obviously. So that's sort of a good frame in terms of like what he and Waldorf were up to. And I think one way that I'm thinking about it now is 100 years later, How do we understand and appreciate and honor the sort of basic impulse of what Waldorf is all about, which is really about allowing humans to be healthy and thriving and evolving in an increasingly complex modern world? And now 100 years later, the world is more complex and we have an even broader proliferation of cultural pathologies surrounding us. And we've moved through this cultural stage, which we could think of as post-modernity. So sort of my question is, so how does Waldorf education and how does education in general now respond to postmodernity and heal those pathologies that have arisen? And it's sort of cumulative in the sense that we're still, we're still dealing with the materialism and the relativism and the cynicism that was starting to grow out of the modern world. And now we have extra problems of the postmodern world that's become even more relativistic, I think, and more cynical. And we see new forms of tribalism emerging. We're obviously seeing later stages of environmental degradation. And collapse and, and social dysfunction. So I think the problems have gotten worse and therefore the education has to get better in some way. So that's sort of a big frame. And then sort of one level of abstraction down, I think when we think about responsible innovation, one way that we approach it at my school, which I think is important as a sort of first principle approach to how to answer this question of what to keep and what to jettison, right? What is essential in a tradition or lineage like Waldorf, and how does it need to change? The sort of simple answer is, well, you know, you don't want to throw away the babies with the bathwater, right? So you want to make sure that you're not overreacting. And part of what's happening in Waldorf and in other, I think, traditions that have been around a long time is sometimes there is an overreaction and an oversimplification of what a tradition like Waldorf represents, because it came from a European context, because it's over 100 years old, it's almost too easy to be overly critical and to say, well, let's, you know, we need to just change everything and we need to update it, need to be more technological. And I think that's a real mistake. And we actually have to slow down and really think about what is important and beautiful and good in the tradition. And that also comes down to things like the curriculum, right? Like Ideally, I think we find a way to keep the classics, like keep a lot of the curricular foundations that we've had for a long time, while also finding things to add and things to integrate. So for us, that means, like, one thing that's amazing about Waldorf, which I haven't found anywhere else, as you mentioned, I've worked in Montessori schools, I've worked in Quaker schools, I've worked in just sort of elite progressive independent schools in San Francisco and I've worked in public charter schools in Boston. I haven't actually seen a really comprehensive and coherent curriculum that spans grades 1 through 12 in a way that really spirals and really makes sense and really covers a sort of global humanistic historical breadth and depth in the way that Waldorf does. And there are some essential texts and essential approaches to understanding human history and human culture across the globe that I think Waldorf actually does a really good job with. But in addition to that, what we've done at my school is we've added things that are both in terms of updating some of the books and some of the readings, but also experiential things. Like right now we're developing a civil rights trip where we take all of our high schoolers on this journey through the Southern United States to really study experientially the civil rights movement, right? And we also do like a 1-week-long Indigenous Peoples trip where we take a group of high schoolers on a week-long canoeing trip through an area that's not too far from us. And we learn about the local Indigenous cultures of our area.

Yeah.

Right. So those are examples of things that we're adding that are obviously newer and more informed by a sort of progressive 21st century diversity inclusion sensibility, but not wanting to be overcritical of the really broad and deep curriculum that we already have.

Can I ask you, just in terms of how— because, I mean, for example, you've just been away with 6 other schools from around who are all Waldorf Steiner schools— how varied are they by place? I mean, how much is there a strong core uniformity in a, in a nice way, you know, across, and how much is there context-specific deviation or, you know, diversity?

Yeah, it's a mix. I'd say there's definitely a strong core, and it's I think it's a strength of it is part of what I'm saying is like, we don't want to lose that core. You know, we don't want it to just be people just doing what they want to do. Sure. You know, it really, like, there is a real depth and a real intelligence to the core curriculum and to some of the fundamental ideas of how people grow and evolve and develop. And I can say a little bit more sort of broadly about the view of human development that really is the anchor of the Waldorf curriculum, because if you start changing too much, you're going to start losing sight of why decisions were made in the first place. And another thing I'll say too that really came up from my experience being with seniors from 6 different Waldorf schools, one of the through lines is music and art, right? And having a real depth of appreciation for the importance of singing. Like, how important is singing for human beings? At Waldorf schools, it's actually very important. It's a really essential, beautiful part of being a human being is singing a lot. And you should have heard these children around the campfire singing like amazing harmonies.

Nice.

And, you know, songs that they had learned and like old, like traditional, beautiful human songs. You know, it was really striking.

And these are not like 8, 9-year-olds, right? These are seniors.

