Are we Educating Citizens or Consumers? A Conversation with Jon Alexander

Future Learning Design Podcast

Are we educating young people as consumers? Have educational institutions become service providers in the consumer economy of educational products? Or are we educating young people as citizens - of their local communities, nations and the planet? If so what does that mean for how we engage them in the processes of living and working together, making meaningful contributions and learning important things as they go. I'm not sure that that looks much like what we're currently doing in most schools around the world.

Jon Alexander is on a mission to help a new story to emerge about how people all over the world are getting involved in 'citizening' - that is, thinking of citizen as a verb and a local participatory responsibility, rather than citizen as a noun that you claim rights to.

Jon began his career with success in advertising, winning the prestigious Big Creative Idea of the Year before making a dramatic change. Driven by a deep need to understand the impact on society of 3,000 commercial messages a day, he gathered three Masters degrees, exploring consumerism and its alternatives from every angle. In 2014, he co-founded the New Citizenship Project, a strategy and innovation consultancy that aims to shift the dominant story of the individual in society from Consumer to Citizen. NCP’s client list includes The Guardian, the European Central Bank, and the European Journalism Centre. They have partnered with the BBC, Amnesty International, National Trust, the British Film Institute, Tate galleries, the National Union of Students, YouGov, the Centre for Public Impact, the Food Standards Agency and the Food Ethics Council.

Jon is author of Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us - a book that seeks to reframe the moment in time we're living in as one of huge civic opportunity, not just crisis and collapse, and in doing so opens up a world of possibility for organisations and leaders across sectors and across the world.

Links to Jon's work:

• Citizens (Book): https://www.jonalexander.net/
• How to Citizen, with Baratunde Thurston: https://stories.howtocitizen.com/form
• New Citizenship Project: https://www.newcitizenproject.com/
• Jon's Four Thought lecture, BBC Radio 4: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04md5b0
• Jon's NCP article on Three Post Covid Futures: https://medium.com/new-citizenship-project/subject-consumer-or-citizen-three-post-covid-futures-8c3cc469a984
• Jon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-alexander-11b66345/
• Baratunde on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/baratunde/