Rowson, J. (2019). Bildung in the 21st Century: Why sustainable prosperity depends upon reimagining education. CUSP Essay Series on the Morality of Sustainable Prosperity, No. 9. Guildford: Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity.
Written at Tim Jackson’s invitation, the essay argues that the ecological crisis is also a crisis of understanding: “The complexity of the world is overwhelming the complexity of our minds.” Rowson contrasts Bildung with education framed as human capital, observes that education “currently serves the economy, when it could and perhaps should be the other way round,” and draws on the Nordic folk schools and on Piaget and Kegan to propose lifelong, community-based learning as the organizing purpose of a society. He acknowledges Bildung’s historical links to nationalism. The wiki takes from it the argument that a post-growth economy cannot be designed by minds formed only for a growth economy, which supports the claim that Bildung sits beneath the BioConomy’s economic architecture.