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Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real: A Narration
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This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It, by Ginie Servant-Miklos, and we’re inviting you to join us. Visit humanrestorationproject.org/book-club to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author, for a Q&A on July 31. I’ll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on Open Access through Bloomsbury. Hope to see you there!
I’m back this week with another narrated piece from our upcoming Progressive Education Primer. If you like this format and want to have more narrated essay content, or if you can’t stand it, leave a comment on YouTube or Discord to let us know. This one is written by our Executive Director, Chris McNutt, titled Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real.
Pedagogies of Collapse, Bloomsbury Open Access
Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real, Chris McNutt
Additional music credits: Dandelion by | e s c p | https://www.escp.space | https://escp-music.bandcamp.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Book Club Announcement
00:00:12
Speaker
Hey there, Nick here from the Human Restoration Project podcast. This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse, a hopeful education for the end of the world as we know it, by Jeanne Servant-Miklos, and we're inviting you to join us.
00:00:26
Speaker
Visit humanrestorationproject.org slash book dash club to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author for a Q&A on July thirty first I'll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on open access through Bloomsbury.
Progressive Education Primer
00:00:47
Speaker
Hope to see you there.
00:00:50
Speaker
I'm back this week with another narrated piece from our upcoming progressive education primer. If you like this format and want to have more narrated essay content, or if you just can't stand it, leave a comment on YouTube or Discord to let us know.
00:01:04
Speaker
This one is written by our executive director, Chris McNutt, and it's titled Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real. The only antidote to a world of manufactured confusion is a shift toward making students builders of meaning, not consumers of it.
Misinformation and Truth Manipulation
00:01:27
Speaker
In the early 2000s, Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin's chief political strategist, had a fascinating yet twisted idea. He funded neo-Nazi skinhead movements alongside liberal human rights organizations.
00:01:40
Speaker
He backed parties opposed to Putin while orchestrating Putin's messaging. Then he outright let everyone know he was doing it. In the end, the goal was not to make one of these sides win out or to make Putin look good.
00:01:54
Speaker
Instead, it was to make all narratives suspect, leaving citizens in a state of confusion where nothing felt real and resistance felt pointless. As journalist Peter Pomerantsev documented in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, the Kremlin's aim was to make the truth feel unknowable, so dark and complicated that you just want to switch it off.
00:02:18
Speaker
This became known as the firehose of falsehood model, a media technique with high-volume, multi-channel, rapid, and continuous communication with no commitment to consistency.
00:02:29
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It became even easier with the growth of social media both inside and outside of Russia, and in recent years, with the growth of artificial intelligence. And over the first two decades of the 21st century, Russia's Internet Research Agency created fake accounts to inflame American political divides.
00:02:47
Speaker
The 2016 Brexit referendum, the invasion of Ukraine, and more. Each day this campaign operated, it became more and more difficult to determine what was real. With Oxford dictionaries naming post-truth its word of the year in 2016.
00:03:03
Speaker
Political theorist Hannah Arendt warned about this decades earlier, writing, quote, the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists, end quote.
00:03:22
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The reason is straightforward. When no one can agree on what's real, those already in power face no organized opposition. Surkov didn't need Russians to believe in Putin.
00:03:33
Speaker
He needed them to believe that figuring out the truth was not worth the effort. Exhaustion, not persuasion, was the product. The strategy worked because it exploited something genuine about human cognition, that we don't have infinite capacity to evaluate competing claims.
00:03:50
Speaker
At a certain point, we default to the familiar and the convenient, or we stop trying altogether. This is what makes the firehose model so dangerous and so portable.
00:04:01
Speaker
It doesn't require a centralized propaganda state. It only requires more noise than any individual can filter.
AI and Education: A Question of Truth
00:04:09
Speaker
And any institution with enough reach, be it a government, a media ecosystem, or a social media platform optimizing for engagement, can reproduce the effect, intentionally or not.
00:04:21
Speaker
This problem extends to various issues facing our world. Despite more and more research proving humanity's impact on climate change, how inequity is expanding across all systems, or the dangers of growing authoritarianism, we've seen more people rejecting said research.
