Breaking a Few Eggs to Make a…?

Epistemic Collapse, Educational Obedience, and the Case for Transformative Sustainability Education

1. Introduction: Exit, Epistemic Collapse, and the Educator’s Dilemma

In a previous piece, I explored what happens when young people begin to withdraw - not out of apathy, but as a form of strategic disillusionment. What I called exit thinking was a response to the erosion of shared responsibility, the breakdown of institutional credibility, and the refusal to participate in systems that appear morally incoherent. But exit is not always loud. Sometimes, it appears as a quiet refusal to play along. A student lowers their hand, stops completing assignments, or sits silently through a discussion that feels pre-scripted. They have not given up. They have simply decided that the classroom is no longer a trustworthy space for truth.

This kind of disengagement is not just emotional or political. It is epistemic. And it is increasingly widespread. When truth becomes contested not through the weighing of evidence but through the consolidation of power, students do not always resist by speaking up. Sometimes, they resist by stepping away.

In this piece, I want to follow that thread further. I want to ask what it means to teach when truth itself has become performative. Across political contexts, we now see public figures making blatantly false claims, yet retaining authority through repetition and spectacle. This morning, during a BBC Verify segment, former U.S. President Donald Trump was fact-checked after claiming that the price of eggs in the United States had gone down. It had not. I accepted the BBC’s correction without hesitation, not because I had verified the figures myself, but because I trusted the institution. Yet that trust is not shared by everyone. Many of Trump’s supporters would dismiss the BBC as politically compromised. The same claim becomes credible or fraudulent depending not on evidence, but on which authority is believed.

This fracture of epistemic authority has profound implications for educators. We are charged with teaching critical thinking, yet we do so within systems that often reward compliance and enforce silence. We speak of truth as if it were neutral, yet we know that which truths are teachable is shaped by policy, ideology, and risk. The question, then, is not just what we teach, but what kind of knowing we are preparing students for.

My argument in this piece is that education must do more than correct misinformation or promote generic critical thinking. In a world shaped by ecological crisis, political polarisation, and epistemic collapse, education must become transformative. It must help students understand not only how systems distort knowledge, but also how to imagine and enact alternatives. What we need is not a more efficient curriculum or a more politically balanced classroom. What we need is a paradigm shift. In the sections that follow, I argue for transformative sustainability education as a radical response to this moment - a pedagogy rooted in truth, justice, and the possibility of regeneration.

2. Manufactured Lies and the Politics of Truth

Donald Trump’s false statement about the price of eggs may appear inconsequential. It is not a policy lie, nor a fabrication with immediate material consequences. Yet it is emblematic of a broader epistemic strategy: the use of deliberate falsehoods to test, not persuade. These statements function not to inform, but to signal control over the terms of reality. They reveal the shift from truth as correspondence to evidence, toward truth as loyalty to authority.

This is not new. George Orwell warned of this dynamic in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where he introduced the concept of Newspeak - a deliberately constricted language designed to make dissent not only dangerous, but literally unthinkable. As Orwell explains in the appendix, “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible” (Orwell, 1949, p. 312). The manipulation of language is not simply about silencing dissent. It is about reengineering the conditions under which thought can occur at all.

When power rewrites language, it does not need to censor. It can simply make alternatives nonsensical or illegible. The eggs may or may not have gone up in price, but if the leader says they have gone down, and if belief in that claim becomes a demonstration of loyalty, then language has ceased to function as a tool of understanding. It becomes instead a performance of alignment.

Hannah Arendt, writing after witnessing the collapse of democratic institutions in Europe, described this shift in even starker terms. For Arendt, totalitarianism is not characterised by widespread belief in lies, but by the collapse of the distinction between truth and falsehood altogether. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist,” she wrote, “but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, and the distinction between true and false, no longer exist” (Arendt, 1951, p. 474).

This is not just a condition of gullibility. It is a kind of epistemic fatalism. When truth becomes a function of who speaks rather than what is said, public discourse loses its referential anchor. What remains is affect, allegiance, and control. To believe, or at least to perform belief, is no longer a matter of cognition, but of identity.

