Campfire Learn Together: Head, Heart, and Hands at the End of the World

We were educating young people for a certain kind of future. But the science was telling us that a very different future was coming our way. And so I felt almost intellectually and emotionally dishonest.

— Virginie Servant-Miklos, Documentary Together: The Bildung Climate School

We want to start with ourselves and to understand ourselves enough and who we are and how to regulate ourselves and our nervous systems before we take on really stressful, really overwhelming questions.

— Virginie Servant-Miklos, Pedagogies of Collapse Q&A, Human Restoration Project

For our Sunday, August 16, 2026 at 10AM CT, 4PM UK Campfire Learn Together, we are watching and discussing two videos about the same school and the same argument: a half-hour documentary about the Bildung Climate School in Rotterdam, and a Q&A with its founder, Dr. Virginie Servant-Miklos, hosted by our partners at the Human Restoration Project.

This one is a return, not an introduction. We read Pedagogies of Collapse earlier this year and wrote a crosswalk between her framework and our Learning Space. We found a fellow traveler — someone who set out from a different trailhead and walked into a clearing we already knew. She built Experimental Pedagogics for students staring down ecological and social collapse. We build ARLES for Autistic and Disabled learners staring down an education system that was never designed for them. Different rooms. Different emergencies. The same refusal.

What we did not have then was footage of the school itself. Now we do. The documentary is the practice — students sewing, boxing, breathing, arguing, walking a runway in clothes they made from other people’s discards. The Q&A is the diagnosis, delivered without anesthetic, in a live conversation that gets very heavy very fast. Watch them in that order and you get something rare: a pedagogy and the room it actually happens in, followed by its author telling you exactly how bad she thinks things are.

Content note. The Q&A discusses climate collapse, geopolitical collapse, fascism, drug use, and death, and it contains explicit language. It is not gentle. Take it in pieces. Leave the room if you need to.

We watch. We reflect. We bring our whole bodyminds. And we argue with the parts that deserve arguing with.

Videos

We’ll watch these together at the start of the session — subtitles on, sound up, cameras optional. No need to have watched ahead. We’ll take a bodymind break between them.

Documentary Together: The Bildung Climate School – YouTube

Documentary Together: The Bildung Climate School — about thirty-one minutes. A program in the Netherlands that puts MBO (vocational), HBO (applied sciences), and university students in the same room to work with real Rotterdam companies on sustainability. In the school’s own words, students “work with head, heart and hands to build personal and communal resilience.” It ends in a sustainable fashion show that five hundred people came to.

Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It w/ Dr. GInie S… – YouTube

Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It — about fifty-six minutes. The Human Restoration Project’s unedited Q&A with Servant-Miklos, closing out their summer book club. The host opens by saying the book club went through the stages of grief. It goes downhill from there, in the most useful possible way.

Two videos, one question: what do you teach a young person when you no longer believe the future you were trained to prepare them for?

Videos
Intellectually and Emotionally Dishonest
A School That Starts on a Danish Farm
Stop the Division Between Manual and Brain Labor
Boxing, Breathing, and the Curriculum of the Nervous System
Imperfect Solidarities
Cooling the Robots
I Would Incite You to Riot
The Stimpunks Synthesis
Join Us
Main Takeaways
Related Glossary Entries
Reflection Questions
Resources

Intellectually and Emotionally Dishonest

After I did my postdoc in Denmark on sustainability education, I went through a phase of deep anxiety and you could even call it eco depression. We were educating young people for a certain kind of future. But the science was telling us that a very different future was coming our way. And so I felt almost intellectually and emotionally dishonest.

The documentary starts where every honest account of a new school starts: with someone who could no longer keep doing the old one. Servant-Miklos went on leave. She says plainly that she was not sure she wanted to continue in education at all, and that if she did, “it had to be in a different way.”

Name that accurately and it is moral injury — the distress of being complicit in something that violates what you actually believe. Not burnout from working too hard. Distress from working correctly inside a system doing the wrong thing. That is a systemic condition dressed up as a personal one, and educators are drowning in it.