00:04:39
Speaker
The question for educators, then, is no longer just what are the facts. It's whether truth as a stable category still functions the way our institutions assume it does, especially in a world of large language models and AI video generation.
00:04:58
Speaker
Is reality real at all?
00:05:05
Speaker
Writing decades before ChatGPT generated a single sentence, philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued that the distinction between reality and what he called simulation had already collapsed.
00:05:17
Speaker
He laid out four successive phases of the image, or how we view the world, with each phase marking a further detachment from reality. Each phase showed a more simulated world where what's around us isn't really real, but a version of the real world offered to us by powers greater than ourselves, namely corporations.
00:05:41
Speaker
This culminates in what Baudrillard dubbed hyper-reality, where the simulated version of our world feels more real than actual reality, or more real than real.
00:05:54
Speaker
Baudrillard's work can be difficult to picture because it's philosophical and frankly sort of weird, but when applied to classrooms, these concepts are actually very easy to understand.
00:06:06
Speaker
In the first phase, the image reflects a profound reality. This is, for example, a classroom role play. Students pretending to be 1970s disco dancers for a history lesson.
00:06:18
Speaker
Everyone knows it's a simulation. The real event is referenced honestly, and the activity draws its meaning from that reference. In the second phase, the image masks and distorts a profound reality.
00:06:31
Speaker
Consider a teacher administering a perceived-as-real, high-stakes, yet ultimately fake literacy test for students to experience unjust pull-test practices in the Jim Crow South.
00:06:43
Speaker
The exercise is pedagogically useful, but it bends reality. Students experience discomfort without experiencing real danger. The simulation distorts the scale of what actually happened, but it still points towards something real.
00:06:58
Speaker
The referent exists, but the representation is imperfect. In the third phase, the image masks the absence of a profound reality. And it starts getting odd here.
00:07:10
Speaker
This is the teacher delivering a sanitized version of the Thanksgiving story because students are not ready for the full, darker history. The representation doesn't distort the truth.
00:07:21
Speaker
It conceals the fact that the truth has been removed entirely. the cheerful construction paper pilgrim hats are not a bad version of history, they're a placeholder for where his history should be, as in, they mask history's absence.
00:07:37
Speaker
And in the fourth phase, the image has no relation to any reality whatsoever. This is the realm of hyper-reality. In this instance, the teacher delivers the mandated curriculum faithfully, not realizing that the script itself is inaccurate and having no framework through which to recognize the inaccuracy.
00:07:57
Speaker
The curriculum is correct because the curriculum is all there is. There's no outside reference point. The simulation has replaced reality so completely that the question of accuracy no longer arises.
00:08:11
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As in, we've hit a point of hyper-reality, where the curriculum is real because it's the curriculum, therefore it is real. It becomes more real than real.
00:08:25
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In Baudrillard's words, quote, In the first case, the image is a good appearance. In the second, it is an evil appearance. In the third, it plays at being an appearance.
00:08:36
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In the fourth, it's no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation. end quote Schools and arguably our entire media ecosystem have been drifting toward the fourth phase for decades.
Simulated Reality in Education
00:08:53
Speaker
The Vanishing Point
00:08:58
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There's a major parallel in this simulated reality to the growth of generative AI. Over time, AI collapses in on itself. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a study in Nature documenting what they call model collapse, a degenerative process in which AI systems trained on AI-generated content begin, quote, forgetting improbable events over time as the model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality, end quote.
00:09:26
Speaker
The outliers, the unusual perspectives, the minority viewpoints, these are what the model loses as it trains on its own outputs. What remains is an increasingly narrow, increasingly average, and increasingly circular version of knowledge.
00:09:42
Speaker
It's essentially an Ouroboros, the serpent consuming its own tail, where each generation of output becomes the input for the next, and each cycle a little more hollow than the last.
00:09:54
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This is not a small technical problem. If the systems we rely on for information are progressively narrowing what counts as knowledge, if the unusual and the marginal are being stripped away by the recursive logic of the machine, then the AI is not just simulating reality, it's flattening it.
00:10:14
Speaker
The data collected about genuine human interactions, the researchers note, will be increasingly valuable precisely because authentic human knowledge retains the diversity that recursive AI output eliminates.
