The desperate need for sense-making

to be elevated to the same status as maths, STEM and writing in our schools

In a world where everyone with a device is a photojournalist, where conspiracy theories built to stoke fear win most news cycles, where video and voice editing software distorts any truth, where fame is the glittering prize at any price, and where people do not give an ounce of care for anyone or thing but there own advancement, we need to learn the skills of sense-making.

All of us. Me. You. We. Urgently.

How do we educate this with as much fervour as our current government’s haste for STEM subjects? 

The tragedy is that in the short-sighted haste for STEM subjects, we step over the subjects that might support better sense-making. History, geography, philosophy, literature.

But sense-making for this current and future world is a new art. We must learn discernment and do so within an ecology of all human dignity and respect.

We must unlearn the shining colonial histories that are always pitted in the battle of the good and the bad. The superior and the inferior. The righteous and the savage. Perspective so screwed, ‘truth’ is one-sided.

This is a difficult task, as difficult as any we might face in this coming period of time.

And for us adults, those who create tools for sense-making that strip the oceans of garbage, the most contagious of all viruses, from infecting us, might have a tool that supports humanity’s future.

We need that tool as soon as possible if we have any chance of navigating this next decade towards a better world.

Photo taken January 3rd 2021