The lessons we don't learn from history

I was asked to keynote about youth power and youth democracy and change. And i was like, This is great, right? This is amazing. And then I get there, and the conference, yes, has people from all over the former Soviet Union, but it also has the head of the KGB or the FSB and they're coming down hard on saying no one will ever mess with Russia's national story. I said, this is so going south. This whole country is not going where we thought it was going to go. That's a moment that I really shifted how I thought about the promise of democracy and how you need to be organized in order to make it work. - Fernande Raine

Laura Osborne

Welcome to change my mind, the podcast where we ask leaders what they've changed their mind on and why I'm Laura Osborne, poles apart, co author and WPI economics managing director. You've just heard from our guest today, Fernanda Raine, CEO of the history collab, who changed her mind on how straightforward it is to have a democratic Russia. This series of the podcast is sponsored by 1014 you'll hear more from them a bit later on. And if you'd like to listen to previous episodes, you can visit openDemocracy, who host all of them on their website. Just search openDemocracy and change my mind for more as ever, I'm joined for today's episodes by my co hosts, president of accord, Ali Goldsworthy,

Alison Goldsworthy

Hi, Laura. It's so great to be back here for this second episode of our new series. I really missed recording them so much.

Laura Osborne

Oh yeah, me too, and behavioral scientist Alex Chesterfield, Hi, Alex,

Alexandra Chesterfield

hey. I'm also delighted to be back.

Laura Osborne

So we recorded this podcast with Fernande Raine, as I mentioned, CEO of the history collab earlier this year, Fernanda is committed to making history active and interesting for young people as part of the safeguarding of democracy. The disillusionment of the young with democracy and trying to counter it is at the heart of her work, and chimes clearly with ours on polarization. Her comments on the failure of grown ups to make democracy work in the eyes of the young really stayed with me.

Alison Goldsworthy

Yeah, I remembered that too. When I asked Fernanda about what was happening in the US and about their history lessons in particular, which have only become more contentious since we recorded the podcast, I was struck by her reflections on the lack of depth and discussion in the classroom and the failure to connect what's happening in the past to the societal challenges that we face now. You could hear her sadness that teachers aren't able to teach the way that they want to and the way that they think will help children learn. So it means that that doesn't resonate with young people who are in their care.

Alexandra Chesterfield

Yeah, I wasn't able to join the recording of this one. I was busy plotting a move to the US of A which has now happened, but I'm really fascinated by what I heard listening back, especially how Fernanda connected civic skills learnt in school and the development of well rounded humanity, and how we achieve very little as a cohort of one, and that we really need to work with others to drive change. It sounds obvious, but it's so often forgotten, and we really hope that you take something from it too.

Fernande, welcome to change my mind.

It's wonderful to be here, Laura, thank you so much for having me.

Oh, thank you. We're absolutely delighted that you are. So you're the CEO of the history collab for listeners who don't know what that is, can you tell us a bit about it, why you founded it, and what it exists to do?

Yes, of course, I'd love to. It exists to really put the joy and the fun and the excitement back into learning history, so that young people can discover it as a source of inspiration and possibility and wisdom, and not as sort of stacks and stacks of drill-and-kill facts and dates and times and people that have no relevance to them currently. So why we founded it is because most young people experience history as something that is mind-numbingly boring, and the effect of that is, I think, a weakening of our democracy. So I created it not because I care particularly passionately about history personally, which I do, but because I was sensing a problem in the state of our democracy. And I felt like there must be something wrong with how we're teaching about the past, if young people don't see how they could change it and change the current situation and see their role in the future. So it really is a future focused history project that was created because of a specific historic moment in the United States that caused all of my warning signals of the state of democracy to go off.

I think we probably know what you're talking about then, but also, as you say, that need to engage young people and give them a sense of ownership over their future is such a critical thing, and something we touched on in poles apart, alongside that growing disillusionment with democracy that you talked about, where do you think that's come from? Do you think it is very recent events, or do. You think it has been growing over time?

