What if schools were to cultivate “safe uncertainty” in every learner?

Towards a vision of education for Citizens, not just Consumers

This essay is lightly edited from the original, which I wrote in 2022 as a contribution to the book Regenerative Learning: Nurturing People and Caring for the Planet, by Satish Kumar and Lorna Howarth (eds).

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Until the autumn of 2008, I thought I knew it all.

I’d had the best education the world-as-is had to offer, and I sailed through it — straight As, “School Captain,” Cambridge degree, you name it.

In my second year at university, mine were among the billions of eyes watching as the twin towers come down — and the billions of ears listening as Bush and Blair and Giuliani told us what we as the Western public should do in response, to defend our way of life and lead the world into the future: go shopping. Grow the economy. Show them we’re not scared.

That’s why, when I graduated in 2003, I went to work at one of the world’s biggest advertising agencies. I wanted to help, and I thought I was doing. The system had worked for me, and I was keen to work for it.

Only in 2008 did I eventually raise my head and begin truly to see the world around me, and in particular the already manifest urgency of climate change. Increasingly troubled, but still interpreting a bug in the system not a feature, I decided to go back to university to learn to help fix it. I found a course I could do part-time while continuing to work, a Masters in Responsibility and Business Practice at the University of Bath.

And then, at the first week-long gathering of my cohort, my brain exploded.

I remember the moment clearly. It was Friday afternoon, and I was in discussion with my tutor*. We had spent the week talking, reflecting, telling each other stories of our lives and our dreams. Having signed up to learn how to fix the climate, I was frustrated. “I came here to learn the rules,” I said. “That’s what I do. I learn the rules, I play by them, and generally speaking, I win. I came here for you to teach me to do that with climate change. Not just to talk.”

I remember exactly what she said in response. “What if I told you there are no rules?”

I stared at her. Then, from absolutely nowhere, I broke down in tears.

Cultivating Safe Uncertainty

I believe this insight — the power of which I felt viscerally then and understand more fully now — must be the foundation stone of an education in which people and planet truly matter.

It is not just that the rules we have been living by, that manifest in every structure and institution of our society, are broken, although of course they are. What we need to root our education system in, though, is the fact that no one knows what should replace them in order for seven or eight or ten billion of us to live sustainably and peacefully and joyfully on this planet. There is no point pretending anyone does; any prescription offered that has any certainty as its heart is a lie.

We are living now in a time of radical uncertainty, and we have to start by facing that.

That might not seem a particularly fertile starting point for reimagining education — if no one knows, how can anyone teach? To explain why it absolutely is, I want to draw on a little-known essay published nearly twenty years ago by family therapist Dr Barry Mason, called Towards Positions of Safe Uncertainty.

In his essay, Mason argues that those coming for therapy tend to occupy one of two “positions”: unsafe uncertainty, characterised by anxiety and a loss of co-ordinates by which to navigate their lives; or unsafe certainty, characterised by self-disgust and -rejection. All know what they think they want, and this Mason terms safe certainty: solutions, answers, fixes. The problem is not so much that this is wrong as that it is a chimera: safe certainty simply does not exist; there are no such things, really, as solutions, or if there are, they should really be understood as “only dilemmas that are less of a dilemma than the dilemma one had”.

As such, all that a therapist can really do is support the creation of safety, helping the person step into a position of safe uncertainty. “This position,” Mason writes, “is not fixed. It is one which is always in a state of flow, and is consistent with the notion of a respectful, collaborative, evolving narrative, one which allows a context to emerge whereby new explanations can be placed alongside rather than instead of, in competition with, the explanations that clients and therapists bring. A position of safe uncertainty is a framework for thinking about one’s work, orientating one away from certainty to fit, a framework for helping people to fall out of love with the idea that solutions solve things.”

Education, I believe, must seek to cultivate safe uncertainty in everyone. We need to see the challenges we face as radically unresolved in order to see that the only way forward is to see every single one of us as a participant in facing them.

What would such an education system look like? It would not pretend that theories were final answers; rather, it would see information as equipment. It would see every young person as the potential source of the next advance in understanding, as power to be unleashed not controlled. It would see teachers as giants not in the fee-fi-fo-fum sense, but on whose shoulders young people might stand in their search. It would see teachers and students as side-by-side participants in a shared inquiry into the future, not transactional counterparts. And the work involved in creating it would be about renewal, not just resistance.

From resistance to renewal

Head-on battles over content and context are exhausting the energy of so many in our education system today. This resistance — defending the arts, ensuring history is not taught solely through the eyes of the “winners”, protecting teachers’ time and rights, ensuring children are fed and can learn at all — must continue, and will intensify. As the dominant system collapses, those who have attained power within it will seek to do the same things they’ve always done, but harder.

Shifting the mindset, however, can happen and is happening in parallel; and it is generative, energising work.

In the UK, this kind of change is taking shape at the core of the education system, under the moniker of Big Education, Whole Education, or oracy (as opposed to just literacy and numeracy). These are narratives of education that are about building agency and power in young people, not just implanting knowledge. They are in many ways imperfect compromises, but they are also growing communities of practice that meet the system where it is today, saying at least some of what needs to be said in a way that can be heard.

It is also coming in from the fringes, in the form of projects like the youth-led and -governed Rekindle School, a supplementary school in South Manchester where children and teachers are stepping outside the existing system to create the school they dream of in the time after hours. It is finding ways to break into the dying system through initiatives like Smart School Councils, which create a means for every child to participate in the decision-making in their school, and is already present in over 500 schools across the UK. It is there in the resurgence of democratic and Steiner education and forest schools and more.

Most of all, though, it is something individual teachers and community leaders and parents are simply stepping into on their own initiative and in their own daily practice, treating young people differently in small but vital ways, because they are thinking of them differently. It might lie beneath the scope of the headline writers. But it is there, and growing. Especially now.

Our moment in time

At the outset of the pandemic, Arundhati Roy published an essay in the Financial Times in which she argued that “the pandemic is a portal”; that for all the tragedy of our time, a door to a different future had been opened. Today, some fear that portal is closing, with little having changed. I see it differently.

That day in 2008 was seismic for me. But it would be two full years before I would leave the advertising industry, another four before I began in any recognisable way the very different work I now do. Seen from outside, I stayed in my previous world, reabsorbing myself into safe certainty. But inside, something had shifted. The external appearance was the same, but a portal had opened inside me, and it could only grow.

I believe that is analogous to where we are now collectively, as a species, not just in terms of education but in every aspect of our lives. Our certainty has been blown apart. It might look like the space is closing, but the opening is more subtle and distributed than Roy’s metaphor would suggest. There is not one enormous portal, but billions of tiny portals inside our minds that are expanding and connecting at different rates. Many of the most vital and most promising exist in the realm of education, among young people who are less constrained by the world-as-is, and among those who work and live with them every day.

My hope in writing this essay is to help teachers and students and parents acknowledge their portals, the validity of their uncertainty, and feel safer in sustaining it. If reading it does that for even one, writing it will have been time well spent.

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*My tutor was a truly brilliant woman called Chris Seeley, who passed away far too young. If you’d like to know more about her, start here.

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Here’s me with the Regenerative Learning book, and one that sets out my thinking more fully…