00:10:28
Speaker
And in a world saturated by AI-generated content, human messiness becomes a scarce resource. Of course, this isn't limited to AI-generated content.
00:10:39
Speaker
It has a direct parallel to schooling and what and how we teach. Baudrillard described this condition in The Illusion of the End as a kind of vanishing point.
00:10:50
Speaker
The closer we get to perfect reproduction, the more of the thing itself disappears. The more perfectly something is simulated, for example, the more the original becomes irrelevant.
00:11:02
Speaker
We're not approaching this vanishing point and preparing for it. We've likely already passed it either through an obsession with education standardization or AI-generated videos.
00:11:13
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The question is not how to avoid it, but whether we can escape it. Generative AI has made the production of pure simulacra trivially easy for anyone with an internet connection.
00:11:25
Speaker
The institution designed to teach students how to read reality was already deep in simulation. And now the tools for manufacturing unreality are everywhere.
00:11:36
Speaker
Students growing up in this world are not digital natives in the shallow and misguided sense that phrase usually implies. They are essentially hyper-reality natives.
00:11:47
Speaker
They're living in a world where the distinction between the real and the simulated was never stable for them to begin with. And to be clear, it isn't that AI has brought about this simulation.
00:11:58
Speaker
It's just that AI has made it more inescapable.
00:12:04
Speaker
The Interpassive Classroom
00:12:09
Speaker
Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. In what would become dubbed Taylorism, work could be scientifically analyzed, broken into discrete tasks, timed with a stopwatch, and optimized to find the one best way to perform any job.
00:12:29
Speaker
In the past, the man has been first, Taylor wrote. In the future, the system must be first. Workers were stripped of autonomy and judgment, and managers monopolized knowledge and decision-making.
00:12:42
Speaker
Raymond Callahan's Education and the Cult of Efficiency documented how aggressively schools adopted this model during the massive spread of public education between 1910 and 1930.
00:12:53
Speaker
What emerged was a new professional class of school administrators whose priorities were financial, not pedagogical. The result, Callahan argued, was not better teaching or deeper learning, but an obsession with cost-cutting.
00:13:07
Speaker
Wayne Au, writing in the Journal of Curriculum Studies, called contemporary high-stakes testing the new Taylorism. Public school teachers in the U.S. are teaching under what might be considered the new Taylorism, Au argued, where their labor is controlled vis-a-vis high-stakes testing and prepackaged corporate curricula aimed specifically at teaching to the tests.
00:13:30
Speaker
This is the logic of scientific management continued a century later, now enforced not necessarily by stopwatch-wielding foremen, but by standardized assessments and pacing guides.
00:13:42
Speaker
Expanding on this historical context, Baudrillard points toward what might be called anti-pedagogy, an education system that forecloses genuine autonomy by pre-coding all possible responses.
00:13:55
Speaker
Students aren't invited to think independently. Instead, they're trained to reproduce the correct signs. The institution does not fail because of a crisis of funding or legitimation.
00:14:06
Speaker
It fails because education itself has become a simulation of what it once was.
Interpassivity and Educational Reform
00:14:12
Speaker
A dead form that continues to function precisely because no one inside it can see the difference.
00:14:19
Speaker
In other words, the curriculum has reached that final stage. It's more real than real. The success of a given curriculum is measured by its adherence to the curriculum.
00:14:30
Speaker
Or more bluntly, corporations can capitalize on teaching to the test by providing a single source of truth on teaching to said test. And the test can mimic the corporate training materials to hone in on best measurement.
00:14:43
Speaker
This is, again, a vanishing point or Ouroboros. What we're actually meant to teach becomes a simulated version of what it means to know something, of what matters, or what the purpose of schooling is.
00:14:59
Speaker
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek introduced the concept of interpassivity, describing situations where an external object consumes, enjoys, or believes in the place of the person.
00:15:12
Speaker
Žižek's famous example is the VCR. Because it can record a show, the owner watches fewer shows, not more. The VCR watches for the viewer.
00:15:23
Speaker
The viewer is relieved of the duty to engage. Canned laughter on a sitcom works the same way. Even if tired from a hard day's stupid work, all evening we did nothing but gaze drowsily into the television screen, Zizek wrote.