I absolutely think it's been growing over time, and that's part of what was so shocking about looking under the hood of the system of American history education, right? Like it's not just something that was born in 2016 right? This is something that's a longer standing issue. I think there are a couple of reasons why young people are disillusioned with democracy frankly. I mean, I think, on the one hand, if they turn on not the television, but whatever YouTube, right? Whatever you look on on your phone, because who watches TV anymore?, but if you listen to what grown ups are doing, they're embarrassing, right? I mean, if that's supposed to be modeling what democracy is about it's not particularly exciting or enticing. It sounds very divided and divisive and not particularly mature, and not something that anyone would really want to be a part of. Why would I want to be yelled at? Why would I want to be yelling at other people? Like, that's not fun. That's one thing. It's also that young people are being told, theoretically, that they should care about democracy, but they're given no power in school ever at all, like through college. The American educational system is not set up to have young people practicing democracy in any form at all. Student Government is a joke. They organize parties. They organize food drives at Christmas or at the holidays, but it's not actually a structure for solving problems, negotiating compromise, expressing ideas, having influence on people with power, ie. the administration of the school. So it just is something that young people don't even get to practice. And at the same time, young people know they have power. They have access to everything, to influence, information, they have access to people around the world, and at the same time in school, they're being treated the same way that they might have been treated 50 years ago. Right? The name of the game is getting a score on the test and learning a pile of stuff that grown ups think you should learn, and then getting a job or going to college, but that's not teaching you or raising you in your skills as a civic participant, right? Memorizing the 1300 page AP US History textbook is not going to get you one step closer to being a functioning human being in democracy. Finally, there's also this creaking tension between democracy and capitalism that young people see and feel.

Young people are really smart, right? They see when things don't make sense and when things aren't fair. So they look at the system in which they're living, and they see, yes, we have this capitalist system, and there are all sorts of great things about it. I can go to the mall, I can go to the store, but companies are out there that are hurting people. They're hurting the planet, and they're not being held accountable. That doesn't make sense. That's not fair. And what they experience is grown ups who figured out how to win in the model, are saying you don't get to question that, like you can't question the link between capitalism and democracy, that's way too complicated, and that's way above your pay grade. It's not above their pay grade, and they know it's not above their pay grade, but they sort of baked in inconsistencies and challenges with capitalism that are coming up. They're like all over the place, right? They're philosophers, sociologists, historians, political scientists, writing about these challenges and that we have to wrestle with them. And the same thing is being said by 14 and 15, year olds, right? And in between, everyone is saying, shut up, you guys. You don't have a right to say anything on that topic that's way too complicated. And they're like, What do you mean? Too complicated? This is the root of democracy, right? And so I think that's part of the disillusionment with a with democracy, is that it's being taught as something that's static, right? Democracy is sold in this country in particular, as this sort of uniquely American invention that needs to be protected and preserved in a certain way. But they're not taught that democracy really is this historical human global invention. It's this construct that obviously needs constant renewal and reimagination with whatever comes our way, like they don't. Democracy changed with industrialization, and it should change with technology, right? It's dynamic. It's adaptive, and that's not how it's being taught in schools. That's not how young people are experiencing it, and I think that's their big disillusionment in in the energy of democracy, of it not being something that's an invitation to co invent, to reimagine, to renew, to revive and strengthen their being told to participate, but by the rules of the people that are currently in power, which obviously doesn't really make sense.

I wonder if I could just help for our listeners, just take a step back. And if you could help, just explain what a typical US history lesson might be like for a teenager, and I say that because, you know, I mean, I went to high school in the States and in the UK, and profoundly different experiences. And our listeners are, are based sort of all around Western Europe and the US. And I wonder if you could just paint that picture?

