We are living through a period of compounding disruption. The demands on human judgment, collective reasoning, and civic agency have never been greater. Yet the skills most essential for navigating that disruption remain largely invisible in how we design, deliver, measure, and value education.
Critical thinking, creative problem-solving, analytical and systems thinking, tolerance for complexity, and the capacity to reason and act with integrity under pressure have long been framed internationally as hard-to-find economic essentials. Additionally, these capacities also underpin our collective social and civic lives: how we participate, how we lead, how we disagree, and how we recover. They are among the most practical and fundamental of life skills. Yet global education policy has persistently treated them as secondary to ‘real learning’: soft versus hard, values versus skills, citizenship versus employability.
That distinction is becoming costly. Transnational reports have positioned these capacities as critical for economic participation for over two decades. More recently, amid growing social fragmentation and democratic strain, they are increasingly framed as foundational to civic life itself. History bears this out: societies that think and act together make better decisions, sustain stronger institutions, and recover faster from crisis. Yet despite this, they remain largely implicit across global education curricula.
So why are we still leaving this largely to chance? And what would it look like to build it deliberately? These are questions I’ve been sitting with for some time, and last November, I presented at the Department of Education Research Summit in Croke Park, whilst also chairing the morning session on ‘Visions of Future Educational Systems’. My paper, The Visible Mind: From Extractive Systems to Generative Citizens, proposed an intentional reframing of education’s role in society.
The Summit gathered teachers, academics, researchers and policymakers ahead of Ireland’s 2026 National Convention on Education. The stakes are high: the last National Education Convention in Ireland was held in 1993. January 2026 marks the beginning of that national conversation, one now supported by Fíorú, Ireland’s newly launched Futures-Oriented Educational Research Network, which I also cover below.
The gathering felt less like a conference and more like a collective call to action. Speakers engaged with the shaping forces of our time: the lessons of past successes and failures, the persistence of everyday challenges and the raw excitement of emergent possibilities. Much of the conversation acknowledged a critical friction: these goals are set against a socio-technological landscape evolving faster than our institutions can comprehend.
What follows is an overview of the core arguments I presented: why education must evolve from a system overly focused on credentialing to one of cognitive infrastructure, and what that transformation might look like in practice.
The Problem: The Speed Trap We’re Living In
Biologist E.O. Wilson once observed that we live with “Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology”. It’s a profound diagnosis. 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 reason grows wider each year. Cognitive psychologist and behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman described two modes of thinking: System 1 (fast, automatic) and System 2 (slow, effortful). Some are familiar with this as Dual Process Theory. However, these thinking patterns extend beyond the individual level. They are fractal by nature, like the branching of a fern leaf that repeats at every scale; cognitive patterns that replicate upward through organisations, governance and entire economies, becoming the structural DNA of our social systems.
When they scale up, they don’t simply become larger. They transform into fundamentally different kinds of systems that operate according to different laws of physics.
System 1 scales into Complex Systems
Think of a murmuration of starlings wheeling across the sky: thousands of birds moving as one fluid mass with no central controller. Or a financial market responding to breaking news. Or spikes of misinformation cascading through social media networks. These are emergent systems, where coherent patterns arise from simple local rules. They’re non-linear, probabilistic, self-organising. They thrive in high-entropy environments, constantly adapting without a blueprint. Unregulated, they mutate with rapid agility.
System 2 scales into the Complicated Systems
Think of a Swiss watch, a bureaucracy, or carefully drafted regulation. These are mechanical systems, designed from the top down, where A leads predictably to B. They’re linear, deterministic, and require enormous energy to maintain structure and stability. Built to minimize surprise, they’re defensive by nature. Overwhelmed by the speed and agility of emergent systems, they risk calcification and inertia.
Neither system is inherently bad, but the danger lies in the mismatch: we’re trying to manage a complex world using complicated tools. And increasingly, we’re being outrun.
Two Forces, Two Speeds, One Collision
This mismatch is reshaping our world at every scale, changing how we think, how we live together, and how our planet functions.
The Invisible Hand (System 1: Extractive Challenger)
This is the domain of complex private challengers: the algorithmic infrastructure of the digital age married to extractive capitalism. From AI and social media platforms to financial markets and corporate governance structures optimised for shareholder primacy.
