Lessons from a long life - Edgar Morin (1922 - 2026)

Edgar Morin died last month in Paris at the age of 104. A Resistance fighter, sociologist, philosopher and researcher who spent eight decades thinking about how we think. Across that long life he returned, again and again, to one central idea: reality is not made of isolated parts that can be fully understood by breaking them down, but of interwoven systems in which order, disorder, uncertainty, part and whole are inseparable.

While many public intellectuals narrowed their focus, Morin went wide. He wrote across politics, ecology, education, science and culture, arguing that reality is woven from relationships and feedback loops, not isolated parts that can be solved one at a time. His six‑volume La Méthode tried to give us a language for this “complex” world, where order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty, part and whole constantly interact.

He said modern societies “divide in order to know, reduce in order to manage, isolate in order to control”. This way of thinking 'works' in some domains but breaks down when we face problems that cut across boundaries: climate, health, education, economics. That may be why, despite official tributes (including a national ceremony at Les Invalides), he was never fully “heard” during his lifetime.

You can feel that tension Morin described in education and assessment. We have more data, more digital infrastructure and more talk of “transformation” than ever, yet a rising NEET crisis suggests something in the system is still missing the mark for many young people.

Morin’s question for those of us working on assessment might be: before asking how to make our systems faster, cheaper or more consistent, are we sure we’re looking at the whole of what matters? Or are we still, in subtle ways, dividing, reducing and isolating, and then calling the result “transformation”? Are our efforts ultimately about control rather than empowerment and is our approach to AI and technology going to amplify this further?

If his life’s work is a guide, the next phase of assessment change is less about replacing human judgement with models, and more about building infrastructures that help people see complexity more clearly. Perhaps the real challenge is connecting what we measure to the outcomes we actually care about.