What you will probably see in a history lesson is some variation of a teacher trying to get through a large amount of material so that they can check the boxes that are required by the state standards. So that you can get credit for US history, and you need to have a US History credit so you can graduate from high school. So in order to get your history credit, you need to cover a vast amount of material. Why you need to cover it is not relevant, why you should care is not relevant, but that you have checked those boxes is relevant. Whether you know it is also not relevant because it's not tested in most states, so there's no state mandated testing, so whether or not the kids actually learn it is not particularly relevant because it's not one of the key metrics for success of the school on whether kids know history or not.

With the evaluation that does happen is it typically, for example, in the form of true or false or multi choice quizzes and things like that, rather than discursive essays?

it is a lot of multiple choice. So when you ask young people today, what is your history experience like, they will say it's a drill-and-kill of dates and facts, of memorizing dates and facts that are given to them fairly without context and with no connection to the current time. Of course, there are discursive essays that they're being asked to do, but in the eyes of the young people that are taking the class, they find the questions that they're being asked to discuss completely irrelevant. One of the questions, for example, that I just looked at in the AP US History class textbook around the Great Depression is was the policy behind the New Deal progressive? discuss. I don't know what your teenagers are like. My teenagers couldn't give two cents about whether the policies of the New Deal were progressive.

You're fine to swear on this podcast.

Well, I'll restrain myself, but yeah, but the questions that are given to young people for discursive essays are entirely irrelevant to them.

So there's a real lack of drawing the connection between the actual lessons and insights of the past to what's happening in America today?

For the most part, yes.

Do you think that's one of the biggest issues?

That is one of the big issues. So I mean to give credit where credit is due. There have been efforts to say, let's make learning more inquiry based around questions. The problem with how this is being implemented is that the people formulating the questions are still adults who don't know how to create questions from the lens of what the young people want, and they're still just asking questions to still get through the blocks and blocks and blocks of material, because the learning is not designed to be around concepts and competencies. It's around content areas and some critical thinking skills and writing skills and language skills, but the main focus of how it is set up in school is still to cover a specific library of content and are little supported in being able to do the kind of teaching that they know works for kids.

So you think it's, it's fundamentally, essentially an overhaul of not just what is taught, but how it's taught, that would be required to draw those connections to what was happening in the past and the, you know, big questions about future societal change that we all face today?

100% which is why, when we set up the collab, we're not creating curriculum, we're trying to change the entire structure of school so that learning can happen in a way that allows young people to develop their civic skills and interests and their own full humanity and history is a part of that, but it requires reorienting the entirety of school toward outcomes like agency, well being, belonging, a sense of identity, that is what matters for your civic capacity, whether you can collaborate, whether you can communicate. Those competencies are 1000 times more important than whether you have been able to check N number of boxes and some tests right?

Take X number of pop quizzes!

Exactly, and so. So we are, on the one hand, very focused on history, and on the other hand, very focused on weaving an alliance of different institutions across the country and the globe that are seeing that need to move toward competency based education. Are seeing the need to break the Carnegie unit. Are seeing the need to integrate our understanding of the teen brain and learning science, right? We know now how young people learn far better than we've ever learned this before, but that's stuck in systems, right? That are. Trying to come out while there are companies, obviously, that make money on the old form of learning, textbook companies, testing companies, tutoring companies, there's many, many billions of dollars of educational industry players out there that thrive on the system exactly as it is. So that's the challenge.

Doesn't say that, because any kind of systems level change is obviously critical, but very hard to do. I'm assuming, based on what you do, you do have hope that it is possible, though, that you do think it can be fundamentally redesigned.

Oh, 100% I think change. I mean, this is the great thing about being a historian, right? Change as often as possible. The only thing that matters is whether a couple of people that really cared about change managed to start working together and to seeing it as a long game. My training in history is from diplomatic historians who think about grand strategy and think about long term models of state interest and and thinking about, how do you plan toward an extremely visionary long term goal, by designing pathways and creating alliances and thinking about how to work together. The other part of my training is in revolution. So my dissertation was on the Second World War.

