Can There Be Abundance without Education?

I’m passionate about education, more specifically, about learning. That’s why I was so surprised that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s recent book, Abundance^[1] only mentioned education three or four times in their entire exposé, so few times that “education” wasn’t included in the index.  Neither were these words: intelligence, learning, thinking, teaching, or schools.

Klein and Thompson offer a framework for America that focuses on what is needed by everyone: cheap clean energy, housing, adequate transportation, and health care. They propose that if we decided to tackle the problems that get in the way of producing these outcomes and make them readily available to everyone, we could do it. They cite accomplishments such as the COVID vaccine which was created and mass produced in ten months. They argue that we need to grow, build, govern, invent, and deploy, and they propose a blueprint to get us there. They are quite convincing.

However, what they don’t include in their list of core necessities is education. In fact, on the last page of the book, as I was finishing the conclusion, I wrote, “Where is education?” I was perplexed. Something important was missing.

So, I read the book a second time, specifically looking for references to education, and basically there are none. Klein and Thompson emphasize the importance of science, innovation, and experimentation, with great ideas for public/private collaboration and funding, but they don’t address the fact that without basic, quality education for children, we won’t have the scientists, doctors, inventors, and thinkers that can make their ideas of abundance come to fruition.

I know that education is struggling in America because I have been both a consumer and a producer of it. The challenges that teachers and students face are bigger than can be solved with a one-size-fits-all panacea. It just doesn’t exist. But for Klein and Thompson to completely sidestep education as vital to achieving the abundance they describe, is disappointing.

Why am I so bothered that such brilliant journalists would fail to give a nod to something so essential as education?

It’s because learning is essential to who we are as humans, to what we believe and value, and to how we engage with each other in a civil society. All human development takes place in relationships, and learning is a major part of becoming human.

In my book, Stuck in Our Screens, I admit that tackling the problems of universal education is beyond its scope, but I also suggest in the conclusion that some of the solutions needed to save our humanity involve learning. So let’s explore what science tells us about learning, since it may be the secret sauce missing from Abundance.

Na’ilah Suad Nasir and his colleagues^[2] did a nice job capturing what we know about the process of learning that psychologists have generated over the past century or so. The first studies conceived of learning as a demonstrable behavior. Psychologists determined that learning was a process of conditioning that developed when people experienced a stimulus and then gave a predictable response. This process produced a learned behavior.

The next wave of studies gave us the punishment – reward idea. Scientists found that people altered their behavior to get expected rewards. (This is the science that social media uses to keep us stuck in our screens.)

The third wave was more sophisticated and concluded that learning was a process of making meaning out of information, storing it in memory, retrieving it when necessary, and then experiencing it in our minds. These folks shifted away from looking at behavior as learning and focused on thinking… in other words, what was going on in our brains.

Lastly, scientists decided that learning was about becoming a whole, multi-faceted person. In other words, learning was not just about what someone could do or know. It was about how growth and development happened through social relationships.

Dr. Nasir and his colleagues write that what we need is a theory of learning that integrates bits and pieces of these four waves of social science. I’m particularly encouraged by the last understanding of learning, the one that puts the heart of learning in the relationships that people have with each other and the world around them. That’s why I’m so concerned that if we don’t create rich environments for our children, where human interactions are plentiful, stimulating, and benevolent, we won’t have people who are good at being human beings who can solve big problems.

There is a movement afoot to give every student an AI chatbot that will facilitate their learning. This is a complex (and expensive) proposition, and I’ll be writing about that soon, but back to the brilliant people who will build a future of abundance as described by Klein and Thompson.

The one thing that Klein and Thompson emphasize is that great advancements in science, medicine, energy, and transportation is that the breakthroughs happen when knowledgeable people from many disciplines get together and talk and think about hard things.

Where did these smart people come from? Most of them got their intellectual start in a family, or a school, a youth organization, or a thriving community—places where learning wasn’t just about memorizing facts, but was about talking, thinking, exploring, interacting, and experimenting, with the support of people and relationships.

There is an anti-intellectual and anti-elitism sentiment in America right now. Smart people are leaving this country to go somewhere else, but without smart people who are given tools, time, incentive, and fellow deep thinkers with whom to collaborate, we cannot possibly have a future of abundance. Relationships are the core of learning and being human. So, let’s think about that, and then, get the message out.

Coming soon… AI chatbots in the classroom.

^[1] Klein, Ezra and Derek Thompson. Abundance. Avid Reader Press. 2025.

^[2] Nasir, Na’ilah Suad, Carol D. Lee, Roy Pea, and Maxine McKinney de Royston. “Rethinking Learning: What the Interdisciplinary Science Tells Us.” Educational Researcher 50, no. 8 (2021): 557-565. doi: 10.3102/0013189X211047251.