This presents a profound challenge for educators. If truth is degraded in the political sphere, the school becomes one of the last institutions where epistemic integrity might be modelled and cultivated. Yet schools are not neutral havens. They are embedded in the very systems that reward obedience and punish deviance. When public figures openly flout factual accuracy and remain politically viable, we must ask what lessons this teaches - not just in society, but in the classroom. What do students learn when they see that truth has little bearing on success, that honesty is optional, and that epistemic allegiance often trumps critical reasoning?

In this context, the teacher’s task becomes deeply fraught. We can no longer assume that offering evidence will be sufficient. We must ask how our pedagogies either reproduce or resist the larger cultural shift toward epistemic nihilism. We must recognise that the battle over truth is not merely rhetorical. It is educational. It is ontological. And it is far from over.

3. Quiet Authoritarianism in British Schools

It is tempting to view the collapse of truth as a uniquely American problem, tied to the political theatrics of Trumpism or the spectacle of U.S. media polarisation. Yet this is a convenient illusion. In the United Kingdom, the erosion of truth, trust, and epistemic integrity does not arrive through populist slogans or overt disinformation. It arrives more quietly, through policy, bureaucracy, and the everyday disciplining of schools. Authoritarianism here is not shouted. It is politely administered.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the securitisation of education through the Prevent Duty. Introduced as part of the UK government’s counter-terrorism strategy, Prevent places a statutory obligation on educators to identify and report students deemed at risk of radicalisation. While its stated aim is safeguarding, its practical effect has been the normalisation of surveillance in schools—particularly for Muslim students, who are disproportionately targeted by referrals (Heath-Kelly, 2017). The duty asks teachers to interpret complex social and political identities through a lens of risk. It transforms pedagogy into pre-criminal policing and reframes curiosity, critique, or dissent as signs of ideological vulnerability.

Equally insidious is the Department for Education’s 2022 guidance on political impartiality. This document instructs schools to avoid endorsing partisan perspectives and specifically warns against aligning with activist movements such as Black Lives Matter or climate strikes. While framed as a defence of neutrality, the effect is chilling. In practice, it restricts critical engagement with the very issues, racial justice, climate breakdown, economic inequality, that are most urgent to young people today. Neutrality, in this sense, is not the absence of politics. It is the endorsement of the status quo.

Most recently, the government has moved to consolidate its authority over how gender is discussed and recognised in schools. In late 2023, the Department for Education released draft guidance on gender-questioning children, advising schools that they are not required to affirm a child’s gender identity and should base communication and safeguarding decisions on biological sex. This guidance was followed in April 2024 by a Supreme Court ruling that legally defines the term “woman” as referring to biological sex under the Equality Act. Although the guidance is non-statutory, and the ruling is limited in scope, together they signal a broader ideological shift. They attempt to fix the ontological terms by which students may be recognised or supported. In effect, they reassert the state’s authority to define reality, and to enforce that definition through policy.

The consequences are not abstract. They shape what can be said, taught, and named in classrooms. For gender-diverse students, these moves constitute more than institutional discomfort. They represent a systemic denial of existence. For teachers, they demand either complicity or resistance. There is little room for neutrality when recognition itself is being legislated.

This logic of control is not limited to headline policies. It extends into the minutiae of school life. At my own school, male students in the Sixth Form are prohibited from growing facial hair, even when it is culturally or religiously significant. Younger girls are required to tie their hair back at all times, regardless of context or relevance to safety. These may seem like trivial uniform rules, but they operate as part of a broader regime of bodily discipline. They teach students to manage their appearance, regulate their bodies, and conform to expectations that are rarely explained. These are not policies about learning. They are practices of submission.

Taken together, these policies and practices constitute what might be called a pedagogy of containment. They do not foster curiosity. They manage difference. They do not teach students how to think. They teach them how to comply. And they do not prepare young people to navigate complexity. They prepare them to perform legibility within systems that are increasingly closed to dissent.

British schools are not authoritarian in the classical sense. But they are increasingly sites where epistemic obedience is demanded, and ontological diversity is curtailed. The curriculum may still speak of inquiry, tolerance, and open debate. But the institutional message, absorbed through rules, routines, and risk-averse policies, is often one of quiet submission. The most dangerous ideas, it turns out, are not those that challenge the state. They are those that insist on naming realities the state prefers to suppress.

