Ireland is at an inflection point: continue treating education primarily as economic preparation, or reimagine it as the foundational civic infrastructure upon which democratic society depends.
This was the central provocation I put forward at November’s Department of Education Research Summit in Croke Park. Chairing the session ‘Visions of Future Educational Systems’, I presented a paper titled ‘The Visible Mind: From Extractive Systems to Generative Citizens’. It proposed a speculative reframing of education’s role in an age of volatility.
The Summit served as a critical precursor to the 2026 National Convention on Education, a once-in-a-generation opportunity. To underline its significance, the last National Education Convention in Ireland was held in 1993. We are, quite literally, beginning the redesigning of the bridge while crossing it.
The Problem: Caught Between Two Speeds
Biologist E.O. Wilson observed that we live with “Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology”. It captures a profound mismatch: our emotional wiring evolved for small tribal groups, our institutions still operate with hierarchical assumptions from centuries past, yet our technological capabilities now rival those once attributed only to deities. The gap between the pace of change and our collective capacity to respond with grounded wisdom grows wider each year. Our society is currently suspended between two dominant forces operating at incompatible speeds:
System 1 scales into Complexity
Think of a murmuration of starlings wheeling across the sky, or a financial market responding to news, or social media trends cascading through networks. This system operates at machine speed. This is the realm of algorithmic infrastructure and shareholder capitalism, optimised for short-term value extraction. From social media feeds to pharmaceutical pricing, these systems are agile, private, and exceptionalist—treating the commons as externalities to be exploited.
System 2 scales into the Complicated
Think of a Swiss watch, a public institution, or a carefully drafted regulation. The Bureaucratic Institution operates at deliberative speed. These are our public structures, designed for stability and democratic legitimacy. However, they are often paralysed by institutional gravity. A curriculum takes a decade to implement; a crisis unfolds in days.
The Result
When the state moves too slowly to protect and the market moves too quickly to comprehend, the citizen is caught between the gears. This friction manifests as growing inequality, collective irrationality, and the slide into populism.
(A) Disempowered Citizens + (B) Extractive Systems = (C) Emergent Malignancy
An Opportunity: Generative Architecture
To resolve this, we must envision a System 3: education as the cognitive bedrock of a resilient society. Ireland is not starting from failure; PISA 2022 results and Eurostat data confirm our students are top performers in literacy and attainment.
However, a systemic paradox persists. We excel at measuring what students know, yet we often overlook the longitudinal practice of how and why they apply that knowledge. To move forward, we must bridge the “translation deficit”, the gap where high-level policy meets granular classroom specification. Without a robust methodology, we risk creating only erratic “clusters of coherence” rather than system-wide evolution.
(A) Empowered Citizens + (B) Generative Systems = (C) Emergent Intelligence
The Fractal Framework: Scaling Cognitive Fluency
To bridge this gap, my research proposes a Fractal Framework. Drawing on complexity theory, this framework posits that large-scale transformation arises not from top-down mandates, but from simple, generative rules enacted consistently at every scale.
The Principle of Fractal Scaling
The core tenet is fractal scaling: the pedagogical logic governing a single classroom should mirror the logic shaping the national curriculum. By embedding structured synthesis-building early, we ensure that by the Senior Cycle, students possess years of internalised experience. Synthesis, iteration, and collaboration should not be sudden, unfamiliar demands, but part of a cognitive spiral that maintains conceptual continuity from primary school through to doctoral-level inquiry.
Four Fractal Principles for Generative Education
This framework synthesises decades of research in cognitive science and metacognition (including insights from Kirschner, Willingham, Friston, and Vervaeke). These principles act as generative constraints:
- Make Thinking Visible: Prioritise the visibility of reasoning over the mere accuracy of output. When students externalise their logic, they move beyond declarative knowledge to reveal the underlying structures of their thinking. This is the fundamental process required to build the well-organised knowledge structures that eventually facilitate expert-level intuition.
- Connect Networks of Knowledge: Shift from “fact silos” to interconnected semantic networks. Research confirms that expertise is defined not by the volume of information held, but by the density of connections between concepts. Students engage in deliberate synthesis, creating the integrated mental architectures that enable rapid pattern recognition and creative problem-solving.
- Disciplined Conjecture: Cultivate a disciplined comfort with uncertainty. Rather than seeking a single “correct” answer at the outset, students learn to treat initial ideas as provisional models to be tested and refined. By working iteratively from probability toward certainty, they move from speculative “hunches” to evidence-based conclusions, building essential epistemic humility.
