Teaching Connection in an Age of Algorithms

23 April 2026

The world now faces a metacrisis: overlapping ecological collapse, accelerating automation, deepening social fragmentation, and an attention economy that erodes trust and wellbeing. These systemic stresses make traditional schooling insufficient—young people need embodied relational capacities to navigate complexity, resist manipulation, and co-create resilient communities – relational skills are the civic literacy of the AI era.

I have become all the more convinced of this after leading the Human Transformation in a Time of Metcarisis at the Harvard Graduate Scho of Education last year. To put this into practice, I have conceived of a gradual 5-level capacity-building pathway which offers an urgently needed ladder from inward regulation to collective agency, each level amplifying and stabilizing the next:

  1. Self: Build baseline self‑awareness and regulation so students can notice emotions, manage reactivity, and sustain curiosity amid informational overload.
  2. Dyad: Students connect with a peer-practitioner and train together on listening, mutual attunement and repair—core skills for resisting polarizing algorithmic cues.
  3. Facilitated group: Students join in groups of 8-10 guided by professional facilitators and learn co-regulation in realtime, as well as developmental practices to better communicate, build resilient relationships and seed shared meaning.
  4. Peer group: Students then learn to co-facilitate their own groups, putting into practice their leadership abilities in ways that help student group members to continue to grow in self-awareness and relational confidence.
  5. Professional facilitation: Practitioners who have completed all 4 levels go out into the world to scale with fidelity by creating safe-brave relational spaces in their local and online communities to act towards positive change in the face of the metacrisis.

Why now? relational capacities are a social immune system against a metacrisis that profits from isolation and distraction. Teach connection, not just content—so students hold both heart and data. Teach people to connect and they can steward technology; leave them reactive and technology will steer them. This is a call to action: to revolutionize, democratize and technologize education!