Yeah, these are seniors singing their hearts out. Like, our seniors actually self-organized and came up with their own idea and practiced for like 2 hours this like singing performance that they shared with all the rest of the groups around a campfire. Wow. And the paintings that they did, the landscape paintings that they did up in Maine, like every one of them, just incredible. So that, and that's a big part to not lose sight of. Like we so get caught up in thinking about curriculum, thinking about texts, thinking about the propositional knowledge that we're transmitting to our students. Whereas one of the essential things from Waldorf that I think is really important and beautiful is it is very holistic and it is very much grounded in a sense of nature and art and music and the overall holistic human experience of what it means to be healthy and well-integrated and happy and part of a community. Yeah.

Just as a kind of point of differentiation, just because you are quite well positioned maybe to make the comparison, what if you walked into a Waldorf Steiner school not knowing the philosophy or, or anything about it versus walking into a Montessori school? What, Are there particular things you might pick up in terms of the differences that might just kind of help orient people a little bit more if they've not experienced it?

Yeah, there are some interesting— I mean, there's lots of differences. I think you would definitely pick up an aesthetic sense that beauty is an important thing at Waldorf schools, and you would see a pretty wide range of structures. For instance, there are some elements to Waldorf education that seem very traditional, And actually, this is an important point in that, you know, there are more traditional elements of education that are really important that we don't want to lose, like knowledge transmission, right? Like, like there's a lot of actual content and curriculum that we do want to transmit to students. And it's not just that anything goes and kids making up their own rules. And at the same time, at other times of the day, you'll see that there's an incredible amount of freedom and openness. Like, for instance, on our campus, this, children have a lot of freedom to sort of roam outside. We have hiking trails. We have a lot of outside time. We have a lot of time for games and free play, especially in the younger grades. So it's, it's a real integrated balance of freedom and play and nature and art and music and more traditional, exacting, kind of rigorous approach to learning and knowledge. And academics, and even with art, like actually learning how to execute particular techniques so that you can become a good and cultivated artist, as opposed to, oh, just, you know, oh, that's beautiful, Timmy, like whatever you do is— there's a craftsmanship and there's a cultivation of skill in many domains that actually needs time and effort to be cultivated and needs real teachers with a more traditional form of authority to really transmit. And you don't want to lose that. And a lot of the sort of progressive tropes of education are a little bit too anti-traditional, I think, with really good intentions. I've worked in a lot of progressive schools and know a lot of sort of progressive educators who will go along with notions about, you know, freedom and play and co-creation and co-construction with students. And that's actually great and beautiful and good, but you have to find the right balance. You have to find the right balance because it actually, in our culture, that has dovetailed with certain approaches to parenting and certain approaches to education that I think you, you can lose something essential and important about healthy hierarchy and about teacherly authority and about actually how much do our children know and understand. Even like one thing you'll see at a Waldorf school that's very traditional is memorization. Like we've memorized poems, right? Like all of our children memorize a pretty decent number of poems and songs. And that is, I think, beautiful and key and good. And it's sort of a lost art.

No, it's, it is fascinating, isn't it? Because there is, as you say, there's kind of a tendency towards the kind of pathologization of these traditional tropes. Like, you know, so even just some of the words you're using there, right? Like authority or transmission or, you know, all these things, you know, they kept kind somewhat simplistically bucketed into the traditional part, which we are reacting against in this kind of rush to try and figure out how does education evolve, you know, with all the, in the context of all the problems and challenges that you've talked about. But it is, there is something really deep about the tradition. And it makes me think of Daniel Schmachtenberger talks about Chesterton's fence, right? Like you have to understand before you take the fence down, you have to understand all the reasons why the fence was put up in the first place. And it wasn't just for this one obvious reason that you think is self-evident, that we don't, maybe we don't need anymore, but there's all these other reasons why perhaps that, that fence was put up in the first place. Right. And there's a, there's something deep rootedness of the tradition, for example, the Montessori tradition or the Waldorf Steiner tradition, as you say, over the course of a century or more. There's also just much longer deep-rooted tradition of, as you said, teacherly authority, really healthy hierarchy between adults and children. And how do we keep our children safe while also nurturing this authentic person into being? And there's a very dynamic and interesting dance between those things. And I think that's one of the most interesting things about the progressive schools is that there's an acknowledgement of the balance that is needed there and not just a kind of reactive move away from the traditional structures, as it, as they say.

Yeah, and it's so important to have a historical context for the waters that we're swimming in and the cultural currents and reactions that we can get caught up in, you know, because there, there is this sort of traditional, modernistic, actually sort of Prussian educational system, you know, which sort of gave rise to like the banking model of education and really the underlying intentionality behind that industrial education system being one of creating conformist people who don't question authority and are not free thinkers. And there is a really important critique of that system.

Yeah, absolutely.

But then the sort of swing and the sort of postmodern swing away from that, you can move to the other extreme of laissez-faire, anything goes, you know, follow the child. And it's all about finding the right balance. You know, I think you have to return to sort of first principle thinking around dialectics and synthesis and integration and seeing these polarities. And there's so many polarities out there in our social cultural world, and we have to be able to identify them and then find our right relationship to them. And that's just one example of that.