These systems operate by stealth at machine speed, optimised for short-term value extraction. A teenager scrolling TikTok encounters an algorithm that has analysed millions of data points to predict what will hold their attention for another thirty seconds. A voter sees political content calibrated not for truth but for emotional resonance and shareability. A consumer receives product recommendations based on behavioural patterns they themselves don’t recognise. Science historian Graham Burnett recently labelled this ‘human fracking’.
But the extraction runs deeper. A pharmaceutical company prices life-saving medication beyond reach because quarterly earnings matter more than patient outcomes. A housing developer builds luxury apartments in a city with a homelessness crisis because shareholder dividends trump social need. A corporation offshores jobs and dodges taxes while lobbying against regulation.
This is the logic of shareholder capitalism at its most ruthless: a system where fiduciary duty to shareholders legally supersedes responsibility to workers, communities or the planet. Where the pursuit of infinite growth on a finite planet is not questioned but mandated. Where ‘efficiency’ means extracting maximum value in minimum time, regardless of what or whom is consumed in the process. The public interest becomes collateral damage.
While largely invisible in operation and private in governance, these systems are profound in their ability to reshape societies and behaviours. They are rapid, agile and exceptionalist, treating democracy, community and the commons as externalities to be exploited rather than foundations to be protected.
Institutional Architecture (System 2: Bureaucratic Defender)
This is the slow, deliberative machinery of the state: bureaucratic, defensive, risk-averse. It encompasses departments of education, healthcare systems and democratic structures.
A new curriculum might take five years to develop, three years to pilot, another two to roll out. A public health response requires consultation rounds, impact assessments and stakeholder alignment. Democratic legislation moves through committees, amendments and multiple readings.
These bodies are cautious by design, constrained by accountability and slowed by institutional gravity. They operate through consultation and gradual implementation, optimised for stability rather than speed. This carefulness serves vital purposes (preventing hasty mistakes, protecting vulnerable populations, ensuring democratic legitimacy). But in a hyper-rapid environment, caution can become paralysis.
The Structural Tearing
The danger isn’t the duality, it’s the unchecked dominance of the infinitely faster system. This creates a structural tearing: the citizen caught between gears on a bicycle propelled by a strap-on rocket.
When citizens are unfamiliar with the cognitive tools required to navigate complexity, and extractive systems operate unchecked, we see the emergence of collective dysfunction. Growing inequality. Mental health crisis. Social fragmentation. Civic unrest. Ultimately, a slide into populism and collective irrationality.
As the state moves too slowly to protect and the market moves too quickly to comprehend, the citizen is paralysed.
Why This Should Matter to You
If you’re not an educator, you might wonder what this has to do with your life.
Consider you’re a parent deciding whether to vaccinate your child. You encounter contradictory claims online. Some cite ‘research’, others share emotional testimonials. Which sources are credible? How do statistical risks translate to individual decisions? What’s the difference between a peer-reviewed study and a wellness influencer’s anecdote?
This requires more than information access. It demands the ability to evaluate evidence, recognise methodological quality, distinguish correlation from causation and hold uncertainty while making consequential choices.
Or you’re reading about climate policy proposals. One politician claims carbon taxes will destroy the economy. Another insists they’re essential for survival. Both cite data. Both sound confident. How do you judge competing claims when you’re not a climate scientist or economist? How do you distinguish principled disagreement from motivated reasoning or outright deception?
These aren’t edge cases. This is the everyday cognitive demand of modern life.
When education increasingly narrows its focus to compliance and credentialism (treating students as future units of productivity rather than future citizens), society loses more than individual potential. We lose our collective ability to navigate complexity, surface new thinking and coordinate positive action.
Crucially, we become defenceless against contaminated information. In an era where AI-generated content floods the internet, where deepfakes are indistinguishable from reality, where algorithmic amplification rewards outrage over accuracy, without the tools to filter this noise we lose the ability to distinguish signal from static, credible expertise from confident charlatanism.
Democracy itself becomes vulnerable. Shared narratives, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we value, have always enabled collective sense-making. But when the factual basis for policy discussion is systematically eroded, those narratives fracture. We can’t deliberate about trade-offs if we can’t agree on basic facts. We can’t make informed choices if we can’t evaluate competing claims. We can’t govern ourselves if we can’t think together, and we can’t think together without some common ground on which to build shared understanding.