We know this shape. Broken systems, not broken people applies to the adults in the building too. When a teacher cannot bear to keep teaching, the useful question is almost never what is wrong with the teacher.

Her response was not to write a better curriculum. It was to step outside the system first: “We need, I think, to first step outside the system before we can come back in.” That is the same move Chris McNutt makes in Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real, and the same move we made when we stopped trying to get schools to accommodate our kids and started building somewhere else. You cannot reform your way out of a building whose foundation is the problem.

A School That Starts on a Danish Farm

I discovered the concept of [Bildung], which was a philosophy for personal development and community building where young people from farming backgrounds, some working-class backgrounds came to learn first of all vocational skills related to innovative farming techniques, but also aesthetics and community building.

Here is the part that made us sit up, because we have written this page before.

Servant-Miklos found her model in the Danish folk high schools. In the Q&A she describes going to visit the ruin of the farm where the first one started, about two hours out of Copenhagen, and catching “some wind of inspiration blowing through the old thatched roof.” And she says what she realized standing there: “this was a place for farmers. Not for like rich kids.”

In 1932, a Tennessean named Myles Horton visited those same Danish folk schools before going home to found the Highlander Folk School — the movement halfway house where Rosa Parks took a workshop in the summer of 1955 and Septima Clark ran the citizenship schools that registered tens of thousands of Black voters. We wrote a whole crosswalk calling Highlander our ancestor. Ninety years later a climate educator in Rotterdam walked into the same Danish farmyard and came out with the same conviction.

That is not coincidence. It is lineage. Forgetting is a tool of white supremacy — it tricks us into believing we must be the first. We are not the first, and neither is she, and the fact that two people separated by ninety years and an ocean found the same trailhead is evidence that the trail goes somewhere.

The extension she makes is the one that matters most:

Working class kids deserve a chance to find themselves, too.

She is explicit about what she rejected to get there. She attended one of the last summer schools at Schumacher College, the famous eco college in the UK, and realized it was “so elitist” — “when you talk about plant phenomenology, there’s no way that I’m doing that with a working-class student from Rotterdam South.” Microcolleges and gap-year self-discovery programs are wonderful, she says, “if you’re rich and you can afford to take 6 months or a year out.” Her students cannot. So the Bildung has to arrive attached to a certificate, an internship, and hours that count.

Liberation that requires a year off is not liberation. It is a luxury good with a liberation label.

Stop the Division Between Manual and Brain Labor

When I was doing my research on VMBOs, I was hearing 15-year-olds telling me they were too stupid to study or go any further in their education.

The Dutch system sorts children into vocational, applied, and academic tracks early, and the sorting sticks. Servant-Miklos calls the result “a toxic culture in which we devalue manual labor and technical professions whereas we need them. We cannot do this transition without the technical professions.”

Then she turns the knife the other way, which is the part almost nobody says out loud:

I don’t think it’s healthy that anybody who spends 5 years or however long it is studying finance or tax law should come out of that process completely disconnected from their body and unable to handle basic technical tasks.

And the conclusion:

So while it may sound radical that we are calling to stop the division between manual and brain labor, let’s say, actually perhaps this is the most human thing to do.

This is Dewey’s argument about vocational education with the safety off. Dewey wanted a vocational education that would “first alter the existing industrial system, and ultimately transform it” — not one that adapts workers to a regime he was not in love with. Servant-Miklos is running the experiment.

The documentary shows what it costs and what it buys. Two weeks in, some of the MBO students were ready to quit: “we’re doing these projects and the university students, they make us feel stupid.” She held a circle. And here is the diagnosis she offers, which is not a diagnosis of the MBO students: “most of these university students had just never thought about it. It just had not occurred to them that they’d have to reach out beyond their own bubble.”

What it buys shows up in the students’ own words. A student who had never sewn: “I think it’s way better that we’re mixed.” Another: “I think that I’ve learned way more here in like the 10 weeks that I’ve been here than in like one year of school maybe.” And Servant-Miklos, on visitors to the school: “I ask people who come visit the climate school, can you guess which of our students are MBO, [HBO], university? And they can’t.”