00:15:39
Speaker
We can say afterwards that, objectively, through the medium of the other, we had a really good time. When a teacher follows a mandated curriculum, the platform teaches for the teacher.
00:15:51
Speaker
Critical theorist Michael Apple documented this process decades ago, arguing that teachers lose the time and skill to plan their own curricula and instead become isolated executors of someone else's plans and evaluative mechanisms.
00:16:05
Speaker
Likewise, theorist Henry Giroux says it reduces teachers, quote, to the status of specialized technicians within the school bureaucracy, whose function then becomes one of managing and implementing curricular programs rather than developing or critically appropriating curricula to fit specific pedagogical concerns, end quote.
00:16:26
Speaker
The student, in turn, is measured on their ability to reproduce predetermined output. And even in competency-based frameworks, measuring creativity or critical thinking becomes self-consuming.
00:16:38
Speaker
The skill is not applied, but performed for the purpose of assessment. And this can become even further entrenched. Without proactive use, AI accelerates interpassivity into what Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop in The Disengaged Teen have dubbed passenger mode, where the role of the student shifts from active participant in making sense of the world to passive consumer of whatever the curriculum, or now the algorithm, outputs.
00:17:08
Speaker
The question, is this true, gets replaced by, does this sound right? And eventually the question stops being asked at all. We become trapped in this system. We can't change the curriculum without changing the assessment.
00:17:21
Speaker
But we can't change the assessment without changing the policy. And we can't change the policy without changing the public's understanding. And we can't change the public's understanding without changing the curriculum.
00:17:34
Speaker
One has to occur before the other, and so nothing occurs at all. There's an obvious parallel to American healthcare or gun control. It's easy to become nihilistic when every lever of change is blocked by every other lever.
00:17:49
Speaker
If our education system continues to reform only through the narrowest ways, or if we nihilistically throw up our hands and stop advocating for reimagination, we'll be stuck in this vanishing point forever.
00:18:02
Speaker
This only gets worse over time as we become more and more removed from what was possible to begin with. Author Kurt Vonnegut described this endpoint in Breakfast of Champions.
00:18:13
Speaker
Quote, In the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that too.
00:18:26
Speaker
End quote.
00:18:31
Speaker
Toward rhizomatic future.
00:18:37
Speaker
In the same novel, Vonnegut offered an antidote. Quote, Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order instead, which I think I have done.
00:18:48
Speaker
If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. End quote.
Power Structures and Learning
00:19:02
Speaker
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offered the rhizome as an analogy for what knowledge could look like if we abandoned the tree. A rhizome, like the underground networks of ginger or grass, has no center, no defined boundary, and no clear hierarchy.
00:19:20
Speaker
It's made up of semi-independent nodes, each capable of growing and spreading on its own. Different kinds of plants and fungi can be linked together. The rhizome can be broken at any point and start up again on one of its old lines or on new ones.
00:19:36
Speaker
This is counter to a tree, which depends on its roots, trunk, and leaves, or else branches begin to fall or the tree itself falls. We're tired of trees, they wrote in a Thousand Plateaus.
00:19:49
Speaker
We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicals. They've made us suffer too much. Educator Dave Cormier extended this into education with the concept of community as curriculum.
00:20:03
Speaker
In rhizomatic education, knowledge is created by a broad collection of knowers, sharing in the construction and ongoing evolution of a given field. Curriculum is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process.
00:20:21
Speaker
There are no pre-packaged answers, no fixed learning objectives, no expert-driven march through predetermined content. Students are not empty vessels, they are nodes in a network of meaning-making.
00:20:36
Speaker
Paulo Freire called this critical consciousness, the capacity to read the world, not just the word. Teaching students a mandated curriculum will not fix systemic information if we ignore the structural power dynamics and economic incentives that produce it, nor if we ignore the real-world experience of everyone in the room.
00:20:59
Speaker
The answer requires a shift from content transmission to constructionism. This is the same shift that has been proposed for over a century of progressive education and over centuries beyond the Western system.
00:21:14
Speaker
Students need to understand not what is true, but how truth gets made, by whom and in whose interest. Less, here is the French Revolution, according to the worksheet.
