Global Thought Leader Symposia
The Whitestone Foundation held its inaugural online thought leader symposium entitled “The Existential Crisis of Learning and the Future of the Knowledge Economy” on Nov. 12, 2025. Watch the video.
The global economy, with which the US economy is inextricably intertwined, within the last few decades has morphed without question into a knowledge economy. Artificial intelligence, or AI, has accelerated and deeply augmented this transformation.
The knowledge economy is an economic system where the generation, acquisition, and application of knowledge play the premier role in facilitating economic growth, development, and productivity. Unlike traditional economies that leverage physical resources, cheap and unskilled labor, or industrial production, the knowledge economy is built on intellectual capital—skills, expertise, innovation, and intangible assets such as intellectual property, research, and technology.
Despite the meteoric trajectory of the global knowledge economy in the last two generations, it has a potentially fatal weakness that may in the very near future undermine and puncture its success. That weakness is our failing education systems, not just higher ed but K-12 learning as well.
Higher education, especially in the United States, is imploding because of a “perfect storm” of excessive costs, declining undergraduate enrollments, cratering entry level job opportunities, growing public distrust, outsize cutbacks in government financial support, and new visa restrictions on foreign students.
K-12 education, which feeds students to colleges and universities, is in dire trouble because of falling student performance, widespread teacher shortages, chronic underfunding, budget instability, mounting mental health and social challenges, policy and curricular turbulence, a dearth of instructional innovation, outdated pedagogical models, and lack of reliable access to current information technology.
According to the World Economic Forum, globally over 250 million children remain out of school, especially in low-income countries facing conflict, displacement, or chronic underfunding. There is a critical international teacher shortage and persistent digital inequity, which altogether impedes educational and social progress
What is to be done?
The usual, tired, lazy-minded response is “more funding”. However, even a US Department of Education study concludes that, after decades of substantial increases in education funding, student outcomes have not improved “substantially, if at all.” It underscores that observers and policymakers frequently note the lack of significant return in student achievement despite greater investments.
Our educational systems from kindergarten to graduate school are for the most part constructed on a paradigm from the 19th and early 20th century factory era that has become totally irrelevant to the 21st century and the digital age.
Education as a whole, including higher education, needs to undergo a total makeover, or large-scale “rethink”, and we need to begin now. At the same time, we are compelled to ask the question, “if we know what needs to be done, how can we really do it, and how do we deal with the seemingly insuperable obstacles we face”?
Panelists
Dani Chesson (University of Denver)
Darryl Meekins (Lightbox Consultants)
Erik Raschke (Goudsewaarden School, Netherlands)
Erec Smith (Cato Institute, Free Black Thought)
Justin Taylor (Sewanee School of Letters)
Victor Taylor (The Whitestone Foundation)
Paul Wolfe (The Cambridge School, Dallas)
ModeratorsCarl Raschke (University of Denver)
Gary Bedford (Wild Globalization Project)