4. The Educator’s Trilemma: Obedience, Inquiry, or Resistance

Faced with these intersecting pressures, the collapse of epistemic consensus, the politicisation of truth, and the creeping normalisation of ontological control, educators find themselves caught in an impossible ethical bind. We must choose, often implicitly, between three postures: obedience, inquiry, or resistance. Each brings with it a set of risks, responsibilities, and institutional consequences. And none is neutral.

The first, and perhaps most common, is obedience. This is not necessarily a conscious alignment with power, nor a commitment to ideology. Rather, it is often a pragmatic adaptation to institutional norms. It is the path of least resistance in a system designed to prioritise order, reputation, and procedural compliance. Few educators would claim to be teaching obedience. Yet the practices we are required to uphold, uniform enforcement, sanctions for lateness, silence in assemblies, the prohibition of “controversial” language, reinforce it daily. Students internalise the implicit message that success means behaving, not questioning. They learn that fitting in is rewarded, while standing out is risky. This kind of pedagogy does not prepare students for the complexities of contemporary life. It prepares them for performance within systems that are increasingly intolerant of ambiguity.

The second posture is inquiry, often celebrated in policy documents and school visions as the gold standard of 21st-century learning. Critical thinking, evidence-based argument, debate, and research skills are all promoted as markers of academic excellence and intellectual maturity. And yet, inquiry in schools is almost always bounded. It is framed by what the curriculum allows, what parents will tolerate, and what school leaders deem reputationally safe. There are sharp limits to what students can inquire about and how far they can go. Discussions of race, gender, colonialism, and ecological collapse are often permitted only within sanitised, depoliticised parameters. And when students push beyond those boundaries, by demanding recognition, asking unanswerable questions, or calling for action, they quickly come up against the institution’s defensive reflexes.

This contradiction is rarely acknowledged. Inquiry is praised, but only when it is clean, polite, and abstract. Michael Hand (2012) has argued that neutrality in teaching is not always appropriate, especially when the evidence is overwhelming and the moral stakes are high. In such cases, he writes, educators have a duty to speak with clarity. Neutrality in the face of injustice is not educational virtue. It is evasion.

Which brings us to the third posture: resistance. This is the most ethically demanding and professionally precarious of the three. It draws on a lineage of critical pedagogy that refuses to treat education as a neutral or technical process. Paulo Freire (1970) insisted that all education is political. The only question is whether it reinforces existing oppression or contributes to liberation. Teaching for resistance means helping students to identify structural injustice, to name it, and to imagine alternatives. It means creating pedagogical spaces that prioritise lived experience, collective agency, and ethical dissent. It means preparing students not only to succeed in the world as it is, but to transform the conditions that make that world unjust.

Vanessa Andreotti (2014) has expanded this vision, arguing that educators must go beyond critical literacy and begin to hospice the systems that are no longer sustainable. This includes the epistemic systems of schooling itself. To teach resistance in this frame is not simply to provoke. It is to help students grieve what is dying, understand why it is dying, and begin the tentative work of reimagining what might come next.

Yet resistance carries costs. Teachers who centre marginalised perspectives, question dominant narratives, or support student activism risk professional sanction. They may be accused of politicising the classroom, undermining neutrality, or failing in their safeguarding duties. This is especially true in contexts governed by policies like Prevent or recent guidance on gender identity, where state surveillance and ideological control are formalised through institutional protocols.

This trilemma - obedience, inquiry, resistance - is not static. Teachers may shift between them depending on the topic, the audience, or the political moment. But it is real. And in the current climate, the middle ground is shrinking. The call to be neutral is increasingly indistinguishable from the call to be silent.

To respond with integrity, educators must recognise that our role is not simply to transmit knowledge, but to shape the very conditions under which knowledge becomes possible. We are not outside the crisis. We are living and teaching within it. And the choices we make - what we permit, what we suppress, what we model - are already political.

In the next section, I explore the deeper structures behind this crisis, arguing that what is at stake is not just pedagogy, but epistemic formation itself.

5. Education as Epistemic Formation

Education is more than curriculum content or pedagogical technique. At its most fundamental level, education is a process of epistemic formation, a structuring of how students come to know, whom they trust, and what they consider legitimate knowledge. This process is not neutral. It is shaped by social norms, institutional power, and historical context. In moments of political polarisation and epistemic breakdown, this formative function becomes not only more visible but more contested.