Yeah, I know, absolutely. But I also think it— there's an interesting thing that's going on. I mean, whether you like the term metamodern or not, but there's a really interesting kind of space there where people are saying, right, you know, back to the pre-modern and the modern and the postmodern, and then that kind of synthetic work of bringing some of the things there together. Because that, that idea of teacherly authority, or from Zach, or, you know, just the idea of hierarchies between and the craftsmanship, but all— there's so many things that you've said that you could say would take you way back beyond, in chronological terms, beyond the pre-industrial, you know, pre-Prussian education system that you were just critiquing. Absolutely. I mean, yeah, but it's, we need to look at all of that and say, where, where are the bits that, like the fence, right? Where are the bits that were put up actually to create healthy relations and healthy communities that aren't just there to be, to kind of dismissed as just part of this industrial educational model?

Yeah. I think though, I think those meta-modern and integral frames are really helpful ones. They really are. Yeah. I feel like part of my work is bringing more and more people into that conversation so they can kind of take a step back and have a broader view of what's happening and how to situate the different possibilities for how we orient ourselves to these different cultural currents. And having a sort of meta-modern historical frame, I think, can be very helpful.

Yeah, I did want to ask you— I mean, I'd love to come back to the developmental psychology point, and as you were talking about something that is key, and as you said, it's key to the Waldorf Steiner thing. But just before we go there, I'd love to ask you about the spirituality part, because This is a, you know, bearing in mind I'm sitting here in France and, you know, any talk of religiosity or spirituality anywhere near education will get you disbarred from anything to do with education, right? They couldn't be further apart. But you've got something there in the, what, you know, as you say, in the integral or the metamodern conversations, or in the Waldorf Steiner, the Montessori, when she talked about cosmic education, you know, there's, there's a spirituality broadly that is somehow present in those frames. I wondered what your thoughts are there. I mean, how explicit is that in a Waldorf context, or, you know, and just in general, what do you think is the place that that plays?

Yeah, well, let me try that. There's a lot to say there to bring those two things together, which is really human development slash human evolution and spirituality, and both how they are cultivated in Waldorf and just their importance overall. I mean, one thing I think I'll go back first and just say in terms of the One helpful scope to see in Waldorf is there, there's this grounding in the notion of beauty, goodness, and truth. And actually seeing there's a particular progression of emphasis over the child's lifespan. So in the first 7 years of life, there's really a focus on goodness and actually helping children to understand that the world is a good and safe place. And this is the bedrock around play-based education, and also modeling, like imitation, like being, emphasizing the quality of the modeling and the presence of the adult for the child to model and have healthy attachment and to really have a deep, firm, safe grounding and secure attachment in the goodness of the world. And only then are you in a good place to move into an appreciation of beauty. So in the second 7 years of life, you cultivate yourself as an artist. As a musician, as a creator, as someone who's living in a world of goodness and is going to bring beauty and goodness into the world. And that's actually why you're here, right? You are in a good place and you're in a beautiful place, and you're— and you are a creator in this marvelous world of ours. And then you have a healthy ground in the third 7 years of life to really dive deep into your quest for truth, right? And it's— and what we— that's so simple and so essential. Because what we've done for most people nowadays is we rush the search for truth. We reframe truth as whatever our ideology is and trying to convince children to believe what we think, but they're not grounded in goodness. They're not enabled to be cultivators of beauty, and it's not developmentally appropriate in the sense of like, it's really not until your teenage years that you're ready to kind of reflect back on what you've learned and problematize it and criticize it and make it more complex and nuanced as you really get into that more higher-level cognitive thinking. So that's sort of one frame that I wanted to share because I think it's really essential. And even if we could even just reground and reestablish some really basic simple approaches like that, it would do wonders for our educational system and for our parenting. And to sort of slow down a little bit.

You know, I'd just love to reflect on the fact that a lot of my work is linked to schools and education organizations who are kind of trying to reorient around some of their own values, right? So it's really interesting to hear you talk about these, like, these fundamental kind of timeless values of beauty, truth, and goodness. And in a way, organizations are reaching for these values to ground them, but they tend to be the ones that their, you know, mission defines as the one, or their, their business model defines as the ones that they that are going to help them survive in the marketplace, or they're relatively superficial, you could say, values. It feels like there's almost this yearning for this grounding. It's so interesting to hear you talk about that, that that is really built into the progression. It's fascinating.