The alternative is more generative. Education that equips citizens to develop critical thinking, systems awareness, and collaborative problem-solving skills effectively open-sources solution-finding. It enables what James Surowiecki called ‘the wisdom of crowds’: not mob rule, but deliberative participation where people can question assumptions, articulate values, and engage constructively with difference.
At scale, this produces clarity of collective purpose. Communities become better at identifying what actually matters and weighing complex trade-offs. Active citizenship shifts from sporadic emotional reaction to sustained and constructive participation grounded in shared understanding.
This isn’t just about academic attainment. It’s about a society’s capacity to listen and think to itself whilst deliberating critically. Education, in this sense, becomes foundational civic infrastructure, determining whether agency is concentrated or shared, whether collective intelligence can emerge precisely when it’s most needed.
An Opportunity: Generative Architecture
But there’s an alternative. When citizens are equipped with cognitive tools and a generative mindset that supports rather than extracts, we see the possibility of emergent intelligence rather than emergent malignancy.
Kahneman described two systems of thinking. We need a third, one that can hold its own against algorithmic hyper-speed and bureaucratic inertia, one that counters the exponential rise of computational complexity by amplifying our distinctly human capacity for adaptive, integrative thought and reason.
System 3: The Visible Mind (Generative Citizens)
This third system isn’t merely a sectoral intervention in education policy. It’s a proposal to recognise education as the civic bedrock we require to collectively navigate 21st-century complexity.
We are already seeing the emergence of sophisticated digital infrastructures for civic participation (consensus-finding platforms like vTaiwan and Polis, citizens’ assemblies, petition portals). However, these consultations risk only attracting those who are already engaged. And without the cognitive capacity to utilise them effectively and participate constructively at scale, these tools risk exacerbating existing pathologies rather than resolving them. As we see with social media, online deliberation collapses into performative tribalism. The algorithm feeds us controversy and outrage while misleading claims travel faster than careful reasoning.
Without the cognitive scaffolding to define purpose and support human and planetary need, or an intentional cultivation of clear thinking, effective collaboration, and objective deliberation, democratic innovations will struggle to navigate complexity and realise their collective potential. The infrastructure of participation, on its own, is insufficient.
The reality is we’ve democratised instantaneous access to the compressed entirety of human knowledge, but not the capacity to make sense of it. We’ve given everyone a megaphone, but not the ability to use it with care and consideration. We’ve created always-on digital interconnectivity, but not the cognitive architecture to harness its strengths and direct it purposefully. We’ve unlocked unprecedented convenience, but not the discipline to resist its compulsions.
Meaningful participation as a 21st-century citizen depends on deliberate cultivation of metacognitive capacity: the ability to direct attention with purpose, recognise patterns within everyday experience, intentionally think across interconnected systems, and hold paradox without retreating to over-simplification.
This requires fluency in applied thinking skills: critical inquiry that frames the right questions, creative problem-solving, and analytical reasoning to make sense of rapid change. Foundational to all of this is the ability to move deliberately between divergent and convergent modes of thought.
These are not alternatives to disciplinary knowledge; they are the means by which knowledge becomes usable, enabling the shift from knowing that to knowing how, from knowing about to knowing through action and judgment. Thinking. Doing. Feeling. Deliberating. Deciding, all with clarity and purpose and evidenced reason.
Collectively, these capacities form what Brené Brown describes as an emerging “thinking class”: citizens able to navigate ambiguity, collaborate productively, and contribute meaningfully to the shared challenges that will define this century.
The metacrisis we face is fundamentally a crisis of human decision-making. Climate disruption, democratic erosion, and technological acceleration all stem from choices by human-made, human-led systems. Better solutions require better choices, and better choices require enhanced human capacity: more informed, more deliberate, more attuned to complexity and grounded in human and planetary need.
Rather than endlessly treating symptoms, we address the root: human cognitive capacity at scale. Give someone a fish, feed them for a day. Teach them to fish, feed them for a lifetime. Teach an entire generation to think critically and deliberate collectively? You transform how every future decision gets made.
From Scores to Sensemaking
We’re Not Starting From Failure
By international standards, Ireland’s education system is robust. OECD’s PISA 2022 results place Irish students as top performers in the EU for reading literacy. Eurostat confirms Ireland has the highest rate of third-level educational attainment in the European Union.
This success reflects decades of sustained state investment and societal commitment to education’s transformative potential. Incremental reform continues its evolution, though the path has been uneven. The Junior Cycle reforms of 2014 promised continuous assessment at 40% of final marks, later reduced to 10% following teacher union negotiations.
