Chapter 4: Starting Small to Make Big Changes for a New Education Narrative | Benjamin Freud, Ph.D. | 13 Min Read

June 9, 2022

There is no distinction at all between the everyday world (samsara) and freedom (nirvana). There is no distinction between freedom and the everyday world.

—Nagarjuna

Futurephobia is not a word that we come across very frequently considering its potential impact. You’ll find only a few hits on your favorite search engine, and a search on News on the Web Corpus (which contains billions of words of data from web-based media from 2010 to the present) shows one occurrence in the last twelve years (17 May 2021 in The Guardian). As of this writing (May 2022), Climate anxiety has come up 697 times in the media (though sometimes more than once in the same article). This doesn’t in itself mean that climate anxiety is on the rise: the media have a tendency to latch onto certain terms and give them momentum. The media and the public feed off each other: momentum becomes a function of the mass of press coverage times the velocity of public conversations. Futurephobia has, however, eluded press coverage and public conversation even though its implications are at least as impactful as climate anxiety.

According to one study, a majority…

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Benjamin Freud, Ph.D.

Benjamin Freud, Ph.D. is the co-founder of Coconut Thinking, an advisory that supports schools and learning organizations to co-create, co-develop, co-stress test, and co-implement ideas that nurture the conditions for emergent learning. Benjamin is also the Head of Upper School at Green School, Bali. He was previously the Whole School Leader of Learning and Teaching at Prem Tinsulanonda International School in Thailand. He was the Academic Coordinator at Misk Schools, one of the most prestigious and high-profile school in the kingdom. In 2018-2019, he was also the Head of Upper Primary and Middle School at Misk. Prior to this, he was Vice-Principal of the Middle School and High School at the Harbour School in Hong Kong. He holds a Ph.D. in History, an MSc in Education, an MBA, an MA in International Relations, and a BA in International Affairs. Benjamin was born and grew up in Paris, France. He moved to the U.S. when he was 15 and spent 11 years there in different cities before living in the U.K., Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and now Bali, Indonesia. He started his career in consulting for Internet start-ups in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s, working with people whose ambitions were no less than to change the world. This experience had a profound effect on Benjamin's outlook on education, innovation, and entrepreneurship.