It's a sort of return to first principles. It's a simplicity on the other side of complexity, and there's a progression to it. It's not everything everywhere all at once. Actually sequential. And, and another sort of root idea, I think, at the center of Steiner and Waldorf's vision is the sense of the goal. And this ties into development overall. Like, it's not so much about breaking down the stages and which developmental model is better than others, and how do you understand one stage versus the next stage. It's really about having a clear orientation toward a goal, right? Like, what are you driving toward? Like, what is the point of it? Right. And for Waldorf, there's this ideal of the individual, the individuated, strong sort of ego presence individual who's operating out of their higher self as opposed to their personality. Right. And you're sort of on this spiritual developmental journey to become a wise person, a self-actualized person, a fully individuated person, someone who's able to sort of take human history. In your particular culture in a sort of post-conventional stance.

Yeah.

And I think that the, the relevance and importance of understanding developmental psychology is really about that. It's about how do we keep front and center some vision of human wisdom and human attainment and like what, what are the qualities and characteristics of the kind of healthy, integrated, wise person that we want our children to become. And if we don't have a clear sense of that, and if we don't have a sense that there are very real qualitative distinctions And that there is a difference between being conventional and post-conventional. There is a difference between being a wise person and being someone who just goes along with the status quo. There is a difference between being reactive and being thoughtful and considered. And you need adults in your community who are actually modeling that. And that comes down to a fundamental problem, obviously, is who's teaching the teachers.

Sure.

And how do you have enough adult models of the kinds of humans that we need our children to be in order to actually solve the real problems that they're gonna face in the 21st century.

Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a, that's huge, isn't it? Absolutely. But I'd love to ask you, just talking about the individualistic focus, how much of that is also a collective endeavor? Because obviously you're talking about community there, but like for some, sometimes I have a, a nervousness when we start talking too much about the individuated individual, cuz just given how much context and place and connection, interconnection. I mean, as we start talking about complexity in a moment, you know, there's, there's a, a deep recognition that, or I feel that, that is the way we interact. We are only our full selves in connection with and in dialogue with and in community with other people. And then, you know, that is a fluid flux. How does that play into this notion of an individuated individual?

Yeah, thank you so much for asking that, cuz it's, it's, it's, again, it's one of these essential polarities, the individual and the collective, and it's all about right relationship and right balance and also understanding the healthy sequence of development that will allow that healthy integration and balance to emerge. And I'd say in the sense of Waldorf, and I'd say in the sense of just human development in general, you definitely start with the communal, right? You start with a sense of you are part of a group and a tribe and you are developing very close relationships with other people in the community and your elders. And another aspect of Waldorf that I think is key is you stay with the same teacher for many years. So you're developing a deep relationship, and it's a beautiful thing when you find a strong Waldorf teacher who takes a group of children over the course of several years. They are a family. They are a tribe. They are a group. They have a depth of connection that is, at this point in time, very rare. In other schools. I actually haven't seen it. I have not seen the depth of community and connection in any other school because you just don't have the time. You don't have the breadth of experiences that you're doing together. You're doing art together, you're singing together, you're taking trips together. You're— there's just so much in the fullness of what a human community can do and what we always have done, especially in pre-modern times. So that's essential. And that's sort of a given. And that's the foundation is rooted in your community over a long period of time, not a transactional relationship, not having a different teacher every year, but actually having a depth of relationship of community from which you can become an individuated individual.

Yeah.

So those two things definitely go hand in hand, and which is why, too, starting from goodness, the goodness of the world, including your social world. You need to feel safe and validated and seen and accepted in your community to feel like you're in a good, safe place. From there, the creation of beauty emerges, and only from there can you become a healthy individuated person who's willing to question authority, who's willing to critique, you know, the status quo, and who's willing to actually partake and continue on, on your own journey wherever it leads you. And as you get older, you get to realize the diversity in your community, right? Like even, even this group, our group of seniors, or really any class, you see a closeness and you see a way in which they really are like family. They know each other so well, but also they're just all so different. And you be— and it's, it's just such a natural and organic and simple context in which to appreciate individuality and diversity in the context of a really close-knit group. And I don't see how you can achieve that in a really large school where people are just trading teachers all the time and they have their little cliques and they don't really all know each other. And then they're moving on to who knows where. And it's just, you know, that, and that is part of the critique of the sort of industrial modern educational system that I think is still really important to see, even just in terms of size. In scope. I think there's something special about being at a small school. Our school's right around the Dunbar number, you know, like actually having a community of just a few hundred people or less where everyone actually knows each other. The old kids know the young kids, all the teachers know all the students, and vice versa. There's a very different quality of relationship from which individuality can emerge.

Yeah, that's beautiful. And I mean, I often say that, and You do notice it when you look at these, whichever these kind of broadly progressive schools are, they're often around that kind of size. And you, you rarely find ones which are kind of 400 or 500. Cause it's just, it's too, the community then gets to a point, as you say, where you just can't know everybody in that same kind of way. And it's, I think there's something really deep there. Again, it goes back to that kind of pre-modern idea of the Dunbar number. And you know, that's just how we kind of evolved in, in bands and tribes and groups. And, you know, and yeah, it's important. There's something important there, pretty deep, in terms of don't mess with the fence, right? Don't take the fence down. If you suddenly— yeah, school with 2,000 people, it's like there's gonna be all sorts of unintended consequences of creating that kind of an environment.

