34. Black Mountains College: Rethinking Education for Our Times - with Ben Rawlence

Today’s episode explores a simple but urgent question: is our education system still fit for the world we’re entering? Climate disruption, AI, and uncertainty demand new forms of education fit for complexity and change.

A rich lineage of alternative and experimental education has been evolving for decades, seeking to make learning more holistic, place-based, creative, and ecologically grounded. The focus of today’s conversation is one of those institutions: Black Mountains College in Wales. BMC is building a university model explicitly designed for a warming world, where nature is often the classroom and curriculum blends ecology and climate science with the arts, systems thinking, and community-rooted practice.

I’m joined by its co-founder and CEO, Ben Rawlence, award-winning writer and former human rights researcher, to explore:

• The historicity of Western educational systems
• What the role of a university should be in society
• Black Mountains College as model of the future of education 
• The role of ecological imagination
• Youth, eco anxiety and the challenges of parenting in today’s planetary moment

Episode Website

Links:

• Black Mountains College
• Think Like a Forest by Ben Rawlence
• Guardian: ‘We create changemakers’: the new UK college dedicated to climate crisis
• BMC and ecological imagination by Joseph Rowntree Foundation
• List of alternative schools and earth centered curriculum centers
• The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies of Ecological Revolution from Below
• Britt Wray on Climate Grief
• Future Council
• Re-imagining education conference

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

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