EDUCATION

as much as an informative exercise. themselves of the responsibility to brand awareness or consumer sentiment key lever of fixing that system.”

Run for Something

Despite the diversity of their specialisms, communications industry leaders in our US conversation were near-unanimous in describing their diverse roles as ‘educational’. From Mishka Pitter-Armand of Crisis Text Line to Editor of PRovoke Media, Arun Sudhaman, the panellists acknowledged that education – in the broadest sense of sharing knowledge and raising awareness – was paramount in their daily working lives.

The UK discussion also sought to define education, but – perhaps unsurprisingly – began from a different starting point. Considering education from the perspective of its outcomes rather than its origins, questions of subjectivity and metrics arose. Based on a model like rote learning, educational success could be measured by degrees of consensus: whereby if we all agree that the sky is blue or that water boils at 100 c, then that lesson has been successful. But what about less unanimous ideas – for instance, that Pablo Neruda’s poetry is the best in the world, or my wife the most beautiful woman?

“We don’t talk about what we do as education, even though it’s clearly our mandate. If you think about it in terms of this conversation, almost everything we do is education– but I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it and defined it as such.”

Arun Sudhaman, PRovoke Media