That sounds like a fun bit.

Oh, it's so fun. So you get to do diplomacy and revolution, both different models of how to really change things around and how to think about power. So I love thinking about revolutions, right? Because they're they're fun and they're also dangerous, right? So they're also revolutions can go awry, but of course, change is possible, and so how do you create partnerships? How do you create a vision of a future that would allow more people to thrive and a more inclusive democracy to emerge from the rubble of what we have right now, it's a great opportunity right to reimagine and renew democracy, so that, for me, is a source of tremendous hope that the not only the education system, can change, but with it, the culture of our democracy.

Let's talk about the Untextbooks podcast that you guys do, which brings together young people and historians, and it's been really successful. What's been your biggest takeaway from bringing this group together?

I think one of the biggest takeaways that I have from that is that intergenerational conversations are absolutely critical for any kind of democratic culture, any kind of civic culture, to thrive. I think the weaving of wisdom across age groups is where creativity and power for change can can grow. So I love working with young people, and particularly young people today, this generation of teenagers is fantastic. They're curious, they're able to find information. They feel powerful. They feel excited about possibilities of a different future. And at the same time, they are eager to know, What are the dangers, what are the problems that we don't want to replicate? What are the things that we might cause without wanting to like the unintended consequences? That's where historians are amazing. Historians are great at looking at understanding root causes and understanding that sometimes, when you're running in one direction, there are all sorts of problems that can emerge.

One of my favorite podcasts is one that we had this last episode on gun violence, right a young person super excited and passionate about gun violence and the scourge of of deaths and this public health crisis around gun violence in the United States, and she's talking to a historian on the feed who says, You know, it's really complicated. It's really complicated to make laws in this country that will actually change how people behave. And talking about the complexity, to say, if you're going to change this, this problem, if you're going to affect it, you have to look at the complexity and say, Okay, where are there levers that I can move? Because you can spend your whole life doing something that has zero impact on the problem, and then look back and be like, Oh my god, I can't believe I just wasted my whole life on doing stuff that didn't have a difference, which is super sucky, right? It's just a waste of time. We don't we only have one life, so put it somewhere where it's actually going to make a difference, and historians are fantastic at helping things that through.

The focus on intergenerational stuff, I find fascinating. Because, you know, as people become more segregated, those links become both more precious and harder to get and more important at the same time. But how do you find like older people responding to some younger people in that situation?

It's amazing. So my favorite answers by any historian ever are the ones that they give to young people, because they instantly go into talking like a human being. Academics are trained to posture. They're trained to write books that no one can understand often, right? Like, can you open a standard book of historical writing, you can have a PhD or several PhDs and still struggle to figure out what they're saying. It's not written for people to understand often. I have two wonderful advisors, Paul Kennedy and John Gaddis, both of whom write beautifully, they write like novelists, they talk like novelists, so they're an exception to that rule. But they got made fun of for being 'public historians' or people that write for the common man, just because they don't have 10 pages of theory before they start their story, or that they're just so dense that you can't read it doesn't mean they're not fantastic researchers. So I think there's a beauty of combining the two age groups and these two communities, because the dialog is just so rich and it's so caring also to allow historians to see that teenagers actually care. They actually care about what they have to say, and you often don't have that direct audience as a as someone who's very famous, as someone who's really important. One of our most prominent guests was Stan McChrystal who was a general in the US Army. He's retired now, but he gave this beautiful speech at the launch event for Untextbooked to the students, saying, I love my conversation with you because you hold the future and for me to have the privilege to share what I know and what I've seen and what I've done with you, who carry that burden, those keys to those doors that are all to be opened up.