That last one is the whole functioning label argument in a single sentence. The tier was never a fact about the student. It was a fact about the sorting. Put people in a room where the sorting has no purchase and it stops being visible, because it was never there.

Everything we know about competency networks, spiky profiles, and omni-directional learning says the same thing. A room where the researcher learns to sew and the tailor learns to research is not a nice diversity exercise. It is a functioning competency network, and it outperforms the sorted room. Meritocracy is the story the sorted room tells about itself.

Boxing, Breathing, and the Curriculum of the Nervous System

When we start the program, the climate school, they get a class on planetary boundaries from me. And that hits them really hard because in 45 minutes, I just go through every boundary and explain to them what the consequences are of breaching that boundary. And when you put it all together, it’s not a pretty picture.

Then the documentary does something unusual. It shows the class landing.

A student: “I don’t think I can go back to a version of myself that was before [Bildung]. And then I thought, yeah, I’m not going to come next week because it’s too much.” Another: “If we have an 11-week course and every week we learn about how bad the state is and we never learn to deal with that, I know it would crop up for me at least.”

Most climate education stops at the planetary boundaries class and calls the dysregulation a side effect. Servant-Miklos treats it as the syllabus. The school runs a reflection track led by a boxing therapist. There is breathing work, journaling, singing, cooking, painting, dancing.

A student on the boxing:

You have to work under pressure, so you have to counter, you have to defend, but you also have to keep breathing, you have to keep an overview. So it’s very important that you stay grounded.

Another, on the breathing exercises: “I took that home. I still do the breathing exercises. I actually fully learned how to manage anxiety.”

We would put it in four words. Regulation is the curriculum. You cannot learn from a state of threat. Before attention, before content, comes the nervous system. She reaches for existential phenomenology and psychoanalytic group theory; we reach for interoception, co-regulation, and polyvagal theory. Different literature, identical conviction: embodiment is not the weather around the lesson. It is the ground the lesson grows in.

She is also clear that this is not a wellness add-on with an individualist moral. When she says look after your own well-being first, she immediately flags how that can sound:

I’ve seen too many burnouts to feel like it’s productive to try and carry the weight of the world on your shoulders without making sure your shoulders are strong enough first. So that’s not to say take care of yourself and to hell with the rest. It is to say first take care of yourself and that is a condition for you to be able to then play your part.

That is rest as policy and care as infrastructure, not self-care as consumer product. The sustainability of the carer is a condition of the care.

And then the sentence in the Q&A that we would put over the door of every regulation-focused program, including ours:

Some pain just cannot be regulated away.

No toxic positivity. No claim that the right breathing practice makes a burning forest tolerable. Grief is a correct response to loss, and a pedagogy that treats it as a symptom to be cleared is lying.

Imperfect Solidarities

Girls in hijabs come to my school alongside people with queer flags and we are able to build these imperfect solidarities and just say everybody get along because we’re doing something and not just sitting around navel-gazing.

Imperfect solidarities is the ethical core of the book — in her words there, “the art of finding gaps in the system, places where it doesn’t have a firm hold; start there and make the best of it, mistakes and all.” Not a frictionless coalition. People who do not agree, working the same problem, refusing purity as a precondition for showing up.

In the Q&A she pushes it further than the book does, and this is the most uncomfortable stretch of the hour. Her account of how the left lost the working class is blunt: the parliamentary left sold itself to donors, and the intellectual left — “which is us, and we [messed] it up” — got hooked on “who’s the most guilty and the most complicit.” She describes standing in an Extinction Rebellion meeting hosted for free by a working-class bar owner who believed in climate justice, watching him go red as a pronoun round came at him with no explanation and no exit.

When you shame someone… they turn. It’s like a visceral human reaction. Shame is the worst human emotion and it turns on a dime into hate — and then you lose those people.

We are going to disagree with the framing of that scene at the campfire, and we should — the bar owner’s discomfort and a trans person’s safety are not symmetric costs, and stop doing pronoun rounds is not the lesson. But the underlying claim about shame is one we already hold. Shame does not produce change. It produces compliance, masking, and exit. We have said this about behaviorism in classrooms for years. She is saying it about political culture, and the mechanism is the same one.

