In pursuit of Cognitive Solidarity

Guest post by Pip Sanderson, National Institute of Teaching (England)

Image sources here and here

Here’s a peek behind the Cognitive Resonance curtain: I’m currently engaged to provide strategic advice to England’s National Institute of Teaching as it launches a new center— or centre—that, broadly speaking, aims to help educators understand and address challenges to student learning and wellbeing that are posed by digital technologies. This effort is led by Pip Sanderson, the NIoT’s director for teacher education, who I’ve worked with extensively over the past two years. She’s become a good friend.

Last week, Pip participated in an event hosted by Eton College titled Fulfilling Potential: Reframing Cultures for the Digital Age in post-16 Education, and she prepared five minutes of opening remarks for her panel. At my unexpected invitation and with her permission, I’m now sharing her speech with you.

As you’ll soon read, Sanderson offers powerful testimony regarding the role schools and teachers should be play in fostering shared knowledge and understanding as digital technologies proliferate. Full disclosure: I provided an outline for these remarks, sourced the (very real) anecdote about the boy wearing the t-shirt, and suggested the rhetorical framing that appears in the final question.

Apart from that light involvement, however, these are entirely Pip Sanderson’s words. I hope everyone working in education systems, in whatever capacity, takes heed of what she says here.

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A lot of today is about the future. But I’d like to start by looking backwards.

Across history, when our information systems change, we change: psychologically, socially, emotionally—and in profound ways. The invention of writing did this. The invention of the printing press did this. And over the last 30 years, digital technologies have done this, and are doing this still.

As Naomi Alderman puts it, we are living through a Third Information Crisis. Not a moment, but an epoch. We’re already in the middle of it, and it will shape the rest of our lives. Naming it matters, because it helps us see this isn’t just about new tools.

Instead, it’s a systemic shift in how knowledge itself is formed and trusted. And that has huge consequences for us all, and the very notion of democracy. We are all navigating a radically altered information environment.

But some things remain the same. From cognitive science, we know something simple but powerful: we understand new ideas using the knowledge we already have. And building that knowledge takes effort.

So we know we must protect against the temptation of cognitive offloading that new technologies offer us. We must preserve the cognitive grapple that leads to real knowledge.

We also must nurture our own identities, our young people’s identities and our social norms, and—just as crucially—our sense of what feels believable against the onslaught of digital information. They don’t just change what we know.

They change how we decide what is worth believing at all.

Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, describes this as “epistemic collapse”: a breakdown in the processes that allow societies to establish shared truth, reason together, and hold power to account. In other words, a breakdown in verification, deliberation, and accountability.¹ And because those processes aren’t innate, because they’re learned behaviours, we may have taken them for granted as we move from one information age to another.

Let me root this back into schools, with an example someone recently shared online. It’s a non‑uniform day. A boy arrives wearing a t‑shirt that reads: “Male by birth. Alpha by choice.”

That slogan comes from an online ecosystem that rewards certainty and identity signalling, often by framing the world as a struggle between winners and losers. That moment is one example that captures what teachers are telling us. It’s not just that pupils believe the “wrong” things and treat others differently or poorly because of what they’ve absorbed online. It’s growing cynicism about whether any source of knowledge deserves any trust at all.

And teachers are left feeling deeply unsure about how to respond. How would you expect teachers to respond to the boy in that t-shirt?

Now crucially, we all may share extreme or misleading ideas, adults and children alike, not because we fully believe them, but because they signal something to others, be it belonging, humour, outrage, or identity. From a socio‑psychological perspective, that’s just being human.

But what’s changed is the scale and speed. Ideas that once sat at the margins are now being algorithmically rewarded, normalised, and of course monetised. And that is rapidly eroding shared ways of knowing and understanding.

That’s why this moment, and what we do in response, is better understood as a crisis of epistemic infrastructure. If schools and colleges are to build positive, connected cultures in a rapidly evolving digital and AI‑influenced world, where our epistemic norms are crumbling, we have to start with how information actually functions in social groups: how identity, relationships, and status shape what young people trust and share.

So I think our greatest endeavour in the next few years is to work out how we create classroom cultures on mass scale where verification, deliberation, and accountability are normal; where pupils learn not just what to know, but how knowledge is built, challenged, and revised.

There is some good news here.

Even in the highly fragmented information environment we live in, pupils consistently report that they trust their teachers more than almost any other authority. That gives schools and teachers a unique role, and it’s not to be the arbiters of truth in every debate, but rather to serve as places where young people learn the habits that make shared knowledge possible. So I’ll conclude with two questions:

• What durable knowledge and habits can teachers draw on as technologies change faster than curricula ever can?

• And how do we replace what can feel like cognitive anarchy with something closer to cognitive solidarity?

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You must admit that’s one hell of a speech! My thanks again to Pip Sanderson for agreeing to share it here, and prepare to read more about this notion of cognitive solidarity in the weeks ahead.

But not right away, as I suddenly find my professional cup overflowing with projects—file this under “happy problems to have.” As such, I’m going to be dialing back the frequency of my essays. You’re devastated, I know. But if you have thoughts to share via a guest post related to some medley of cognitive science, generative AI, and education, now’s a good time to reach out—my email is info at cognitiveresonance dot net.

Thanks for being part of this strange but satisfying Cognitive Resonance endeavor.

1. Eliot Higgins also sits on the Strategic Advisory Board to CDILS.