That's a treat for me and for them, to see someone with that degree of of power and influence and authority, where you spend on every world stage you can imagine, to have someone like that engaging with them as a mentor, as a person who sees them has a transformational effect on them as well. So it's a gift both ways that is very, very powerful in breaking down mental concepts too. We had one event with Gloria Steinem right after the reversal of Roe v Wade, and it was Gloria Steinem on a panel that Random House had organized about women's rights and women's health. And they asked whether we could put one of our young podcasters as a moderator into the panel. And our young podcaster was like, "Are you crazy? Like Gloria Steinem and like huge public panel, hundreds of people, live, no edits, no cuts, no nothing. I'm gonna do it?" I'm like, of course, it's gonna be fantastic. And if you watch the video of that recording, which is on YouTube, the laughter, the smiling, the interaction, the conversation, the richness of exchange between this, you know, goddess of activism, this 17 year old podcaster and these two other academics that were on the call is a total treat. So I love both listening in to the live recordings and watching these podcasters go when they then feel unchained, right, like you do that once and you never turn back. You're like, oh, I don't care. Like, oh, you would need me to talk to Nicole Hannah Jones next week in front of 1000 people at Howard? Sure, no problem, I've got you! Well, yeah, yeah, bring it on!

Yeah, that sounds good. And there's so we'll link to some of that stuff in the show notes for people who are listening. And also, there's a great piece of research, which we might discuss afterwards that it shows young people are much better at spotting mis and disinformation than older people are, which is sometimes sits a little uncomfortably with older people who'd like to think they had a better honed bullshit detector, and talking of Hannah Nicole Jones, I once asked her the question I about to put to you, which was, when did she change her mind on an issue and why? And her response was about what it was to be an American and that you could be proud and a patriotic American as a black woman, or she was actually talking about her dad as well as a black man. But I suppose, having given you the warm up of of her now I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you the same question that we ask all of our guests, which is, can you tell us about a time that you changed your mind on something, and why did you do so?

I've changed my mind a lot on things, and there's two different categories I think of changing my mind. One category of changing my mind is around realizing when an abstract moral concept is in tension with the needs of specific people, for example, on the issue of abortion or marijuana, those are two issues where, from a abstract, religious moral perspective, you'd say, I'm totally against something, because there are such moral reasons to be against what that stands for, what the policy could do. But then you look at what that means for specific individuals and for specific other rights that stand in conflict with that. And for me, the switch was then always to the needs of the actual people. Right to say, I'm sorry, like, I don't agree that a moral principle that is totally abstract should outweigh the benefits that it has for actual living people today that have a certain understanding of their rights and a certain understanding of how they want to live their life and certain challenges that they've dealt with. Who am I to put by moral construct over your real life? So that's one big category, and the other one is about thinking about what's possible, right? I used to travel in Russia a lot, and I was there very much at the beginning of the Russian democracy experiment, thinking that it was going to be easy to just have democracy succeed in Russia. It was like, Oh, this can't be that hard. All you need to do.... All you need to do is get capitalism to work and young people to understand how democracy works, and then in 10 years, you're gonna have a functioning democracy thing. That's it. You could just kind of like history mystery. We can get over it, right, realizing that that is absolutely not the way the world works, and that it's much more complicated than that. If you don't have the external impact of total defeat like you did in Germany in 1945 switching a country out of one way of thinking into a new one is very hard, and Russia didn't experience 1990, 1993 as a total defeat. It just, it kind of crumbled. But that fizzle doesn't turn into anything, into a radical need for change. They think of the US, we never fell to the total defeat of systemic racism.

And do you think total defeat is necessary for opening up your mind on a really big issue?

I hope not, because that would kind of be very much putting a lot of hope on conflict. But I think it requires, if not total defeat, massive mobilization and organization of the other intent, right? So if war is not a great option, your only other option is massive engagement in mobilization, just like has been the case around climate change, it just requires people, people power, to actually engage, get noisy, change mindsets, change how people think. And that's a form of organization that is possible today and it wasn't possible 100 years ago, right? It's an exciting moment in history where, I think we do have an option that's not total defeat, that's military, but it has to be very organized, very systematic, very coordinated, very collaborative. And that's, I think, one of the great opportunities of our time. But my thinking at the beginning that it was going to be easy. I definitely changed my mind on that.