The proof she offers is a bank transfer. She got sixty thousand euros for a climate school from a politician in Geert Wilders’s PVV — the Dutch hard right — because she sat down and had a conversation with him about work in the south of Rotterdam.

That is something that my left-wing colleagues at the university will not do because they don’t want to get their hands dirty. But I worked in NGO backgrounds for a long time and I know from NGO background that if you don’t get your hands dirty, you don’t get anything done.

She raised close to a million euros for a program running out of a community center in the poorest district of the most unequal city in the Netherlands — a building she describes as unlivable from mid-June to September, where the plan is to strap fabric to the roof so the sun reflects off it. Her line about the money is the best sentence in the hour:

There is money out there. It’s just being hoarded by the wrong people.

That is mutual aid logic and it is community organizing craft. It is also what a care web looks like when it has to survive an institution: when one of her partner companies bailed mid-project and dumped her students, she picked up the phone and called a man she had been building a relationship with — a former drug trafficker now running a youth program in the same building — and he said yes. Nothing in a funding model saved that project. A relationship did.

Cooling the Robots

If it comes to choosing between cooling people or cooling the robots, they’re totally going to cool the robots and then the people die.

The Q&A’s AI section is the newest material and the least like the book. Her argument is not about superintelligence. It is about water, electricity, cables, and who gets them.

It’s not a question of generating more electricity. It’s literally there’s not enough cables to carry it around.

She describes a European grid at capacity, data centers firing up coal and gas plants to get around it, and — in an aside that lands hard for us — a personal solar battery arriving in a couple of weeks because she does not trust the grid.

We are already living in that sentence. We electrified everything — solar plus battery with whole-house backup and automatic failover, heat pumps, induction, electric everything — and we did it in Texas, where the moral case for decarbonizing got reinforced every time the grid failed in a freeze or a heat wave. For Disabled people, grid reliability is not an abstraction. It is refrigerated medication, a powered wheelchair, a ventilator, a well pump, an air conditioner in a body that cannot thermoregulate. When the grid becomes a contested resource, the people who lose access first are the people who need it most.

Her second AI argument is about inequality, and she gets to eco-fascism by way of it: the billionaire plan, as she reads it, is to not need people. We would file that alongside eugenics and the long history of deciding which lives are worth the resources — and note that Disabled people are always early on that list, in every triage protocol and every “survival of the fittest” turn a crisis takes. Campfire Munch Together on Why Don’t Fascists Eat Vegetables? covered the appetite side of the same politics.

Where we would press: this is a story about a future that is mostly told through the intentions of a dozen very rich men. That is techno-solutionism inverted — the same conviction that the technology is the protagonist, held with the polarity reversed. The material claims about grid capacity, water, and mineral concentration stand on their own and are checkable. The Randian-fever-dream endgame is a forecast, and she offers it as one. Watch which is which.

I Would Incite You to Riot

I think the schools as we have them are next to pointless. Even worse because they’re teaching [that] it’ll be okay when it won’t. So I would incite you to riot and leave your schools and go and build your own [Bildung] climate schools and go and build something relevant like, you know, teach kids to sew, teach kids to grow food, teach kids to cook, which is what we’re doing.

This is the hardest thing she says, and she says it to a room full of working teachers who came to a book club looking for something they could do on Monday.

She means it. She says that if she could not run the climate school she would leave her university job rather than teach statistics and qualitative research — “the world is on fire, why would I do that?” She says teachers who keep teaching an irrelevant curriculum will destroy themselves doing it. She acknowledges, unprompted, that this is easier to say from a country with unemployment benefits than from the US.

We are the people who did this. Stimpunks exists because a family walked out and built somewhere else. DIY is a humanizing rebellion. We exist as friction. So we are not going to pretend the advice is unthinkable.

