Prologue: No hope without action

This book was nearly titled No hope without action, after long conversations about what hope really means. Nietzsche (1996) described it as the cruelest evil, left in Pandora’s jar to prolong human torment. Paulo Freire (1994), writing much later, argued instead for critical hope, a hope tied to struggle and practice rather than passive waiting. Erich Fromm (1992) added yet another perspective, defining hope as an active orientation, an inner readiness for the possible that resists passivity and insists on engagement. Between these poles lies our concern: hope can sustain us, but unless it is bound to action, it becomes an excuse for delay.

This volume’s designer, Martine Eyzenga, persuaded me to leave the title No hope without action behind. (She was right. We do not want to start off too dark.) We landed instead on Build a positive rebellion. Choosing rebellion over hope signals urgency and agency. Empty hope is most visible in education, where it has long been held up as a path to mobility and freedom. Yet too often, hope delays real change and sustains illusions of progress while contradictions deepen. We need to release ourselves from this empty hope and build a positive rebellion rooted in courage, creativity, and collective action.

Nothing is more political than education, and, like politics, education stands at a breaking point. The old assurances that schools would open doors, guarantee mobility, and prepare us for the future are unraveling. Institutions built on these promises now strain under their contradictions. Classrooms remain full, degrees continue to be conferred, and ceremonies unfold with ceremony, yet public trust in education as a pathway to progress is weakening. We face a paradox: never have so many pursued formal schooling, and never before has its value seemed so fragile. On top of this uncertainties created by advanced technologies and an explosive growth of authoritarianism cast a dark shadow.

The cracks are plain to see. The factory model of schooling, a product of industrial modernity, shaped education to meet the needs of bureaucracies and assembly lines. Age-graded cohorts, bells that mark when learning is thought to start and end, standardized curricula, and the assumption that teachers transmit content to passive recipients remain entrenched. Students conform to institutional routines, while institutions rarely adapt to them. Sorting, compliance, and efficiency overshadow inquiry. Curriculum narrows into checklists, and young people learn to game the system for grades and credentials even when real learning is shallow.

The social contract that once animated this system has broken. The belief of “work hard, achieve, and secure your future” no longer matches lived realities. Graduates face precarious labor markets, rising costs, and widening inequality. Credentials function less as gateways than as costly filters. Institutions, meanwhile, extend study and debt not to support growth but to delay a reckoning with economies unable to absorb the graduates they produce. The system sustains itself by promising more than it delivers and monetizing the gap.

This is not only an economic crisis; it is cultural. The rituals of lectures, exams, and graduations often feel like theater when outcomes do not meet expectations. Families press children to succeed out of fear rather than confidence. Even those who excel by institutional measures often describe a misalignment between what they were taught and the realities they confront. Trust erodes in schools, in leadership, and in the very idea of education as a public good.

In this vacuum, authoritarian politics thrive. Schools are pulled into culture wars. Legislatures dictate permissible topics. Textbooks are sanitized. Libraries face censorship campaigns. Teachers are monitored. Dissent is punished. The rhetoric of restoring discipline, returning to standards, and protecting children is seductive, but its effect is suffocating because this very rhetoric is used as a weapon against children. Inquiry becomes disloyalty. Complexity becomes a threat. The classroom becomes a stage for political control rather than a space for thought.

The pressures on schools are not new, but the pace and scope are unprecedented. Artificial intelligence and other technologies are reshaping knowledge, work, and human interaction. Yet instead of rethinking their role, schools often attempt to fit these forces into old structures. Tools are adopted as symbols of modernization while pedagogy and assumptions remain untouched. Talking about change proves easier than enacting it.

This failure is dangerous. AI and related, advanced technologies are not neutral. They are owned by a handful of actors. They can reinforce bias, expand surveillance, and commodify student data. When institutions resist adaptation, they leave students vulnerable to both obsolescence and exploitation. The challenge is not how to fit AI into schooling as it exists, but how to reimagine education in light of what these technologies mean for learning, agency, and human futures.

Meanwhile, planet-wide crises demand new forms of learning to solve emerging dilemmas. Climate disruption, pandemics, mass displacement, and algorithmic governance are present threats. Yet education often proceeds as if the future will mirror the past, updated with new devices. Students eager to prepare for tomorrow instead encounter yesterday’s solutions, stripped of relevance. Confidence falters when confronted with complexity.

The potential consequences are significant. When learning is reduced to indoctrination, blinding one to the world’s challenges, the pursuit of truth gives way to the preservation of power. Students inherit myths instead of enjoying agency and freedom. Universities, too, risk silence when reputational or financial pressures outweigh academic freedom. When curiosity and courage are no longer nurtured, civic life narrows, and the potential for self-actualization diminishes.