And was there a moment or something that happened that made you think, oh, maybe it's not going to be quite as easy as I thought? Can you pinpoint when you first became conscious of that thought?

Yeah, I can. It was a trip that I made to Russia in October of 2021, when I was asked to speak at a conference on the future of history education in Moscow. And this was a conference organized by my wonderful partners in Europe, EuroClio, who are this network, Association of European history educators and the Russian Academy of Science. And this was a conference under a banner of hope and transformation of history education for the future of democracy. That was the flag under which I was going. And I was asked to keynote about youth power and youth democracy and change. Whic was like, this is great, this is amazing, this is gonna be so great! And then I get there, and the conference, yes, has people from all over the former Soviet Union, a couple people from the West, but it also has the head of the KGB, or the FSB, and the Vice President of the Russian Federation there, and they're coming down hard on saying, no one will ever mess with Russia's national story. No one will ever mess with our story of having won the Second World War and being a great empire in the world. And I thought, something's going on here, I thought this was a big rah rah party for the future of democracy in Russia. What is going on here? Then there were a bunch of different signals and clues over the course of those couple days that came in different forums, right? A museum tour where they're talking in a certain way about certain artifacts. Or a new statue that's there, the Ukrainian Saint Vladimir, the founder of the Kyiv and Ruth, right next to the Kremlin. I was like, wait a minute, what? Kremlin? a statue of the founder of the Kievan Rus? What's going on?!This is like all the pieces of data were pointing toward Russia, absolutely not committing toward a future of open democracy, but taking back Ukraine, setting back up its imperial mindsets, expanding and understanding among its teachers that Russia is an is an empire, and always has been, and was the force that that destroyed National Socialism and anti-fascism being a thing that was big again in the way that they were teaching young kids. And coming back from that all guards were up. I said, this is, this is so going south. This whole country is not going where we thought it was going to go. I thought this was on the way to recovery. This isn't on the way to anywhere. This is on the way to war. This is on the way to conflict. This is on the way to all sorts of terrible things. And I love that country. I love - or rather I loved - Russia very, very much. And it was this super painful moment of realizing that all this hope, all these things that you thought were going to be easy, you thought that were going to work, couldn't win against an overarching narrative and a need for power that very much stood in the way of that hope. So we have to rethink again about what's going to happen there, but that's a moment that I really shifted how I thought about the promise of democracy and how you need to be organized in order to make it work, which translates to the US, right? It's not like we're in great shape here, either, but in order to prevent something like that from happening, of a whole country sliding backwards in time, you have to get organized, you have to get active. You have to get really smart, because what could happen in Germany, what could happen in Russia can happen absolutely anywhere. We're not immune to any of that happening here.

And the people who you were at that conference with what was their reaction to what was being said?

So the Europeans and I, my colleagues from Western Europe that were there, their reaction was to double down on the narrative that had been the foundation for the conference, which was to say, Hey everyone, this is about democracy, right? So let's create a document that's saying we commit to a future of critical thinking, of democracy, of inclusion, of openness, of all that stuff. And we wrote that document and had the Russians sign it and, you know, share it, because we're like this says you've got to commit to this being the ground on which we stand. But then the Russians who were there had very much of a mixed reaction to what they were hearing, because they sensed the tension. And depending on which teachers you were talking to, some of them said, Well, this is total Baloney, like there's no way that they're actually going to be wanting us to be teaching critical thinking, because we don't have the openness to talk that way in this country. And others said, Oh, see this is all great for going exactly in the right direction, Russia is going to be a member of the international community. So as always, people hear what they want to hear or hear a confirmation of what their greatest hope is for the future, and that's how it was there. And then in the end of March or the end of February, when the war started, we reached out to some and then very early realized that we couldn't.

That was going to be my next question. I'll pass over to Laura in a minute. Are they safe?