From the new Primary School Curriculum (launched in 2025) to the Leaving Certificate reforms that began last September, the direction of travel is clear. Several LC subjects now include project-based assessment worth up to 40%, the most significant structural change in over a century. Yet implementation remains contested. Teacher unions have raised concerns, and the deliberation continues.
The Implementation Gap
The question is whether this reform cycle will deepen or dilute. The expertise exists. The policy intent is sound. But translating ambition into consistent practice at scale remains the persistent challenge.
Implementation friction isn’t about intent but translation: maintaining coherent direction when high-level policy meets granular classroom realities. Without constant calibration, we risk creating isolated pockets of innovation rather than consistent system-wide evolution. The pattern of risk is familiar: bold reforms on paper that fragment in practice, leaving results dependent on which classroom a student happens to enter.
This matters because the next stage of reform requires more than structural adjustment. It requires making explicit what has remained implicit: the cognitive architecture that transforms information into a deeper understanding.
The Missing Layer
Having built this robust foundation over the past century, we now have the opportunity to implement significant enhancements. Education systems excel at measuring inventory: grades, credentials, recall. We now have the stability to make visible the cognitive processes by which students actually use knowledge: building semantic networks, recognising patterns, evaluating evidence, adapting reasoning, and navigating complexity.
Advanced thinking skills aren’t new in schools. They’ve always been present in good teaching. The issue is that they remain predominantly implicit, overly dependent on individual teacher expertise rather than deliberately designed into curriculum structures. This creates inequity: students shouldn’t need to luck into the right classroom to develop these capacities. This is the same implementation gap, playing out at a deeper level.
This matters because in a world of rapid change and information abundance, the bottleneck isn’t access to knowledge but the capacity to work with it. Students need to learn how to discern signal from noise, transfer understanding across contexts, and revise thinking when evidence shifts. These aren’t generic skills but specific thinking capacities built on rich semantic knowledge networks.
This isn’t about replacing foundational knowledge with abstract thinking skills. Rather, it’s ensuring that as students acquire knowledge, they work with curricula explicitly designed to build integrated networks of knowledge (semantic networks) that enable deeper understanding, effective reasoning, and application. Facts are essential. They’re the baseline. What distinguishes effective learners is the cognitive architecture that enables them to deploy knowledge, recognise patterns, adapt their reasoning to new contexts, and examine their own thinking.
The research is clear on how this works. As cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham observes: “You cannot connect dots if you have no dots”. Critical thinking cannot exist without the material of knowledge. New information is easier to learn when it can attach to pre-existing semantic networks. As Willingham notes, “Every new idea must build on ideas that the student already knows”.
Domain expertise requires both content and the cognitive architecture to work with it, deep, coherent knowledge within a field and the metacognitive capacity to deploy it. But increasingly, we also need transdomain fluency: the ability to recognise patterns and transfer insights across different contexts. Both co-produce deep understanding. In Willingham’s formulation, “Memory is the residue of thought”.
This matters most in Senior Cycle, where young people should consolidate their capacity for independent thought. Despite project-based components now in several Leaving Cert subjects, the underlying assessment structures risk still privileging recall over reasoning. The question facing Irish education isn’t whether we value knowledge. It’s whether we can systematically teach students to think with it, building the semantic networks and cognitive architecture that enable genuine understanding, and whether we can implement that ambition at scale, not just in exceptional classrooms.
A Systems-Based Approach
To bridge this gap, my hope is to develop an approach that draws on the principles of complexity theory, speculating that a system-wide transformation can emerge from a set of simple, consistent macro-principles implemented at every scale, from individual classrooms to national policy.
The core intent is this: what holds true in a single classroom can also be used to reshape an entire educational culture. Rather than imposing detailed prescriptions from above, introduce structured knowledge-building practices early and consistently, so that by Senior Cycle, students have years of rehearsed practice rather than encountering the challenges of synthesis, iteration and collaboration as sudden, unfamiliar demands.
Think of it as a spiral curriculum for cognitive fluency. What begins as simple collaborative problem-solving in primary school grows in sophistication, maintaining conceptual continuity through to genuinely sophisticated work in later years.