We are going to say what it costs, because she almost does and then moves on. Exit is rationed. It is rationed by money, by immigration status, by health insurance tied to a job, by a disability that makes the crip tax already unpayable, by compulsory attendance law for anyone under sixteen. And it is rationed by exactly the bureaucracy she describes fighting: nearly a million euros raised, a documentary made, a teaching award won, and she still had three students without a September placement because an official decided a diving school is not an internship, since an internship means being at a desk thirty-two hours a week.

That is not a footnote to the argument. It is the argument. The people best positioned to riot and leave are the people the system was already serving.

The Stimpunks Synthesis

The following is a Stimpunks synthesis — our own extension and critique, not a claim made by the videos or their participants.

We wrote the crosswalk from the book. Watching the school changes four things about it, and we want to put all four on the table.

First: the ring with no twin is there after all — as an improvisation, not a design layer. Our crosswalk’s central finding was that Experimental Pedagogics runs cognitive → individual → group → societal → global, and skips the layer ARLES calls Environment: the actual room, its light, its noise, its heat, and the learner’s power to change it. XP had a collapsing outer biosphere and no inner one. The documentary and the Q&A partly overturn that. The environment is everywhere in the practice — a community center that is unlivable from mid-June to September, fabric to be strapped on a roof so the sun reflects off it, a boxing gym used as a regulation space, a runway built as the container for eleven weeks of work. She is doing niche construction constantly. What she does not have is a name for it, which means it is not a layer anyone is accountable to and not a right any student holds. The heat is a hardship the group endures together, not a condition the learners are empowered to redesign. Our extension stands, but the correction is real and we owe it: XP does not ignore the environment. It has no vocabulary for it, so it cannot hand anyone the pen.

Second: “a bunch of neurodivergent guys in a basement.” In the middle of an answer about how the left lost the working class, describing a book she had read about the American far right, she says the MAGA movement was kickstarted by “basically a bunch of neurodivergent guys in a basement on Reddit, on 4chan, on 8chan.” We are going to name this squarely, because it is our lane and because the rest of that same answer is so good. Every other sentence in it is structural: people were abandoned by the parliamentary left, hoovered up by simplistic narratives, shamed by the intellectual left, and they turned. Most of them, she says, “just wanted recognition of their financial struggles… being allowed to participate as full humans, not being looked down on.” That is a systems analysis with real compassion in it. And then a neurotype gets used as the shorthand for the pathology — a stand-in for isolated, malformed, dangerous. It does the exact move the whole rest of her argument refuses: it locates the fault in a kind of person. It is also, plainly, wrong as fact; radicalization pipelines are engineered by recommendation systems and funded by people with names. You cannot make a structural argument about abandonment and then hand the blame to a marginalized neurotype in the next breath. She is openly ADHD and says so to her own students in the same conversation, which makes the aside more careless than cruel. It is still the kind of line that costs Autistic and Neurodivergent people something every time it is repeated, and this is an unedited live Q&A, so it will be.

Third: the girl who walked the catwalk. She tells one story as the distilled example of the model. A student with intense anxiety was asked to lead a group sing; she could not make more than a peep, so, in her words, “we all had to be just below a peep.” By the end of the program the same student walked the runway alone, without the friend she could not usually be separated from.

Grant the first half completely. The group adjusted down to her. That is collective access, and it is rarer and better than any accommodation policy — nobody asked her to get louder, they got quieter. That is exactly what we mean by access as relational rather than a checklist.

Now look at where the story ends. The proof of success is the anxious student doing the maximally exposed, maximally normative thing: alone, on a runway, in front of a crowd. We have watched this arc our whole lives. It is the arc where an Autistic kid’s growth gets measured by how closely they approach the confident extrovert, and where the same practice that produced genuine access gets narrated as producing normalcy. The question we would ask her, and will ask each other at the campfire: if that student had ended the program still unable to sing above a peep, but safe, connected, and doing work she cared about — would the story still get told? If not, the model has an outcome measure it has not examined. Presume competence has to include presuming that the quiet version was already a whole person.

Fourth: “resilience” is doing work that needs watching. The school’s own description says students build “personal and communal resilience,” and the communal half saves it. But resilience is a word with a bad habit: it slides from the group can absorb this to you should have been able to absorb this, and it never reduces the exposure. Resilience is not a protective factor. To judge someone as low-risk because they are resilient is to betray them. Every regulation practice in that school is good — and none of it lowers a planetary boundary, and she knows it, and she says so. Keep the word plural and communal or drop it.