They're not safe to speak with us, so we don't. We just said, Look, I love you, you're great, we'll talk when the war is over, if you need to get out, call me, but you know where to find me. Because you can't. They are absolutely in fear of job and life if they say anything.

I think it was really interesting to hear you explain a bit, Fernande, when that moment occurred for you. Because something we've asked people a lot on this podcast is, what is that trigger point? You know, is it a particular place of particular person? And it often is, you know, some something different happening, you know, something different to what you expected, and it seems to be that way for you. So I think my last question would just be, if we were to ask someone else about a time they changed their mind, who would you like to hear from?

Gosh, there is someone I hope changes their mind so that they actually don't destroy democracy. Or a couple people I have on that list, maybe we could bring them on so that they change their mind? That would be a great idea! We don't talk a lot about who changed their mind, right? We don't celebrate a lot people who change their mind. We we usually celebrate people for not changing their mind. So I love the fact that you are celebrating people who think differently about things so that we can see that as part of our civic obligation to grow. Probably every leader has had to change their mind in some way or another, right? Because you come in with ideas of what you think is going to work, and then you realize that that's not how the world works, then you have to change your mind about how it's going to happen. Because nothing ever works according to script. I'm just trying to think about people that I know who openly will confess that they have changed their mind, and I have to admit that I couldn't even come up with anyone that I knew who had come out and said I've absolutely changed my mind about something.

We've had quite a few guests who've really struggled with the question themselves, who thought not because they haven't, but also because of that, you know, fundamental point that we spent a bit of time thinking about when we wrote the book, poles apart around how changing your mind and taking a different position can really feel like changing your tribe or challenging the people that you belong to or the group you belong with, and so it is really hard, and I think that is a big part of why people don't often talk about it very openly. But as you said, it makes it makes it hard to think about people who have I suppose part of the reason we've always enjoyed doing the podcast is it gives us an opportunity to find people who will talk to us, and the more people who will talk to us about changing their mind, then perhaps the easier it becomes for others.

Yeah, I think most days I have a moment where I wish someone would change their mind about seeing themselves as the center of the universe and the person who is the answer to everyone's woes, right? Like I get newsletters all the time from people that are talking about how awesome they are, what they did, what they have achieved, what they are leading. Literally people writing about social change using the I pronoun. Who uses the I pronoun in the context of social change? You can do that as an academic, I wrote a book, I had lunch, I went for a walk, but 'I did' like, seriously?! The realization that it's not about 'me' would be the mindset shift that I wish we could instill more in people that are creating change, because it's about finding people with whom you can create faster and better and more together. Because the mindset of 'I've got it' is never going to work. So that, for me, is the biggest challenge in our in our democratic culture right now, is that even the people trying to change democracy start their newsletters with 'I'!

Yeah, it's very 'I alone can fix it'.

Good luck.

You know, in a country with a population of one, you might be able to do that, but you're probably also not achieving that much either.

Exactly!

It's a good life lesson to end on. Both for everyone who ever writes a newsletter in the future, and also for people who lead.

That's that is partially also a humility that you do learn with history right as much as we talk about great men and great women, if you look at how history happens, history is shaped and created by multiple forces coming together and weaving threads into a motion that can carry energy into a new space, right? And it's a mixture of artists and musicians and poets and leaders industry people and innovators and inventors and everyone putting in their stone or their vegetable into the stone soup metaphor, right? And then that turns into a broth that can create social change. It's never one person. Napoleon didn't create what he did, or do what he did, whatever your opinion on Napoleon might be by himself, nor did the Founding Fathers, or anyone. Was it a mixture of things that all came together to lift up the world, or move the world, maybe lift it down, but put it into a different space. And that's the power of history, and why learning about it is so cool, because it shows you that doesn't matter what you have and who you are and what your skill is, you can be a part of the thread that weaves a new story for the totality of humanity. And it can be super small. It can be a poem like Amanda Gorman standing there creating a poem that is part of history, or, you know, whoever. But like artists who make things that just shift how people think, all of that matters in moving the world forward. So that's the the main reason why we do what we do is because sort of school reform and education innovation reform, all that stuff without that core of humanity and understanding that what it's about is moving us collectively to a better place. Is a sad place. It's. Not about individuals getting better grades, getting better jobs, getting better whatever. It's about all of us moving somewhere new. This sucks where we are right now. It really does. It's not a good place! So let's all see how we can move together.

