Extracts from: Machado de Oliveira, Vanessa. _Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism_. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2021. > We have come to expect only the type of education that gives us a sense of mastery—a form of education that is transactional, that gives us predictable learning outcomes, and that is based on the transfer of content and the development of competencies and skills that can enhance a person’s efficiency and value within modernity... [Mastery education] feels empowering, strengthens identities, and is often oriented toward affirming and boosting learners’ egos. > [Depth education] is defined as a mode of engagement designed to prompt us to dig deeper and to relate wider, disinvest in harmful desires, activate accountability and responsibility before will (not as an intellectual choice or a transactional calculation), and become open to being taught by the world in unexpected ways. Depth education focuses on complexities and paradoxes and it invites all of us to sit with difficulties; unpack investments; confront resistance; disarm affective land mines; relate beyond meaning, identity, and understanding; rationally explore the limits of rationality; and face humanity within and around us in all its complexity: the good, the bad, the broken, and the messed up. When effectively mobilized, depth education feels disarming, scales down the importance of the ego, and expands possibilities for relationships. > If mastery education can be associated with the filling of a cup, depth education is about transforming the cup into an onion and allowing ourselves to experience the pain and joy of peeling its layers. While contemporary mastery education encourages learners to voice their opinions, aspirations, likes, and dislikes; depth education encourages learners to step back to observe with skepticism one’s own personal narratives, desires, and identifications and disidentifications. > If mastery education can be associated with the image of conquering a peak, depth education is about diving into a freezing ocean in the dark, without an oxygen tank, in order to find out that we are both the water and the plastics and toxins that we (humans) dump into it.