- Think Together: Design for collective as well as individual cognition as a fluid, interchangeable process. This principle integrates the two: individual foundational knowledge provides the expertise that fuels group synthesis, while the group’s collective inquiry challenges and sharpens individual understanding. By externalising insights onto shared “boundary objects”, personal ideas become collective artefacts that teams can critique, refine, and improve together, transforming solo competence into shared intelligence.
Why This Matters
If you are not an educator, it is reasonable to ask why this matters to you. The answer is that participation in modern life now demands higher-order thinking from all citizens. From judging publicly available information to navigating health and technology, the quality of our participation depends on cognitive capacities that education either develops or leaves under-formed.
When education narrows its focus to compliance or credentialism, society loses its collective ability to innovate and evolve knowledge at scale. Crucially, it leaves us defenceless against an expodential contamination of information. In an era where AI-generated “slop” and “nonsense” are mistaken for knowledge, the inability to distinguish signal from noise is a systemic risk. Without these tools, democracy itself becomes vulnerable as the factual basis for policy discussion is systematically eroded.
The alternative is Open-Sourcing Solution-Finding. An education that equips citizens to navigate a more complex reality builds the foundations for the wisdom of informed crowds. It enables a society to think with itself—to question assumptions, articulate values, and engage constructively with difference.
Why Ireland, Why Now
Ireland’s history stands as proof of what focused investment in national capacity can achieve. When we commissioned the Ardnacrusha hydroelectric scheme in the 1920s, we were not merely pouring concrete to electrify the Free State. We were constructing a monument to national ambition and possibility, demonstrating that a newly independent nation could undertake ambitious infrastructure projects that would transform everyday life.
Later waves of educational expansion and industrial strategy demonstrated that same profound intentionality. We made choices about what kind of society we wanted to become, then built the infrastructure to make it possible.
Today’s equivalent challenge demands a different kind of architecture. It looks less like physical infrastructure and more like a national laboratory for macro-social futures. The polycrisis we face (encompassing climate disruption, technological acceleration, and democratic fragility) cannot be met with technical solutions alone. It requires a transformation in our collective capacity to think, adapt, and act together.
The launch of Fíorú is significant precisely because it embodies this renewed intentionality. The vision is for Fíorú to evolve beyond the constraints of a traditional research network, functioning instead as an active catalyst: scanning the horizon for emerging signals, identifying generative approaches, and weaving together the scattered pockets of innovation that already exist across the Irish education system.
The Research Summit marked the opening of a diagnostic phase, beginning the interrogation of what works, what fails, and what forces are reshaping the terrain. The 2026 National Convention is designed as the necessary next stage, a moment of synthesis where diagnosis becomes direction, and a national conversation hardens into a new national strategy.
We have an opportunity that most nations would envy: a high-performing system, political will for reform, and a window of time before the structural tearing becomes irreparable. The question is whether we have the collective courage to reimagine education not as economic preparation, but as the cognitive infrastructure of democracy itself.
A Provocation, Not a Prescription
The Visible Mind is not a static blueprint. It is a provocation and an invitation for further discussion.
If we accept that education is the root infrastructure of nation-building (the meta-system that shapes all others, not by programming our thoughts, but by explicitly equipping us to think as adaptive, independent, critical, and objective citizens), then our primary task becomes the cultivation of collective intelligence.
This is not intelligence measured by the isolated metrics of IQ or academic credentials, but our shared capacity to make sense of complexity, deliberate across difference, and act with wisdom and foresight, rather than succumbing to the myopic, volatile, and destructive cycles of emotive reaction.
This vision extends beyond the production of efficient workers and capital growth. It shifts our focus from manufacturing outcomes to creating conditions. Like tending fertile soil, our role is to provide the nutrient-rich environment of critical inquiry and shared purpose. If we ensure the conditions are right, the rest (competence, invention, and resilience) can follow naturally.
The question is not whether we can afford this investment. Given the alternative (a continued slide into social fragmentation and systemic disorder), the question is whether we can afford not to.
The infrastructure is not yet built. But the invitation is now extended to every teacher, policymaker, parent, and citizen: What if we stopped asking how to make students better at recalling facts, and started asking how to make them better at navigating uncertainty, together?
That question is Ireland’s to answer. The conversation begins at the 2026 National Convention. The architecture begins in classrooms, policy chambers, and communities across the country.
The time begins now.
This article emerged from a paper presented at the Department of Education Research Summit, November 2025. Thanks to Tomás Ó Ruairc, Ian Hughes, Sarah Rochford and the Central Policy Unit team for creating the conditions for these conversations to begin.
Gerard Fox is an educator teaching interdisciplinary design at IADT. His research applies strategic design to the challenge of building civic capacity and connective infrastructures capable of reasserting the common interest of people and planet.