None of which makes the argument wrong. It makes it an argument in progress, which is the best kind to bring to a campfire — and hers is further along than almost anyone’s, because she built the thing instead of theorizing it.

Where we land is the same place her students landed. One of them, on realizing you cannot make a truly fossil-free garment inside this system, and making one anyway out of clothes headed for landfill:

You have to do what you can and it’s okay if not everything can be fixed. It’s okay if you can’t apply all your knowledge.

And another, at the end:

The whole process just made me realize how easy it is to make clothes. You just need a community. You just need people.

That is not a small conclusion. That is the whole library economy, the whole care web, and the entire reason we hold a campfire on Sunday mornings. Servant-Miklos will not scale the school past a few dozen students — “that would defeat the point and purpose of what we’re doing” — because it works at human scale and dies above it. It is not meant to be scaled. It is meant to be multiplied.

Imperfect solidarities. Head, heart, and hands. Beautiful, imperfect hope, flooding the cracks in the crumbling old world.

Join Us

Campfire Learn Together happens every Sunday at 10AM Central, online via Discord. This session is on Sunday, August 16, 2026 at 10AM CT, 4PM UK. Open to the whole community — no preparation needed, no expertise required. Come as you are.

We’ll watch together, take a bodymind break between the two videos, and then open up the reflection questions as a community conversation. You can participate by video, voice, text chat, or just by being in the room. All modes are welcome. Cameras optional. Silence is participation.

There is no designated expert here, including us. We wrote a crosswalk about this book and we still do not know what to do on Monday morning. That is the point of watching it together.

Join our community to get access, then find us in our online space. Our Campfire Learn Together page describes some of what to expect. If this is your first Campfire, you’re in good company — many of our regulars showed up for the first time not knowing quite what to expect, and stayed.

This one is heavy. Come anyway, and bring the thing that regulates you. Come with one skill you have that would still be useful if the systems around you stopped working — sewing, growing, cooking, fixing, listening, navigating a bureaucracy, keeping people calm. We want to hear what is already in the room.

Main Takeaways

A pedagogy that lies about the future is a pedagogy that will break the teacher. Servant-Miklos left education for a while because she felt “intellectually and emotionally dishonest.” That is moral injury, and it is structural, not personal.
The Danish folk high school is a shared ancestor. Myles Horton visited them before founding Highlander. Ninety years later a climate educator stood in the same farmyard and reached the same conclusion. We are never the first, and forgetting that is a tool of the systems we are fighting.
Liberation that requires a year off is a luxury good. No microcolleges, no gap-year self-discovery. The Bildung arrives with a certificate, an internship, and hours that count, because working-class kids deserve a chance to find themselves too.
Stop the division between manual and brain labor. The tailoring student and the psychology student in the same project is not a diversity exercise; it is a working competency network. Visitors cannot tell the tracks apart, which means the track was never a fact about the student.
Regulation is the curriculum. Forty-five minutes of planetary boundaries, then boxing, breathing, singing, cooking, painting. Teach the collapse without teaching the nervous system and you have built a machine for producing shutdown.
Some pain cannot be regulated away. Grief is a correct response to loss. A practice that treats it as a symptom to clear is lying, and she refuses to.
Shame turns on a dime into hate. We have said it about behaviorism in classrooms; she says it about political culture. Same mechanism, same result — compliance, masking, and exit, never change.
There is money out there; it is being hoarded by the wrong people. Almost a million euros, including sixty thousand from a hard-right politician, because she will talk to anyone and her colleagues will not get their hands dirty.
Exit is rationed. Riot and leave your schools is real advice we have taken ourselves — and the people best positioned to take it are the people the system was already serving. She raised a million euros and still lost three student placements to a man who thinks an internship means a desk.
Not scaled — multiplied. The school will never take six hundred students, because it works at human scale and dies above it. The model is a seed, not a franchise.