On "this sucks", which is a very cheery note to end things. "It's not all about you, and this sucks", but I should say thank you so much for joining us. This has been like, not just the force of the passion, but also, I think, really helpful in terms of us understanding how to try and create more nuance. And thank you in particular, for sharing some of the more vulnerable aspects about when you were in Russia. It's a real privilege, and we looking forward to sharing it with people.

So fun. Thank you so so much. I could talk about these topics forever. This is such a wonderful theme, and I love the way that you're framing the questions, and it's been a treat and a pleasure. So thank you so much.

Laura Osborne

Thank you. Our thanks to Fernanda. We had a really great conversation before Ali Alex and I digest this interview, we wanted to bring you a brief word from our partners for this new series, 1014. 1014 is a space for ideas, with talks, performances, exhibitions and in the future, a residency program. 1014 encourages debates on today's global topics by offering transatlantic perspectives and using interdisciplinary approaches. 1014 spans continents, fields of knowledge and individual backgrounds, located in a historic townhouse on Fifth Avenue in New York, provided by the German government. 1014 harnesses the entrepreneurial atmosphere of this metropolitan hub and reaches beyond the city boroughs with its online programs. Check out 1014 online. So now we've heard the full interview. Was there anything either of you wanted to reflect on this time? Yeah,

Alison Goldsworthy

I suppose Fernande's overall message struck me as really optimistic, and particularly at the at the minute, when times can seem a bit bleak, but that change is possible, and it can happen even when it feels like it might never do so. And that in itself, is a really key lesson from history, and then obviously that resonated in the way that she went on to talk about Russia. Her history background goes to a really long range view, which is super valuable for understanding where polarization and global politics is at the minute. I was also really struck by how her podcast that she does facilitates intergenerational conversation, and how necessary that is to straddle divides and to maintain previous connections. I'm also really thoughtful about how that happened to people for who history is not written down, and how it gets passed down and shared between generations in different ways, and how with particularly challenging history, that is important to do. Sherry Turkle's work, talks about how verbal conversation can be so much more powerful as a way to have difficult conversations than writing and sharing things in that format. Yeah. For me it was when she talked about her assumptions on democracy and how easy she thought it would be originally, for Russia to become a fully functioning democracy. And when she describes her in person experience of being in Russia in 2021 and how that reality of its imperialism clearly hit her hard that really stuck out for me, it's not a happy note to end on, but it is a reminder of the importance of safeguarding democracy and its core institutions, which are just under threat in so many places. Yeah, and I think that that's important, there's obviously been some Democratic backsliding around the world. And there are many challenges in the world that appear to be increasing rather than decreasing,

Laura Osborne

Has Fernande and inspired you to think of a time you changed your mind, and why? If she has do share your thoughts with us at Ali@team-accord.com, and tell us about what you've changed your mind on, and the best response will quite possibly find some tasty treats delivered to them in the post that's

Alison Goldsworthy

all from us today. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of change my mind. If you liked what you heard, don't forget. We've got a full back catalog of fascinating interviews with leaders, and you can find them all by searching change my mind in your podcast app. Join us next week, we'll be talking to E wise Katharina Wayman about whistleblowing and how she's changed her mind on the role of regulation in the sustainability context. Thank you to 1014 for their support of the show. To Eve Streeter, our new producer, or well now in her second episode as our producer, and to Kevin Macleod, whose Dreams Become Real is our theme music.