Yes, exactly. It's a big part of the, the meta-modern project and the sort of Waldorf 2.0 project of it's not just bringing together the best of the modern and the postmodern to create a higher synthesis. It's also, as you mentioned, reintegrating the premodern, reintegrating the indigenous, reintegrating the healthy tribal elements that we all have as part of our being as individuals and as communities who yearn for community and yearn for the relationship that's becoming more and more rare, unfortunately. For sure.

Yeah, no, absolutely. One of the things that I also wanted to reflect on was the kind of the way that, as you were talking about the kind of developmental stages, and I really appreciate the fact that you're saying that it's not about which model is right and how, you know, finessing particular models, but there is a danger within all of this talk of developmental psychology and, and stage theory of development that we kind of end up in this talk of maturity, and especially when you start applying it to then adults as well, there's a kind of a hierarchy that can get set up, right? And a linearity as well that, that gets set up that, you know, you pass through these stages and I'm already post-conventional, but you are still conventional. You know, this kind of, that kind of dynamic that can get set up and it's, it can be quite dangerous, I think, you know, like it has a dynamic to it that is not the intention, but something results which is potentially more judgmental or more controlling or more authoritarian than one would like.

Mm-hmm.

So I wonder, yeah, I wondered what, perhaps this is an adult development kind of issue. I don't know whether it's quite a different thing when you're talking about children and clear, you know, clear stages of development in children. But yeah, I don't, I wonder what your thoughts are on the way that that gets weaponized sometimes.

It, it can be, and I think, you know, I mean, the sort of obvious irony there is that there are different perspectives one can take on development, right? There are more or less mature and developed ways of thinking about maturity and development. So there's just no way out of that sort of Escher-like, you know, developmental prism. You can't get out of it. You can't avoid it. But that's just why I think reframing in terms of wisdom, in terms of what are the qualities that we want in people, in ourselves and to focus on cultivating those qualities is really the way to go. I think aspiration and integration and health, psychological health, are more important than thinking about, for instance, cognitive development and stages. And I think having a, even more importantly perhaps, having a sense of telos and eros and just the overall evolutionary journey that we're on and the context of cosmic evolution and planetary evolution and species-wide evolution. And seeing the fractal nature of development. We're not just talking about, you know, one stage of cognitive development being superior to another stage. We're talking about a grand, amazing evolutionary process that we're all a part of. And we have to find a way to reclaim that story or some new version of that story that includes everything and everyone in ourselves, in our group, in our country, in our planet, in our species. And it's all a process. And there's no way to deny the evolutionary process if you just pay attention.

Yeah.

And be. It's interesting. And it brings us back to spirituality too. It actually, it brings us back to the spiritual question in that, again, having a historical understanding of where are we, where are we and when are we and why are we, and what are we and what is our story to make sense of it all. It's all— development is fractal and all of these things are interpenetrating and connected. So at some point we have to have this orientation toward a story that is comprehensive and coherent and all-inclusive. And that allows us to reclaim a sense of human purpose and meaning in life too. And one thing that's been lost in Montessori schools, I think, and in Quaker schools and in pretty much any other school that I can think of, because we're living in a modern postmodern world, we've lost the spiritual. It's become overly secularized. And sort of Maria Montessori was someone who started with a very religious spiritual vision. Steiner is someone who started with a very religious spiritual vision. Quaker schools obviously are literally a religion, and yet they don't feel that religious or spiritual in some ways. I think they've been overly secularized and have become overly conventional in the sense of the status quo of progressive postmodern culture is gen— you know, generally materialist, secular, and kind of ultimately relativist. And in some ways there's like a cynicism underlying that because we don't have a great story about what we're doing here and what it's all about.

No, it's true. But it does leave me with questions about kind of the contextuality though, in the cultural contextuality, because I think, you know, you were talking some big some big concepts there, right? And is that, are we talking there on a universal level for all people at all times, you know, or are we talking, you know, there's some deep kind of cultural differences and, and kind of emergences that come from groundedness in place and culture.

And, mm-hmm.

You know, I think that's also one of my nervousnesses about the kind of developmental psychology piece is that sometimes it's context-free, right? It takes things out of context into make this kind of I mean, I think we are at a species-wide conversation as Nate Hagens talks about in terms of climate and energy and all of, and economy.

Yeah.

But I think there's still a need to really kind of go back to the grounding of like, where are we in place and culture?

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I, I think that's, that's what I'm saying. And I don't think there is any context-free frame.

Mm.

