The Teaching and Learning Centre of Wageningen University & Research organizes its yearly Education Day and they’ve asked me to open the day with a keynote. This year’s theme of the day is Educating responsible changemakers, and for me this resonates with the central theme of my new book En nu? which is the transition from ruler to beginner.

The Anthropocene requires humankind to reconsider its attitude towards the planet. Instead of thinking of ourselves as the rulers of the earth, we should rather think of ourselves as beginners, or novices, since on the geologic time scale we really just arrived. I shall argue that positioning ourselves as beginners has a wide array of advantages for our relationship with our environment, and once we’ve liberated ourselves from the dominant hierarchical conception of social relations the attitude of being a beginner has multiple societal advantages too. This requires us to rethink education, reversing traditional accounts of the teacher-student relationship, creating learning communities, and investing not so much in the transmission of knowledge but rather in the practice of nurturing attentional skills.