The concept of epistemic justice, as developed by Miranda Fricker (2007), offers a powerful framework for understanding the moral dimensions of this process. Fricker identifies two primary forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice, where someone’s knowledge is discounted because of who they are, and hermeneutical injustice, where individuals lack the conceptual resources to make sense of their experiences because those resources have been systematically withheld or denied. In the classroom, both forms are at play.

Testimonial injustice occurs when students’ voices are implicitly treated as less credible, whether because of race, class, accent, neurodivergence, or identity. A student sharing their experience of racism may be dismissed as overly sensitive. A student questioning heteronormative assumptions may be seen as disruptive. These moments are not just interpersonal slights. They are institutional failures to recognise students as legitimate knowers.

Hermeneutical injustice, meanwhile, arises when the curriculum itself renders certain ways of knowing invisible. For instance, discussions of colonialism often focus on empire-building or industrial innovation, while erasing Indigenous resistance and ecological devastation. Gender diversity is sometimes taught only through medicalised frames, leaving no space for cultural, spiritual, or relational understandings. Climate education frequently centres on technical solutions while avoiding the deeper ethical, emotional, and systemic dimensions of ecological collapse. In each case, students are left with impoverished tools for making sense of the world and of themselves.

These dynamics are not accidental. They reflect what Balarin and Rodríguez (2023) describe as shallow pedagogies - uncritical educational practices that limit students’ ability to engage with social and ecological complexity, and thereby perpetuate epistemic injustice. Their work shows how formal schooling often constrains what counts as valid knowledge, whose perspectives are included, and which experiences are considered intelligible. This architecture is often inherited from colonial, patriarchal, and extractive systems. It continues to privilege abstraction over emotion, universality over context, and technical rationality over relational wisdom.

In this context, the silence described in the introduction takes on a different meaning. It is not merely a personal withdrawal. It is a form of epistemic exit- a refusal to participate in systems that deny the reality of one’s experience or the credibility of one’s perspective. Students practising exit thinking are not disengaged because they lack motivation. They are disengaged because they no longer trust that the institution will treat their knowledge with respect.

This is not a failure of pedagogy. It is a consequence of epistemic injustice. And it is growing. As more young people become aware of the contradictions between what they are taught and what they experience, the risk is not simply that they will reject school. The risk is that they will reject the very idea of shared truth. When epistemic formation fails, the result is not critical agency. It is disillusionment, cynicism, and retreat.

If education is to serve a democratic and just society, it must address this breakdown not by returning to neutrality, but by rethinking the conditions under which knowledge is cultivated. This means recognising the classroom as a site of epistemic power, and the teacher as an agent of epistemic ethics. It means designing curricula that are not just inclusive in representation, but transformative in structure. And it means acknowledging that students are already engaged in complex acts of knowing, resisting, and reimagining the world - even when they are silent.

What is required is a shift from education as transmission to education as relational and regenerative practice. This is the promise of transformative sustainability education, which I now turn to as a framework for rethinking what education can be in an age of crisis.

6. From Obedience to Transformation: The Case for Transformative Sustainability Education

If the preceding analysis has shown that education is entangled in epistemic injustice, ontological control, and institutional conformity, the next question must be: what kind of education could respond to this crisis with integrity? What would it mean to teach not just against falsehood, but for transformation?

Transformative sustainability education (TSE) offers such a response. More than a pedagogical method or a curriculum strand, TSE is a framework for reimagining the purposes, processes, and ethics of education in a world marked by ecological precarity, systemic injustice, and epistemic fragmentation. It is, as Stephen Sterling (2001) argued, a shift from learning about sustainability to learning as sustainability - a relational, reflective, and regenerative mode of knowing that connects personal transformation with structural change.

TSE begins with the recognition that the current education system is part of the problem. Traditional schooling has too often served the interests of economic growth, industrial modernity, and political stability, at the cost of ecological integrity and social justice. It has prioritised technical knowledge over ethical reflection, standardisation over relational depth, and individual success over collective wellbeing. These priorities are not neutral. They reflect and reproduce the dominant epistemologies of modernity, what Vanessa Andreotti (2021) has termed the “modern-colonial order of knowledge.”

To break from this inheritance, TSE emphasises three key shifts.

