Regenerative Education - Grab Your Tomatoes 🍅

Never underestimate the power of pickled fruit. 🍅

This week, let’s discuss the power of decentralization and its ability to create regenerative education - a model that immediately grows the knowledge of a community without the need for a centralized school or instructor.

You can read the whole article in this email or online here (or the link below).

But first, Olena. 🇺🇦

Olena was sitting on her balcony in Ukraine when she saw a Russian drone buzzing nearby.

She reached down and grabbed a jar of her favorite homemade treat: pickled tomatoes with plums. She tossed the jar at the drone and knocked it out of the sky. 💥

The incredible bravery (and aim) of Olena is inspiring, and it points to a powerful lesson: the power of the people is great.

The challenge for individuals is coordination.

It’s hard to organize a decentralized group of individuals. When they are able to coordinate, however, the results are greater than we expect.

Nowhere is this power thrown into such stark relief as the war in Ukraine.

A single, centralized individual - Vladimir Putin - started the conflict, but the opposition among the people he is invading and his own people is resisting the occupation.

Oligarchs in Russian made their wealth by centralizing public goods. Now pressure from the people are inspiring companies to boycott Russia and nations to seize this wealth.

Individuals have given nearly $100 million to Ukraine with instant cryptocurrency transactions. That is 2/3rds of what USAID has sent in humanitarian aid.

Ukraine DAO has not only raised funds but acts as a beacon to connect those in need with those able to support.

The more the merrier in the humanitarian world, but it is not hard to see the power of decentralized giving when just over 1% of the world uses crypto and is already giving at this level.

Individuals take action quickly in response to the situation on the ground. With two million refugees, already double from last week’s newsletter, there are literally millions of opportunities for individual support.

By solving the decentralized coordination challenges, we can immediately take action instead of waiting for a government or organization. Baby strollers are just the beginning.

Much of the conversation around web3 focuses on decentralization - the ability to own and control our information, education, money, etc.

I’ve never been a decentralization maximalist. I thought it was nice but not the reason I was excited. I saw web3 as a way to increase access while ideas like sovereignty were nice additions.

The past weeks, however, have deepened my resolve. Many of the greatest challenges our planet faces are essentially problems of coordination - climate challenge, inequality, healthcare, and yes, even education.

As Taylor Kendal recently noted, maybe web3 is our global escape hatch. The huge problems we face with no solution in sight might best be tackled by the people.

Regenerative economics according to Kevin Owocki in The Green Pill:

Many organization are now working towards this end:

Others are building the protocols for future regenerative efforts, including:

Most regenerative organizations are taking models that exist and hacking them for good. In that way,

As Jakob Hackel noted in a recent conversation, regenerative finance, or ReFi, efforts do exactly that. ReFi hacks existing decentralized finance, or DeFi, mechanisms to inspire collective action for positive change.

Education is the poster child for regenerative economics and positive externalities. In fact, when you Google positive externalities, it’s the first example!

When a student learns, they get more knowledge and opportunity while their community adds skills and knowledge. A win for all.

Education is often thought of as a 12 or 16 year process. Only at the very end do the students earn the piece of paper that enables them to capture the opportunities.

Many students will study outside of their home community, or leave their community when their education is done. Since the opportunities are not based in their home communities, we see brain-drain towards urban areas and wealthier countries. In that way, the communities who pay to support the education do not receive the benefits from their investment.

What if we could shorten the time-scale and localize the impact? This would be regenerative education.

Regenerative education would:

A regenerative education (reg ed? reg edu? regucation?) model recognizes the fact that all teachers are learners and all learners are teachers.

In fact, the best way to master a subject is to teach it.

Thus, teaching can and should be a requirement to master a subject. Instead of taking a test, one learner would teach two students before they graduate from that topic.

In this way, education fans out exponential and immediately.

My grandmother and mother went to school in one room with all of the kids from nearby farms. The older kids would teach their peers. In that way, everyone was a teacher and a learner.

The difference now with regenerative education is we can reward and validate this learning without the need for a central school or institution.

This shift unlocks potential.

Now, any place on the planet with at least three people is a “school.” When someone learns a new skills, they can teach two others (in-person or online) and validate this activity. No diploma or registrar required. Since students can learn online from teachers around the world, there is no limit to what someone can learn within a specific geography.

As soon as a learner masters a new skills, it is shared with others.

The One-Room Schoolhouse Model is already being explored by people like Bodo Hoenen of Dev4X, which worked with schools in Tanzania to show that self-directed learning could lead to peer-to-peer learning.

Additional experiments are needed to build out this model. However, the regenerative economics movement can, and should, be applied to education.

We have tremendous power.

As we see the power of people in Ukraine, in train stations in Poland, in humanitarian DAOs, in technical protocols, in classrooms, it forces us to think bigger.

Collectively, we can achieve great things. A re-imagination with regenerative economics at its heart is needed to solve massive planetary problems. Solving coordination problems with web3 can improve our planet, decrease inequality, and provide quality education for all.

The only way to get there is by grabbing your tomatoes. 🍅

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