Learning As If Life Depended on It : Why We Must See the World Anew, and Figure Out What Follows

How can we ensure that future generations enjoy the miracle of life? Learning as if Life Depended on It is a work of planetary reckoning and educational leadership by the Director General of the International Baccalaureate and former State Secretary of Finland, Olli-Pekka Heinonen.

Informed by his statesmanship and deeply rooted in the practices, idioms and metaphors of his Finnish cultural heritage, Heinonen explains why the root cause of global crises is that we don’t adequately perceive the ideas we live and work with. Our worldview is out of tune with reality. Humanity is suffering from an identity crisis. We have become overtrained and undereducated.

This book has four main parts. Part One, about our predicament, details how we are challenged to survive and thrive as a species just as we are discovering that familiar solutions no longer work. Part Two highlights how our prevailing perceptions keep us stuck, through an analysis of ten pervasive illusions of the modern world. Part Three affirms multiple sources of our collective potential while identifying what must change in education systems and societal norms to unlock it. Part Four explores available pathways arising from the learning needed to reshape life at the personal, community, societal, and planetary levels.

The learning we need today begins when we dare to enter our new unfamiliar territory and admit our ignorance. It is time to embark on a collective journey into ourselves, in which learning is recast as an emergent property of purposive social action.

To have any chance of a successful global transition, education systems should offer new ways of sensing and interpreting the world, work to reconcile competing beliefs and values, rebuild meaning, and restore well-being. As change accelerates, uncertainty grows, making the struggle to perceive reality with open-minded clarity more important than ever.

Mr Olli-Pekka Heinonen became the 8th Director General of the International Baccalaureate Organization on 1 May 2021. Prior to joining the IB, Mr Heinonen was Director General of the Finnish National Agency for Education where he worked from October 2016. Mr Heinonen had an active career in politics in Finland between 1994 and 2002: he was Minister of Education and Science from 1994-1999; Minister of Transport and Communication from 1999-2002 and a Member of Parliament from 1995-2002. From 2002 to 2012, Mr Heinonen was Director of Yle, the Finnish national public broadcasting company, before joining the Finnish Prime Minister’s Office in March 2012 as State Secretary, responsible for organizing and leading the office. He has also been responsible, as State Secretary, for the portfolios of the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Development and then as State Secretary at the Ministry of Finance of Finland. Mr Heinonen holds a Master of Laws from the University of Helsinki in Finland and has been awarded honorary doctorates by both the University of Jyväskylä and the University of Turku in Finland. He is married and has three children.