The first is a shift from instrumentalism to reflexivity. Rather than treating knowledge as a means to an end, employability, productivity, competitive advantage, TSE invites learners to reflect on how knowledge is constructed, situated, and used. It cultivates what Arjen Wals (2007) describes as critical transformative learning, in which students are not only consumers of information, but agents in rethinking the systems that govern their lives. This requires pedagogical spaces that welcome ambiguity, discomfort, and unlearning.

The second is a shift from individualism to interdependence. TSE foregrounds the relational nature of human and ecological life. It draws on Indigenous and decolonial perspectives that understand sustainability not as a set of measurable targets, but as a way of living in respectful relationship with others, both human and more-than-human. This relational ontology challenges the separation of reason from emotion, self from community, and learning from healing. It requires an education that integrates the intellectual with the emotional, the cognitive with the spiritual, and the political with the ecological.

The third is a shift from reform to transformation. Reform assumes that existing systems can be tweaked to produce more just outcomes. Transformation recognises that some systems are no longer fit for purpose. In this view, the task of education is not to equip students to succeed within unsustainable structures, but to co-create alternatives. As Andreotti (2021) suggests, this involves both “hospicing” the systems that are dying and “midwifing” the ones yet to be born.

These shifts do not come easily. They challenge deep institutional habits and societal assumptions. They require educators to teach differently, to de-centre themselves, to embrace vulnerability, and to hold space for grief, uncertainty, and hope. They also require schools to rethink assessment, leadership, accountability, and community engagement. TSE cannot be implemented through a single module or workshop. It is a cultural shift that reorients education toward ethical regeneration rather than reproduction.

Importantly, TSE is not merely about sustainability in the environmental sense. It is about sustainability as a condition of epistemic and ethical life. It asks: what kinds of knowing are needed to live well within planetary limits, with historical consciousness, and in solidarity with others? What capacities do students need to challenge unjust systems, to sustain their own wellbeing, and to nurture the commons—material, cultural, and epistemic?

In answering these questions, TSE positions itself not as a corrective to broken education, but as a radically different paradigm. It invites us to see education not as preparation for a world that no longer exists, but as participation in the creation of worlds that are still possible.

In the final section, I return to the question posed in the title. If schools are breaking a few eggs, what exactly are they trying to make? And who gets to decide?

7. Conclusion: What Are We Making Them For?

So we return to the question in the title: breaking a few eggs to make a…?

The phrase conjures a familiar justification for harm in the name of progress. It is used to excuse repression, to defend collateral damage, and to rationalise the enforcement of conformity. In the context of education, the question is not rhetorical. We are, daily, shaping minds, bodies, values, and epistemologies. We break things - certainty, curiosity, resistance, sometimes spirit - so that something else might be constructed in their place. But what is that something?

Are we preparing students to comply with the terms of a crumbling system, or are we preparing them to challenge and transform it? Are we teaching them to passively receive dominant narratives, or are we cultivating the reflexivity to recognise when knowledge serves power rather than truth? Are we helping them survive a world of climate collapse, social fragmentation, and institutional distrust, or are we inviting them to reimagine and rebuild the world itself?

These are not abstract questions. They are lived daily in the decisions teachers make about what to teach, how to respond to dissent, which voices to include, and whose realities are made visible in the classroom. In a time when truth is openly contested, when state policies attempt to fix identities and regulate recognition, and when students quietly opt out of systems they no longer trust, the stakes of education have never been higher.

Neutrality is no longer an option. Silence is no longer safe. We are not just shaping knowledge. We are shaping the conditions of epistemic possibility. And in doing so, we are complicit in determining what kinds of futures remain thinkable.

If education continues on its current path, defined by risk aversion, policy compliance, and procedural neutrality, it will increasingly become a site of disconnection, mistrust, and symbolic performance. But if we are willing to take the risk of transformation, to embrace a vision of education rooted in relationality, justice, and regeneration, then another path is possible.

Transformative sustainability education offers more than a curriculum model. It offers a moral orientation. It calls us to repair the fractured relationship between knowledge and power, between learning and living, between schools and the world. It invites us to educate not for resilience within the existing system, but for the ethical imagination and collective courage to move beyond it.

Someone is always making something. The real question is not whether we are shaping the next generation. It is whether we are doing so in ways that sustain life, dignity, and truth - or in ways that merely reproduce their opposites.

We are already breaking the eggs. Now is the time to decide whether we will keep feeding the same system or begin cooking something entirely new.

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