Grounded in Research, Oriented Towards Practice
This may sound speculative, but it is a grounded synthesis of research from cognitive science, instructional design, learning science and twenty years of experience as an interdisciplinary design educator: Paul Kirschner and Daniel Willingham on how memory forms organised knowledge structures, Gary Klein on how expert intuition emerges from pattern recognition, Annemarie Palincsar on scaffolded instruction.
The principles align with our understanding of expertise development. Expert intuition isn’t magic or innate talent. It’s pattern recognition built from accumulated, well-organised experience and practice. The visible thinking and iterative testing aren’t meant to permanently slow down thinking or replace intuition. They’re the scaffolding for the learning phase that builds the knowledge architecture (schemas) and coherent working habits, enabling ease of synthesis later.
Several themes consistently surface when examining how education might build cognitive capacity at scale. Each principle manifests differently across educational stages (from simple collaborative structures in primary school to allowing scheduled space for sophisticated interdisciplinary synthesis in Senior Cycle), but the continuity of approach is what matters.
Making Thinking Visible
Instead of asking ‘What’s 3 × 5?’, we ask ‘Show me three different ways to solve this, and explain which method you’d choose for different problems, and why’.
Students externalise their cognitive process, mapping the steps taken to reach a conclusion rather than simply reciting the answer. We value the architecture of thought over correct answers.
Consider how this scales. In a primary classroom, a child solving a maths problem draws pictures showing their reasoning. In secondary school, a history student examining the 1916 Rising doesn’t just memorise one interpretation: they map competing perspectives, identify where evidence conflicts and construct an argument while acknowledging uncertainty.
By Senior Cycle, this becomes second nature. Students writing about climate policy don’t just state their position, they articulate their reasoning chain, acknowledge counterarguments and explain what evidence would change their view.
This isn’t about slowing down experts. It’s about building the mental patterns experts already have. You make thinking visible, so it can become understandable, retrievable and improvable. Deep understanding automates to long-term memory, knowledge evolves to relevant, applied, practical and useful.
Building Networks of Knowledge
As stated previously, research shows that humans remember and retrieve information far more effectively when knowledge is organised as interconnected semantic networks rather than isolated data points. Expertise is defined not by volume of facts but by density of connections between them.
A history lesson on the Irish Famine goes beyond dates and death tolls. Students explore how ecology (potato blight), economics (export policies) and ethics (colonial indifference) interconnect, then draw parallels to contemporary food security crises. Biology informs economics. Economics informs social justice.
As cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham observes, “understanding is memory in disguise”. Deep understanding isn’t a large bucket of memorised facts; it’s the ability to access and apply well-organised, interconnected knowledge.
Introduced early and practised consistently, facilitated synthesis becomes increasingly sophisticated, from simple cross-subject connections in primary school to complex interdisciplinary problem-solving in Senior Cycle.
A student studying antibiotic resistance doesn’t just learn the biology. They examine the economics of pharmaceutical research, the ethics of global access to medicine, the public policy challenge of preventing overuse and the chemistry of molecular evolution. The knowledge becomes a web rather than a list.
Cultivating Disciplined Uncertainty
We cultivate the discipline to expect and hold uncertainty, evaluate purpose, test assumptions against evidence and refine understanding through systematic and iterative inquiry.
A science student doesn’t just memorise the photosynthesis equation. They propose what might affect plant growth, design experiments to test each hypothesis, analyse what data actually shows and revise their model based on evidence.
This teaches students to externalise multiple possibilities, create critical distance from initial assumptions, then make decisions based on evidence rather than intuition or received wisdom. It mirrors how knowledge actually advances: through speculation, testing and revision.
It builds comfort with ‘I don’t know yet’ and the discipline to move from speculation to justified belief through systematic inquiry.
Think about how desperately we need this capacity right now. How often do you see people double down on beliefs when presented with contradictory evidence? How often do confident assertions travel further than careful qualifications? How many policy debates collapse because people can’t distinguish ‘my current best hypothesis’ from ‘absolute truth I’ll defend to the death’?
Practised from early years in age-appropriate forms (simple prediction-testing cycles in primary school, increasingly sophisticated hypothesis-testing in secondary), this becomes a natural mode of engaging with knowledge rather than a foreign demand suddenly imposed at examination level.
Thinking Together
The pressing challenges of our time (climate change, public health, democratic resilience) cannot be solved by individuals working in isolation.