But I think that, as you said, there is a species-wide story. We are a collective humanity. And the incredible amount of diversity amongst humanity historically and geographically is a beautiful and rich thing that we should all be on a journey to understand and appreciate. And again, in terms of the aspirational quality of what we want to be aiming toward in education and just for ourselves as individuals and collectively, I feel like there is an omega point that we can be oriented toward that is healthy, that is about helping us to think more and more in terms of ourselves as a species and as a humanity and as a planet. And that's not to deny any diversity. It's not to deny any cultural context or specificity. It's to always reorient ourselves so that any concrete example, any particular culture or idea or story or worldview is always situated in this, in this ever-expanding, ever-evolving bigger story of like, well, obviously, that's all taking place in this larger context of cosmic evolution, and planetary evolution and human evolution. And we should at least be trying to understand things in that light. Because it is the case, we are in this cosmic evolutionary process. And that doesn't mean we can fully understand it from our point of view. And maybe that's where the point of tension is. Like, I'm not claiming from my point of view, sitting here right now in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, in 2023, I have the view that explains the whole cosmos. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying we collectively are on this cosmic journey. And our aspiration and our goal and our educational project is to collectively figure it out as best we can and love each other as we can along the way.

Yeah, absolutely. No, 100%. But it also is, it does strike me as quite interesting that I think historically, politically, Steiner got himself into some interesting hot water with these kinds of conversations, right? With claims of antisemitism and racism. And it's like, that still is an ongoing conversation to defend the ideas from what I understand. And please do correct me if I'm wrong. But, and that's not to say that it's about the ideas particularly, but just that they can be used in this kind of developmental hierarchical evolutionary frame should they be put to that work. And that's, you know, yeah, I mean, that's serious work, right?

Yeah. I think when we're asking questions about tensions around hierarchy and development, again, we have to keep returning to the inescapable fact that there are different perspectives that we can take on these things. Understanding the differences between those perspectives still brings you back to understanding better and worse, more fair or less fair, more valid or less valid, more informed and less informed perspectives on things. So there's just, there's just no escaping that. There's always going to be some qualitative judgment of what is the most appropriate interpretation of X. And it's going to fall back on some sort of spectrum of judgment of what determines what's better or worse. And I guess what I'm saying is the more that we can not try to avoid that, but just try to keep getting better and better at being clear about what are the kinds of judgments that we're making about things that are not overly culturally specific, that are not overly like, well, this I'm looking at it this way because of my positionality, right? Like, we don't want to get caught into that because then you can just reduce the truth to positionality, and then you're caught in relativism. And so we have to keep finding dialogical processes through which we determine what's true and what's valid and what's meaningful. And we have to embrace the fact that it's an ongoing process. There's no final answer from any one given perspective. But we embrace the fact that we are part of this process and this journey where we're figuring it out together. And we're open-minded enough to be on this search for truth so that we can keep improving our interpretations and our judgments and being very aware of all the dynamics and patterns of human psychology that keep us from that, right? The mob mentality. Absolutely. The sort of ethnocentrism, the narcissism, the reactivity, the defensiveness. There's so many elements of human psychology and human group dynamics and us versus them dynamics and sort of demonizing people and scapegoating people and looking for the enemy and wanting to be right and other people to be wrong.

Yeah.

That's the real essential work that we have to bring to all of these conversations because the only way we can get to some, you know, ever-improving sense of like what's true and good and beautiful together is if we are also engaged in some sort of process of healing and psychological and relational integration, so that we're avoiding some of the pitfalls and patterns of human pathology that we keep perpetuating on each other, definitely up through the present moment.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, yeah. And the just the primacy of the process. And I think a lot of what's happened in art, well, in education, but in, in general, you know, capitalist postmodern culture is a, it is an obsession with outcome, right? And it's hard to reconcile if, you know, the beauty in that process, as you say, of, of wrestling and struggling and trying to figure it out, but doing that together in community with some sense of some shared objective is kind of what there is, right?

Yeah. And even just, and in regard to Waldorf and Steiner too, it's also really important that that is also included in this broader truism that no individual has the ultimate truth or say, and it's not taking what anyone says as like the sacrosanct ultimate truth on anything. It always has to be put in a historical context, in a cultural context, and understood in that light and allowed to evolve and grow and be refined and improved. And I think that's a, that's an important important intention for the sort of Waldorf movement. And just as it's an important intention for any tradition or lineage, it's really this essential— back to this essential question of what does it mean to evolve a tradition or lineage without just letting go of it, without saying all traditions are bad and we need to just create something new that's not really grounded in ritual and the sort of depth of like learning that comes with being part of a tradition. But it has to be changing and it has to be growing and we shouldn't be taking anything that anyone said 100 years ago as the ultimate truth that everyone's— Yeah, yeah.