Vocational Education — Dewey’s version: not education that adapts workers to the existing industrial regime, but education that transforms it. The exact project of the Bildung Climate School.
Applied Learning — Problem-based, project-based, experiential, career and technical. Servant-Miklos is a historian of problem-based learning; this is the tradition she is extending.
ARLES — Attention, Relational, Lived Experience, Environment, Systems. Five nested rings that line up with Experimental Pedagogics almost exactly, and diverge in one instructive place.
Bodymind — Mind and body as one inseparable thing. The premise under boxing therapy, breathing work, and every reflection track in the school.
Co-Regulation — Nervous systems settling each other. What actually happened when a whole group sang below a peep so one student could lead.
Polyvagal Theory — Why safety has to come before learning, and why fight, flight, and freeze are responses rather than misbehavior.
Moral Injury — The distress of being complicit in what violates your values. The founding condition of this school, and of a great many teachers still in the building.
Mutual Aid — Solidarity, not charity. The mechanism behind imperfect solidarities and behind the phone call that rescued the students when a company bailed.
Care Web — Informal reciprocal networks that show up when institutions do not. Rotterdam South’s community center is one.
Prepping — Preparedness as a community practice rather than a bunker. The opposite of the billionaire fortress, and the honest version of what a pedagogy of collapse is teaching.
Human Scale — Organizations small enough for humans to actually understand and trust. Why the school will be multiplied and not scaled.
Resilience — A word to watch. It describes recovery, not protection, and it slides fast from the group can hold this to you should have coped.
Shame — What turns on a dime into hate. The thing behaviorist classrooms and purity-testing political cultures have in common.
Eugenics — The long project of deciding whose lives are worth resources. Where eco-fascism goes, and where Disabled people always appear early on the list.
Techno-Solutionism — What happens when the tool arrives before the question. Useful in both directions when a forecast makes the technology the protagonist.

Reflection Questions

On teaching toward a future you don’t believe in. Servant-Miklos took leave because she felt intellectually and emotionally dishonest preparing students for a world that is not coming. Where in your own work are you saying something you no longer believe, because the alternative is not obvious and the room expects it? What would it take to stop?

On the sorting. Visitors to the climate school cannot tell which students are vocational and which are university. What have you been sorted into — by a track, a diagnosis, a functioning label, a job title — and what did you stop believing about yourself once the sorting stuck? What would a room look like where the sorting had no purchase?

On regulation as curriculum. The school spends real hours on boxing, breathing, singing, and cooking before it hands students the planetary boundaries. What actually regulates you — not what you have been told should? And where in your life is someone handing you the hard information with no capacity built for receiving it?

On the pain that can’t be regulated away. She refuses to promise that the right practice makes the grief manageable. What are you grieving that nobody around you has agreed to call a loss? What would it change to have it named out loud in a room with other people?

On imperfect solidarity. She takes money from a hard-right politician and puts hijabs and queer flags in the same classroom, and she says her colleagues will not get their hands dirty. Where is your line? What have you refused to be in a room with, and was that refusal protecting someone, or protecting your own sense of yourself?

On exit. Riot and leave your schools. Some of us did exactly that; most people cannot. What is actually holding you where you are — money, health insurance, immigration status, a child’s placement, a body that needs the thing this job pays for? Naming the constraint is not the same as accepting it. What is the smallest gap in the system near you, and what could you flood it with?

On the skill you already have. Her list is teach kids to sew, teach kids to grow food, teach kids to cook. What do you know how to do with your hands that would still matter if the systems around you stopped working — and who taught you?

—

This page draws on Documentary Together: The Bildung Climate School (2026); the Human Restoration Project Q&A with Dr. Virginie Servant-Miklos on Pedagogies of Collapse (2026); her book Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as We Know It (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, open access); and our own Pedagogies of Collapse and Our Learning Space: A Crosswalk. Quotations from the videos are transcribed from their captions, with filler words removed and proper nouns corrected in square brackets. The Stimpunks Synthesis section is our own extension and critique, not attributed to Dr. Servant-Miklos, the Bildung Climate School, or the Human Restoration Project.