This raises a hard question: what is education for, if it cannot help us create new value to live together amid turbulence? Adding courses, layering devices, or outsourcing direction to markets does not resolve structural problems. These responses keep institutions running on life support but prevent renewal. It is easier to talk about change than to change one’s self.

But hope remains unsettled. It comforts, but it also delays. It gives us the feeling that change will arrive on its own, when in truth it depends on what we do. Education has long leaned on such passive hope: waiting for reforms to arrive, for technology to save us, for the next generation to repair what the last neglected. This posture does not resolve the crisis; it prolongs it. Hope without action deepens paralysis.

And yet, hope endures as a conviction that change is still possible if we act. People cling to education because they believe in its deeper promise: a shared practice of making meaning, building capacity, and shaping futures together. No other institution wields so much trust. The challenge is whether this promise can be recovered before the contradictions of the old model cause collapse.

Naming the problem is the first step. Remember, education is political. It produces inequality while promising mobility. It markets innovation while clinging to inherited paradigms. It invokes freedom while enforcing compliance. Superficial adjustments cannot resolve these tensions. A total redesign is necessary for an education that centers lived experience, cultivates agency, and meets the demands of this century.

Redesign also requires a new relationship to knowledge. Information can be stored; knowledge emerges when people make meaning and act on it. Systems that reward recall over understanding confuse these levels. The remedy is not to lower standards but to move rigor elsewhere: ask real questions, wrestle with uncertainty, test models, publish work that matters, and revise in public. Rigor must be evidence-driven, but the evidence should reflect authentic learning (e.g., performances, prototypes, portfolios, impact), not narrow metrics.

Technology belongs in this redesign, but with a purpose. Tools extend human capacities when they enable modeling, design, collaboration, and creation. They distract when they automate judgment, reward spectacle, or surveil without trust.

Equity, planetary citizenship, and ecological realities must be woven into the fabric of education. Systems that reproduce predictable gaps by class, race, gender, language, or geography flourish by their own design. Repair requires redesign: directing resources to sites of harm, amplifying marginalized knowledge, guiding admissions and placement, engaging families, and measuring belonging and growth rather than throughput.

Cultures of fear silence learners; cultures of trust enable risk-taking. In institutions that move toward trust, breaking rules becomes a discipline, not a reflex. Some rules safeguard equity or safety. Others persist to uphold habits that no longer serve learning. To break a rule responsibly requires naming the purpose it once held, the harm it now causes, and the standard that will replace it.

Manifesto 25 emerged as both a warning and a call to action to break from schooling’s core architecture of fear, anxiety, and distrust disguised as standardization, compliance, and credentialism. It presents twenty-five principles for rethinking education at a time when the world is defined by ecological disruption, accelerating technological change, growing inequities, and rising authoritarianism. These principles are not blueprints in themselves; they are foundations for constructing new ones. They insist that learning is a human right, that dignity and agency are conditions for growth, that technology must serve meaningful purposes, and that equity and planetary responsibility are non-negotiable. Together, they sketch a horizon against which we can measure whether education is keeping pace with the demands of this century or retreating into the habits of the last.

The aim of Manifesto 25 is not to prescribe uniform solutions, but to anchor a shared orientation: to provide principles that communities can adapt, contest, and build upon in their own contexts. If we cannot know the future with certainty, we can at least agree on what must guide us as we design it. Without such orientation, education risks drifting further behind, patching over crises rather than preparing us to meet them. With it, we have a compass for renewal.

This book serves as a companion to Manifesto 25. Each chapter explores one of its principles in greater depth, connecting it with good practices and offering guidance for how we might act. Interwoven throughout are two intermezzos. One collects the voices of youth confronting compliance in a world that demands agency, and another gathers reflections from signatories on where the freedom to learn is defended or constrained. Alongside these, cahiers (notebooks with ideas, grievances, and experiments) surface as spaces of testimony, critique, and design, extending the conversation beyond the text and into lived experience. The structure keeps us close to the principles while allowing practice and reflection to speak back.

This book is not a script but a set of tools and provocations. Readers are invited to use what proves useful, discard what does not, and add what is missing in their own contexts. The manifesto does not ask for belief; it asks for choices. What will you defend? What will you retire? Where will you build?

The cracks in the old order are undeniable. Whether they collapse into failure or open to renewal depends on decisions made now, whether in schools and ministries, in families and neighborhoods, in classrooms and councils. If education continues to manage appearances, it will keep losing trust. If it turns toward agency, meaning, equity, and planetary care, it can again become what people believe it should be: a practice of freedom, a craft of building futures, and a place where courage is learned and practiced.

The future is already here. Hope endures only if we act. Let’s build where we stand.

John Moravec
Minneapolis, MN
September 2025

References

Nietzsche, F. (1996). Human, all too human: A book for free spirits (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1878)

Freire, P. (1994). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed (R. R. Barr, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1992)

Fromm, E. (1992). The art of being. Continuum.