No, absolutely. Just, I'd love to, to not miss the opportunity to talk about the complexity stuff, cuz I just wondered, you've, I mean, you, it's an amazing book that you've written about the kind of place of, of an understanding of complex adaptive systems and complex dynamics in an educational context, particularly with leading schools and, you know, with your case studies about specific school leaders and how they might use those ideas to help them do that work. How do you kind of connect those, you know, the conversation we've just been having and the complexity lens? Where do those two things kind of segue together for you?

Yeah, well, it's all about evolving and growing and being alive. You know, complex systems are growing, they're dynamic, they're nonlinear, they're irreducible. They're open, that, that, that, you know, you can't oversimplify or reduce them and understand them well or respond well. So there really is this sense of actually, if you're in a position to be a part of a living, breathing school community, which can be seen as a complex system, or if you're privileged enough to be in a position of leadership in a human organization, having a sensibility where you are oriented toward things like attunement and sensitivity and a sort of sacred flexibility and not over-determining things, not trying to over-control things, not overthinking things, not thinking that your left brain can just sort of figure it out and like tell people what to do and figure out what's going to happen and make a 5-year plan and then execute. There's like a whole like left-brain modernist overly linear sort of anti-complexity approach that is very common. So a really simple And part of what I would try to get at there and what I think is a point in terms of leadership is to not do that and to be able to understand what's wrong with that and why that doesn't work. And I think there's a, there's a dovetail between individual complexity and relationship to system complexity, right? And it's also back to development too. There's no way to avoid it. There are developmental demands to be an effective leader in a complex system. Because you have to have some sense of psychological and emotional integration to be able to be attuned to the relational dynamics of your community, to be sensitive and flexible, to be not overly caught up in a predetermined notion of what should happen or how things should happen. Yeah. And it sounds really simple, but there's a lot that goes into that because there's a lot going on with people psychologically and emotionally that keeps them from being the adaptive, flexible, responsive leaders and just people and colleagues that they ideally could be.

Yeah, it's interesting. It makes me think of Zach's idea of hierarchical complexity because, and that like takes us back to the development idea, but with Theo Dawson and, and Lectica and all of, you know, that the work around hierarchical complexity. But what's interesting is the kind of initial feeling, and I think sometimes people's initial reading is that that's about the person. Right? The person is at a certain level of hierarchical complexity. Yeah. But the way Zach talks about it is that it's the task, just as you've described there, right? It's the task that has a certain level of hierarchical complexity, whether you as a person can essentially, you know, are you competent enough? Can you cope with that task demand? Right? And I think that for me is a really subtle but significant shift in the way that we think about complexity of task demands, cuz it's not that you developmentally are at a certain level of hierarchical complexity, but you do clearly, you do walk into situations like as a school leader managing this complex dynamic that has significant hierarchical complexity in terms of task demand.

Right.

Yeah. So you've, you've, there's a whole bunch of stuff there that you've gotta be aware of.

Definitely. That's a, yeah. Thank you for that clarification. It is a good, And subtle distinction. I think, I mean, a few things there. One, I guess I take a lot for granted because I've been over this developmental stuff, you know, so much for so many years. I appreciate you pulling that nuance out. And it's definitely a better and more careful way of talking about it, but it would also be not fully honest to imply that there's not a sort of overall sort of average center of gravity that people have as well, or that being in a leadership position, you do cultivate certain skills and there is a sense of, you know, it's not so much about a hierarchy of cognition. It's really more about a hierarchy of health. What I'm more trying to speak to is really just being healthy, being well integrated, being sensitive, being caring, being loving, being tuned into the relationships and the quality of relationships with the people you're with. And that those are really the things that we want to emphasize more. So it's even not so much task demands as though, oh, I'm really advanced in this particular skill. It is that, but it's really emphasizing the particular skill of actual relationship cultivation and the skill of helping other people to feel safe and feel validated so that they can grow and be the best people that they can be. And that's really the meta skill that matters most. Like, what is your skill in helping other people's skills develop and grow? Yeah. Because that's how you're going to create a healthy community of thriving.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, described like that, it's pretty straightforward, right? I mean, it's not like complex adaptive systems language, you know, it's pretty basic human stuff.

It is. We've got to get to simplicity on the other side of complexity. And what I don't know is how much do we have to understand complexity to just be grounded in that simplicity? I don't think we need to. I think for people like me who are going to read dozens of books about it, we have to find a way to get to the other side. I think for a lot of people, we can just stay simple and we can just emphasize the good and the true and the beautiful and help them feel safe and validated and known so that they can continue their evolutionary journey. But in that, people are going to tend to perpetuate and manifest whatever the common pathologies of their cultural situation are.

Sure.

Because we're social beings.

It's an easy trap.

