Institutions have their own lives, beyond any individual. The start-of-year institution machinery (timetables, buses, logins, uniforms and so on) has been a necessary focus for us all. But it isn’t what the school is for and it’s not what really matters. So now that is largely out of the way, let’s look at the big picture for our children. What follows may feel like a detour, but bear with me; I’ll get back to our children at the end.
And by big picture, I mean global news. This does not feel like a glorious moment in history. Ukraine, Myanmar, Iran. Our feeds usually contain something alarming from Washington, something worrying about health, or AI, or the economy. Terror about the climate, I saw a clip of an older person asking a thirteen year old what she wanted to be when she grew up. ‘Not in fire’ she replied.
But that feed is not the whole picture. It’s a selection — of what gets filmed, what gets clicked, algorithmically selected to keep us watching. We all know this intellectually. The trouble is that knowing it doesn’t change how it makes us feel; which is bleak. That can be dispiriting; it can make us lose hope, or become cynical. It can make optimism and hope feel like naivety. And the danger is that if we give up as a result, if we lose the optimism and hope, then we let the bleak future happen, because it seems inevitable. But in fact the future is as open as it has always been.
So let me give you a different feed alongside it; a few things that don’t get filmed, because they happened slowly, or a long way from a camera, or because the good thing is actually something that didn’t happen.
- Two hundred years ago, 85% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today it’s around 10%. From the vast majority, to a smaller fraction. Across the last twenty-five years, that fall has averaged around 137,000 people a day, every day. (World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform.)
- In 1950, 23% of all children died before their fifth birthday. Today it’s under 4% and the progress is that tens of millions of children did not die. And no camera films someone not dying. (UN Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation.)
- Global hunger has now fallen for three years running — down to 7.8% of the world from 8.6% in 2022, fourteen million fewer people than the year before. It’s affecting fewer people each year, which is not what you’d guess from the news. (UN State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, 2026.). In practice: Indonesia, which for decades was a food aid recipient, has reached self-sufficiency in eight staple foods and now funds food assistance to Gaza and Afghanistan. A country that was fed is now doing the feeding. (WFP.)
- And one I was staggered by: first-half of 2026 global wildfire emissions are near its lowest level since satellite records began in 2003. That sounds impossible, because the fires we see — North America, southern Europe — are getting worse, and climate change is indeed making them worse. But those aren’t where most of the world’s fire is. The vast grassland burns of Africa and Asia overwhelmingly dominate the global total, and it’s those – which have never reached our feeds – that have been dying back, far enough to pull the whole world’s number down. (Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service)
I’ll stop there. The list is much longer and if you want to see more, subscribe at fixthenews.com.
Now, none of this means the bad news isn’t real. Ukraine is real, the climate crisis is real, and we cannot read these facts as reason for complacency. Anyone who does so would be making the same error as those who ignore them. Curated good news is its own kind of distortion because if we cherry-pick hard enough we can prove anything. But the good news is a necessary foil to what we see in our feeds, and a reminder that there is more.
And once we have that foil, we can see that there’s something else to see here.
Which is that none of these good things happened by accident. Every one of them is the aggregated result of millions of decisions, taken over decades, by people working largely independently across the globe. The vast majority have never met and never will. Scientists, doctors, farmers, investors, engineers, teachers, activists, civil servants, entrepreneurs, politicians. Ordinary people, in other words. The figures don’t just happen; they came about via dozens of countries and countless individuals doing patient, unglamorous, coordinated work.
So I am not saying we can use the good news to help our mood (though it helps, for sure!). I’m talking about cause. It’s true that there are systems and structures to work within, and to work on (more on that in another post shortly) but it’s individual people who do that work. And to do it they need the capacity to hold complexity, act under uncertainty, work with strangers, and who have the moral drive to do so. There are many, many millions of people like this, working in different countries, on different problems, in different decades, all pushing for a better world with less suffering, more dignity, a planet that still works. It’s the biggest coalition in human history, and it’s still growing.
But humans are not born equipped with the capacities I’ve mentioned; they need to be nurtured. And that’s our job, as educators and parents, to equip and form our students so they can join this coalition.
That’s what an education is for, or should be for. I don’t mean this school’s education, but education in general. It’s the work of taking a young person and, over years, building the habits of mind the coalition runs on: attention, patience, the ability to see a system and still care about the single person inside it.
Education itself has shifted. Where the aim of leaving the world better than you found it was once an idealist’s addition to schooling, something only a certain kind of school did, it has become the mainstream expectation. Many schools now name it, reach for it, feel they ought to. And like all the other changes on the list, it happened across decades, through countless individual teachers and schools deciding, until the entire sense of what a school is for has moved. That is a wonderful change all by itself, and like the others, it’s happened slowly, uncredited, but real nevertheless.
There’s a saying I picked up on a service trip to Indonesia years ago: the meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you will never sit. That feels to me like a description of education (perhaps of parenthood). Large parts of what we do, we do for results we won’t be present to see. And that’s true of most of what genuinely improves the world – slow, collective, unphotographed. Peaceful and wonderful, even as our feeds deliver things on fire
So when I watch students in these initial weeks, I see them beginning. The girl finding the courage to join a group and stay herself; the boy struggling to understand something difficult, and sticking with it; a pair trying to work out why they see some things so differently. None of them can yet do what the coalition will need of them. That’s not a problem – it is what the years are for. I don’t know which of them will go on to do that work, or how, or when. But this is where it starts.
References
- Extreme poverty: Our World in Data, “A history of global living conditions”; underlying data from the World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform and Roser & Hasell (2021).
- Child mortality: Our World in Data, child mortality; underlying data from Gapminder (pre-1950) and the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation.
- Hunger, and Indonesia: The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026; World Food Programme, “Indonesia’s transformation: from food aid to humanitarian donor”; WFP, “Indonesia donates US$12 million for lifesaving assistance in Gaza”.
- Wildfire: Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, “Global biomass burning emissions in 2026 at their lowest level since 2003”
More generally, Hans Rosling’s Factfulness is an accessible starting point to understand ‘good news’ in a wider context. Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature is a deeper and more contested argument about the long-run decline of violence and the reasons behind it. Both are a few years old now, but still rewarding.