Instead of only submitting individual work, students also collaborate in teams on shared projects: a wiki on climate adaptation strategies, a community health campaign, a local history archive. Each student’s research contributes raw material that others refine, challenge and expand. Through this process, the group develops shared artefacts, negotiates perspectives and integrates knowledge across disciplines.
By embedding clear scaffolds and externalised reasoning, we replace vague instructions like ‘work together’ with explicit methodologies for collaborative inquiry. Students learn to scaffold and coordinate research, reason together, map incremental stages of thinking, communicate effectively and reflect on both individual and collective decision-making.
This prepares learners to navigate complexity as cohesive teams. Introduced as simple collaborative structures in primary school and scaled in sophistication through the years, by Senior Cycle students possess genuine collaborative capacity rather than anxiety about suddenly being asked to ‘work in groups’.
The specifics of how these themes translate into curriculum design, assessment frameworks and classroom practice are the subject of ongoing departmental work. What matters is the principle: coherence across scales without requiring top-down prescription.
It’s important to acknowledge that elements of this approach already exist within the Irish education system. The planned increase in Project-based learning, inquiry methods, and integrated curricula during the Leaving Cert redevelopment phase is notable. Some of what’s proposed here would amplify what’s already working. But the challenge remains consistent implementation at scale: moving from isolated examples to systemic practice and ensuring effective translation of intent. How do we embed these principles effectively across the entire education system without imposing rigid uniformity? That tension between coherence and adaptation is precisely what the principles are designed to navigate.
Why Ireland, Why Now
Ireland’s history proves what focused investment in national capacity can achieve. When we commissioned the Ardnacrusha hydroelectric scheme in the 1920s, we weren’t merely pouring concrete to electrify the Free State. We were constructing a monument to national ambition, demonstrating that a newly independent nation could undertake transformative infrastructure projects.
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 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 (climate disruption, technological acceleration, democratic fragility) cannot be met with technical solutions alone. It requires transformation in our collective capacity to think, adapt and act together.
The Department of Education’s timely launch of Fíorú (Ireland’s new Futures-Oriented Educational Research Network) embodies this renewed intentionality. The vision is for Fíorú to evolve beyond a traditional research network into an active catalyst: scanning the horizon for emerging signals, identifying generative approaches and weaving together scattered pockets of innovation already existing across the Irish education system.
The Research Summit marked the opening of a diagnostic phase, interrogating what works, what fails and what forces are reshaping the terrain. The 2026 National Convention is the necessary next stage: a moment of synthesis where diagnosis becomes direction, where national conversation hardens into national strategy.
We have an opportunity most nations would envy. A high-performing system. Political will for reform. A once-in-a-generation mechanism for change in our National Convention. This is a pivotal moment, before the structural tearing becomes irreparable.
The question is whether we have the collective courage to reframe education as the cognitive engine of a progressive, resilient, and functioning democracy.
A Provocation, Not a Prescription
The Visible Mind is not a static blueprint. It’s a provocation. An invitation to speculate collectively on possibilities.
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 citizens), then our primary task also becomes the cultivation of civic participation and collective intelligence.
Not intelligence just measured by academic credentials, but our shared capacity to make sense of complexity, deliberate across difference and act with wisdom and foresight rather than reaction.
This vision extends beyond producing efficient workers and capital growth. It shifts focus from manufacturing outcomes to creating catalytic 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, resilience) can follow naturally.
The question isn’t whether we can afford this investment. Given the alternative (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 only how to improve students’ knowledge attainment and started asking how to help them navigate uncertainty together? What if every classroom conversation revealed not just what students know, but how they think, making reasoning patterns visible, shareable, and improvable?
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. In the words of anthropologist David Graeber, “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”. 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.
Update: January 14th 2026 The national conversation has begun. Applications are now open for the 2026 Convention on Education, and the public can contribute through surveys and submissions here. The Convention will meet four times throughout 2026, bringing together 150 participants to shape Ireland’s education strategy for decades to come. This is the opportunity the article anticipated. The question is whether we will use it to address not just structural reform, but the deeper challenge of building cognitive infrastructure for 21st-century citizenship. Full details: gov.ie/education-convention
Gerard Fox is an educator teaching interdisciplinary design at IADT. His research explores how universal education can cultivate collective intelligence and leverage civic technology to strengthen the public good, building the cognitive and connective infrastructures necessary for reasserting the common interest of people and planet.