We all just sort of repeat the language and concepts of people around us. We all have this tendency to get swept up in social phenomena and cultural waves and cultural reactions and cultural wars and tribal politics and identity politics. Absolutely. And we do have to be able to bring that sensitivity and that love and that care and that quality of relationship to also be the ground in which we help people navigate that so that they're not getting caught up in trends and patterns and social dynamics that are not ultimately healthy for us as a species.

Yeah, no, it's true. And I appreciate you saying, you know, you may not go over the complexity, you might just go round it and get to the other side. But there is, I do, I do think there are some interesting, obviously you're not saying that there aren't interesting and important ideas there, but for me, one of them particularly is emergence and just the, the notion of the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts, or, you know, just, just the fact that there is this quality of emergence that comes from different things interacting that gives rise to this other thing. Which has, is qualitatively different and then actually can end up feeding back and changing the dynamic of the things around it and below it because that's just how complexity works. And I, I, I find that a really useful concept to help kind of think about how some of these dynamics work. Cause you end, you know, culture as in emergent property, you know, as you said, you can get trapped in certain human habits and ways of being, and sometimes the culture you're in, it gives you a lot of noise. Around that, which as a kind of emergent property of just those people interacting, but then that comes back on you and influences then the way you continue to behave. So it is, there's a powerful dynamic there.

Yeah. No, and I mean, I think for, for anyone who has the inclination and capacity to really think about complex systems or anyone who actually get through like chapter 2 of my book, it's all about complex systems. Ideally, it's an entry point. Into that more spiritual and magical space of like evolutionary process though, right? Because like emergent, I've heard a lot of people write and talk about emergence. There's no real way to reduce it or simplify it so that you can really explain what it is. It's kind of a placeholder for the amazing wondrousness of the fact things keep changing and getting more complex and amazing. And we're all trying to understand how that works.

It's true.

And I think there's a certain right relationship and balance between having some good concepts and language to understand processes of emergence and complexity, but also never reducing it to that. Never thinking that that's it, not oversimplifying it, and staying open, keeping that kind of right brain openness to where you have the sense of the gestalt. And there's a quality of experience in your relationship to reality that can open up. From that more abstract space as well. Yeah.

No, it's, it's so true. I've heard, I don't know, I don't know if you know Dave Snowden's work, but I've heard him talk about people who are critiquing the kind of complexity idea to say that it, it's almost like a cop-out just to, you press the emergence pedal as a cop-out to describe this thing that's happening that you can't really explain in, in reductionist language. Yeah. But I'm, I'm totally with you. Yeah. I think that pullback into the reductionism is, a hiding to nowhere. So I'm not sure about the magic, but, you know, I'll let you have the magic.

But well, I, I experience the world as a very magical and beautiful thing.

Yeah, which I do. I completely agree. I completely agree. Or inspiring, definitely. So yeah, thank you, Brad. I mean, I don't want to keep any more of your time. We've already gone over time, but it's super interesting to talk to you. Thank you for taking the time. I mean, there's so much there, and I, I think there's so much we can learn from the long tradition and people who are holding and continuing that tradition of these progressive, you know, educational methods. That's one of the reasons I wanted to do this was just so we can share more out there more widely so people can understand a bit more and learn a bit more and hopefully think about where they're at in terms of their educational context.

Yeah, thank you, Tim. I really appreciate it. And I, yeah, my, my hope is that we, we need to help people who are working in schools to bring more big picture, high-level abstractions that are actually relevant and meaningful for the concrete relationships, problems that they're dealing with. And vice versa, you know, we need people who have that sort of meta-modern sensibility and have a sort of dialogical, dialectical approach to trying to have the right balance between polarities and not getting caught up in culture war dynamics. We need to find a way to bring those insights into educational spaces.

Yeah.

And we need to find a way to update and evolve the systems and traditions that we have and not allow ourselves to just fall prey to a sort of fracturing where we're always just trying to start from scratch and reinvent wheels and build. So true. As I mentioned to you offline, you know, I've had a couple people reach out to me who wanna start schools and it's very exciting and I feel philosophically aligned with them and I think amazing new kinds of schools and new kinds of educational networks can and will be created. But I also think it's a big mistake to just let go of or be overly critical of or dismissive of the traditions and lineages that we have, especially in particular ones like Waldorf that are rooted in a sensibility and a spirituality that actually has a big picture coherent framework of who we are as a humanity, where we're going.

Yeah, no, absolutely. No, I think it's absolutely important. And we have a we have enough of our own culture wars in education anyway, right? So I think, yeah, you know, we need to be able to transcend that.

Touch on that. Yeah, if you ever wanted to talk more about like DEI and culture, and, um, I, I recently wrote an essay specifically about trying to understand the relationship between education and DEI and culture.

No, thank you. I'll certainly link to it in the show notes. And yeah, I would love to come back to it. Thank you, Brad. Amazing stuff.

Yeah, thanks, Tim.

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