00:21:25
Speaker
And more, what does it mean to represent revolution in history? And what gets lost in how we tell that story? Less, verify this claim. And more, understand the architecture of the system that produced this claim.
00:21:40
Speaker
And ask, who benefits from you experiencing it this way? In some schools, these concepts are taught, but it tends to be that working class students learn tools instrumentally.
00:21:51
Speaker
Here's how to use the software, here's how to code, etc. As in, here is how to operate within the system someone else built. Students at well-funded schools learn to understand how power operates, which gives them the capacity to shape systems rather than serve them.
00:22:10
Speaker
The gap gets exponentially worse with AI because the tool itself is presented as a black box. If you're only learning it instrumentally, you are entirely dependent on whoever built it and whoever controls its outputs.
00:22:24
Speaker
You have zero critical consciousness about what you are participating in. This is a dystopian world where some people understand the architecture of reality making and others consume whatever the algorithm decides to show them.
00:22:39
Speaker
Writer Mark Fisher called this capitalist realism, the sense that the current economic system is so total that imagining an alternative feels impossible.
00:22:50
Speaker
Not because alternatives don't exist, but because the system has colonized imagination itself. In the future, each generation reproduces the same ontology.
00:23:01
Speaker
Each iteration produces people less equipped to question it, and everyone becomes more and more dependent on external authorities to tell them what counts as truth. Again, it's worth noting that this colonized imagination is not some faraway dystopian world.
00:23:17
Speaker
It's the world we're currently living in. It can be easily argued that the majority of schools simply teach what is expected of them, typically delivered through corporate-owned curriculum products.
00:23:29
Speaker
How's New Taylorism? Through no fault of their own, many educators accept this at face value because it should be assumed that the curriculum is accurate or that the science backing these curricula must lead to results.
00:23:43
Speaker
The problem is, at risk of belaboring the point, that if our curricula are designed to simply raise test scores, they don't necessarily teach students about shaping and transforming the world.
00:23:55
Speaker
They just regurgitate preset information. This colonized imagination extends to changing the system itself. Even the inclination to move away from it leads us to assume that the alternative, allowing students to find information on their own or co-constructing curriculum together, is beyond the expertise of students or even adults.
00:24:18
Speaker
Further, as each generation becomes embedded in this system, it becomes the status quo. Curricula and pacing guides are no longer questioned, we just build better and more standardized curricula and pacing guides.
00:24:31
Speaker
Hyper-reality extends even further, where we no longer question these practices but scoff at the idea of not doing them. Bringing us back to the beginning of this primer, Octavia Butler offers a different path.
00:24:45
Speaker
Her speculative fiction and the tradition of black speculative pedagogy that's grown from it treats world building as an act of resistance. Butler didn't ask readers to find some kind of hidden truth.
00:24:57
Speaker
She asked them to construct alternative realities with different power structures and different ways of being human. Or in other words, if you understand how this world got built, you can imagine building differently.
00:25:10
Speaker
In a system designed for compliance, AI is just one more tool of inner passivity, one more layer of delegation between the student and the act of thinking. But it does not have to be.
00:25:23
Speaker
In a reimagined classroom, the same technology could be used to model alternative systems to generate possibilities that students then pull apart and rebuild on their own terms.
00:25:35
Speaker
This is a DIY technology, or Luddite praxis. The question is whether students are consuming AI's outputs or interrogating them.
00:25:46
Speaker
The technology doesn't determine that. The pedagogy does. This is why the firehose of falsehood works. Not because people aren't taught, but because the system they were educated in never taught them to build knowledge, only to receive it.
00:26:03
Speaker
Surkov didn't need citizens incapable of thinking. He needed citizens who had never practiced it in conditions that mattered. The antidote to manufactured confusion is an education that makes students into builders of meaning rather than consumers of meanings built by others.
Empowerment Through Change
00:26:22
Speaker
This requires institutional support and time that most schools do not provide, which loops us back to the structural problem. The system cannot change itself because change requires resources it will not allocate.
00:26:37
Speaker
We must stop waiting for the system and start building anyway. Not within the master's house, but in the ruins of it. In the cracks where something rhizomatic can take root.
00:26:55
Speaker
Thank you again and for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
00:27:07
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you.