This book was recommended to me through my ISEEN Professional Affinity Group: Leading through Change, and I am so thankful for this recommendation. This is a difficult and challenging book to read ~ in fact, the author spends a few dozen pages trying to talk the reader out of reading the book in its entirety. It comes with a warning…

The author, Dr. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti has served as a LatinX professor at the University of British Columbia, and is now Dean of the Faculty of Education of the University of Victoria.

I was interested and engaged with this book through the lens of:
(1) holding a leadership position in education
(2) currently working imperfectly on truth and reconciliation in my school
(3) horizon scanning for the ways education can be most impactful for our students and faculty (meaning change over time)
(4) exploring how GenAI might accelerate the techno-modernity in which we live

The stories and exercises in this book are not trying to convince you of anything.They are neither descriptive nor prescriptive; they may be better described as provocative and integrative.They seek to create some generative chaos in your existence in order to make you somewhat uncomfortable and activate learning in your ‘stretch zone.” (Pg. 37)

Perhaps you might be interested in some of these lenses as well. Here are some of my key take-aways…

Thought Exercise: Education 2048

The theme of education is explored deeply and broadly throughout. At the outset, the reader is asked to take part in a thought exercise. This thought exercise creates a scenario of Modernity’s collapse, but lessons that have beenl learned through this collapse. The reader is then called upon to consider, “how to educat our children for human responsibility, considering the needs of the next seven generations of humans and nonhumans alike.” (Pg. 8)

If the reader is to consider the death of Modernity and all that entails, Oliveira writes, “[children’s] education should prepare them to become healthy, wise elders and good ancestors for all relations.” (Pg. 9) If this is to come to be, and in a way that we don’t fall back into old ways of knowing and being that brought about that collapse, then we need to become hyper-selfaware, and hyper-aware of the way that Modernity is all around us, pre-cognitive, and embedded in our thought process.

Oliveira explores Mastery and Depth Education, arguing that Depth education is something that we can strive for.  Depth education focusses on trends and patterns and affective landscapes, and the unlearning process.

If mastery education can be associated with the filling of a cup, depth education is about transforming the cup into an onion and allowing ourselve to experience the pain and joy of peeling its layers. (Pg. 44)

Oliveira recounts her time working as a teacher in K-12 and then moving to work with the British Council as a project coordinator which brought her face-to-face with educational challenges and reinforcement of simplistic views of the world.

Now as a professor at University, she writes, “The problem with the kind of education we receive at university and schools is that we… scale down things like generosity, compassion and humility in order to be able to participate in [Modernity]  that gives us few gifts, but that depends on violence and unsustainability to be maintained.” (Pg. 134)

How might education embrace complexities and build the skill and disposition of discernment in our students? How might we scale up humility and compassion in our education systems, schools, classrooms, and programs?

Indigenous Ways of Knowing, Being and Doing

Oliveira identifies as indigenous, from the Andean region in Brazil, and this book explores the role that indigenous wisdom and storytelling can inform the ourselves with and of the world, deeply.

This book draws on and is inspired by Indigenous teaching from communities of high-intensity struggle in what is known as Latin America and Canada… (Pg. 38)

She recalls an Indigenous story of little people who live in the Andean forest, and can be benevolent, benign, or beastly.  Those unfamiliar with these stories and ways of knowing often ask questions like, “is it true?”, “Can Science explain it?”.  Then Oliveira writes, “I have observed how the Indigenous people I work with answer the “Is it true?” question. They usually surprise people with an unexpected answer, which is generally a version of: “Sometimes.'” (Pg. 45)

Oliveira recounts this and other stories and interactions with such stories to provoke the reader into rethinking how they can connect to different types of knowing and wisdom.

This is beautifully captured in her recalling her work with students of different ages and stages of reading and writing. She told these students a story about a Green Monster and a Yellow Monster:

The two Monsters were tasked with determining who was the most knowledgeable. They set out on two different paths – the Green Monster was ‘obsessed with the form of things: with measuring and documenting everything. The yellow monster was obsessed with the shape-shifting movement of things: with feeling and processing everything differently.” (Pg. 124)

She told the students that at the end of one whole year, the two monsters met again to decide who knew more and better. One had a book, and the other had a captivating song. (Pg. 124). Those that were advanced in their reading and writing said that the Green Monster was the most knowledgable. “It is interesting that children who had not yet learned to read or write were much more open to the practice of dancing with stories than those who had acquired alphabetic literacy.”

Hyper-Self-Awareness

The idea of being very self-aware is a practice of reading this book. It is full of exercises, points where the reader is directed to go back and read again a passage, and to take a break from the book.

Take for example, the story of the Green and Yellow Monster recounted above. The exercise accompanying this one, asks the reader to consider parts of themselves that are resisting or defending certain interpretations. (Pg. 128)

A critical part of Hyper-Self-Awareness is Intellectual Accountability: being able to sit with complexity, challenge  and complicity without seeking recognition or innocence. (Pg. 238)

In this way, this book is teaching the reader, as it taught me, how to begin to gesture towards this level of awareness and accountability.

There is much that resonates from this book with others that I have read. Namely, I see resonance with Hope Matters, by Eline Kelsey, The Future is Analog, by David Sax, Wayi Wah, by Jo Chrona, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Kimmerer.

There is much that is being left on the table from this book review, that simply would not translate without the context and voice of the author themselves. Again, this is a challenging book by intention and design.

Below is a more fulsome and expansive review from Amazon: (yes, I am aware of the irony!)

“This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.

Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance. We take more than we give; we inoculate ourselves in positive self-regard while continuing to make harmful choices; we wreak irreparable havoc on the ecosystems, habitats, and beings with whom we share our planet. But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability?

Machado de Oliveira breaks down archetypes of cognitive dissonance—the do-gooder who does “good enough,” then retreats to business as usual; the incognito capitalist who, at first glance, may seem like a radical change-maker—and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently. She explains how our habits, behaviors, and belief systems hold us back . . . and why it’s time now to gradually disinvest. Including exercises used with teachers, NGO practitioners, and global changemakers, she offers us thought experiments that ask us to:

• Reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis
• Better assess our surroundings and interact with difference, uncertainty, complexity, and failure
• Expand our capacity to hold personal and collective space for difficult and painful things
• Understand the “5 modern-colonial e’s”: Entitlements, Exceptionalism, Exaltation, Emancipation, and Enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism
• Interrupt our satisfaction with modern-colonial desires that cause harm
• Create space for change driven neither by desperate hope nor a fear of desolate hopelessness

For fans of adrienne maree brown, Sherri Mitchell, and Arundhati Roy, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all.”