Year 11 students have completed their journey in Human Technologies. Executive Head of School, Toby Newton, led their final session focusing on how students could prepare best for the world ahead by recognising both their own complexity, and the complexity of those they will encounter on the path ahead.

Human Technologies spends much of its time examining the various technologies through which we construct our understanding of the world- social, cognitive, material and spiritual- and how we experience these through our psychosomatic selves, which have evolved across hundreds of thousands, indeed, millions of years of evolution.

In the final unit of the course, Technologies for a Sustainable Future, students were given the opportunity to examine the likelihood and desirability of a range of potential outcomes for our planet, as forecast in the Arup 2050 Scenarios: Four Plausible Futures.

Inspired by our meeting with “recovering astrophysicist” Tom Murphy, whose unique perspectives of life on Earth were shaped through his examination of our planet on a universal scale, we understood some of the enormous problems that our current age of modernity has brought to not only our species’ survival and future health, but that of the (rapidly diminishing) ten million other species with which we share our planet.

We are very grateful to Tom Murphy for the insights in his Metastatic Modernity series that shaped our class discussions, as well the fantastic insights from our guest panelists on the Technologies for a Sustainable Future panel discussion last month. Jeff Coey, Carly Leung, Christian Pilard, and Craig Williams provided a range of empathic suggestions for our students to connect with each other and the natural world to construct lives of meaning and value. You can watch the panel discussion here.

Yet, Toby wanted to ensure our students not stray too far from recognising the seriousness of the environmental and societal predicament we face - but also the potential rewards if we can solve some of the predicament’s signature problems. We hope that ICHK helps students in Year 11 leave us with a stronger sense of who they are, and why they might be wired that way, together with the knowledge that they themselves have power to change their future course and their future selves. If our students can learn to first be sustainable within themselves, they will have the strength and positivity to shape the world for the better in the years to come.

What we need, to quote one of Toby’s favourite authors, Thomas Kuhn, is a “paradigm shift” of consciousness to recognise our shared responsibility to act. It might seem overwhelming, but in Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” he points out how, eventually, outmoded ways of thinking and believing give way in the face of an increasing body of incontrovertible evidence.

Change can be difficult and painful, but it is also inevitable. Let’s hope as a society we can help by making our contribution to that shifting mindset.
We wish the Year 11 students well as they embark for their IGCSE exams.