Looking Back and Looking Forwards

A couple of weeks ago, the death was announced of Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, who on Christmas Eve 1968 took the iconic ‘Earthrise’ photograph, showing the planet rising above a barren lunar surface.

“We’d come 240,000 miles to see the Moon,” said Anders, “only to realise it was the Earth that was really worth looking at.”

Three years later in 1971, fellow astronaut Alan Shepard cried not when he landed on the moon, but when he looked back at the Earth, his home planet.  

I’ve always been fascinated by this gesture of looking back. It has a small but significant cultural history.

In Homer’s Iliad, Andromache fails to persuade her husband Hector not to fight against Achilles. She knows he will die. And when finally she leaves, recognising that she may never see him again, Homer describes her as “often turning to look back”.

The trope is developed in the story of Lot’s wife in the Bible, and in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus, desperate to see his wife again after her death, descends into the underworld, where the gods grant him the power to return with her on the condition that he does not look back. Of course, he cannot resist. With the surface of the living world in sight, he turns round, and Eurydice disappears forever.

In Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, Emma watches her lover Rodolphe walk away after they arrange to elope the following day. Emma notices that when he leaves he does not look back. The reader knows this is a bad sign. And sure enough, Rodolphe fails to show up the next day, breaking Emma’s heart.

And let’s not forget the Clint Eastwood movie In the Line of Fire. Clint sits at the top of the steps to the Lincoln Memorial flirting with a colleague, Rene Russo. She affects to be annoyed with his company and sets off down the steps because she has a ‘date’ with someone else. Clint continues sitting, eating his ice cream from a little tub, watching as Rene descends the long set of stairs. ‘If she looks back,’ he says to himself, ‘that means she’s interested.’ She does of course look back.

Clearly, then, the act of looking back is a sign of love, and a signifier for nostalgia.

By contrast, the act of looking forwards is characterised more by feelings of hope and fear. So let’s switch now and project our gaze forwards to take a look at the future.

There is a piece of video art called “Camata” by Pierre Huyghe, currently playing at the Venice Biennale in which a group of machines is filmed gathered around a human skeleton on the barren sands of the Atacama Desert, performing what looks like a strange burial ritual.

It’s a chilling scene.

Have the robots learned from humans some kind of funeral honour code? Are they just morbidly curious? Or is this an act of triumph, an act of mockery for their makers, who they have now destroyed?

It’s the science fiction fantasy of our times. The idea that robots – or Artificial Intelligence – will take over the world.

History, said H.G. Wells, is the race between education and catastrophe.

If Wells is right, then how do we avoid sleepwalking into catastrophe? What kind of an education do humans need to survive and flourish...?

I confess that I don’t have the answer. But it might be possible to establish 7 basic starting points:

First. To understand that we are never self-sufficient when it comes to learning. Knowledge comes through association and dialogue. The future of learning is collaborative. Teams of course need leaders, but leaders cannot function without teams.

Second. The dialogue needs to extend to other communities, not just locally or nationally, but internationally, to enrich the quality of the conversation, and to deepen the expertise of teams.

Third. We need to find ways of appreciating difference – because to see through eyes other than our own is to understand that our way of looking at the world is not the only one.

Fourth. It’s not enough to know things, though know things we must. We must also learn to think. That requirement has not changed much over the centuries. Socrates’s students did not merely learn facts; they learned how to think.

In her account of the trial of Adolf Eichman for Nazi war crimes, Hannah Arendt famously articulated the idea of the ‘banality of evil’. Eichman’s problem, she contended, was not one of satanic evil, but rather he didn’t think.

It was his inability to think or question himself that led to a fog of stupidity in which he blindly followed orders and efficiently administered the slaughter of fellow human beings. 

As such, an education might concern itself less with finding solutions, and more with asking better questions – including questioning ourselves.

Fifth. Students should understand the value of simplicity but they must also accept the need for complexity. Indeed, the motto for education might be, it’s not that simple.

Sixth.

There is a difference between watching (which is passive) and seeing (which is active).

And if people get used to merely watching rather than learning to see – including looking forwards and backwards – then they cease to think.

Seventh. In the 1930s, globes were sold with only the names of airports on them because the future was seen merely in terms of air travel. The vision was utopian but wholly misguided. As human beings we must remember to keep our feet on the ground.

So, what were those robots doing, enacting a burial for the last human beings in the Atacama desert?

I don’t know, but by thinking critically and creatively, rather than sleepwalking into a future world reliant on technology, let’s hope we can prevent the fear of catastrophe from becoming a reality, and avoid future astronauts looking back at our battered planet, crying not just with nostalgia but with grief, wishing we’d acted earlier in cultivating our own inner space.

I am hopeful we can manage that, but what is clear is that education is the key to a successful human future. And the key to education is paying attention and looking hard. And the project starts right here with students in schools like ours.

Chris Greenhalgh
Principal & CEO