What’s Actually Happening Before I Write Anything
A look behind the curtain at the invisible decisions that shape every article
You see the finished piece.
You do not see the hour I spent staring at a blank document wondering whether to write about competency-based education, planetary boundaries, or why most sustainability frameworks quietly assume a level of institutional trust that no longer exists in many communities.
You do not see the notes I abandoned, the angles I started and discarded, or the moment I realized that the article I thought I was writing was actually three separate articles pretending to be one.
What you see is the translation. What I want to show you today is the original mess.
I Write Because I Think It Matters
Let me start with the obvious question: why bother at all?
I am not writing because I have run out of things to do. I am writing because I believe the challenges facing education, sustainability, and the future genuinely matter — and because I think the distance between important ideas and the people who could use them is one of the more quietly serious problems of our time.
Part of why this feels urgent to me: the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals — 17 interconnected targets covering everything from climate action to quality education to reduced inequality, with a 2030 deadline the world set for itself — are significantly behind where they need to be. That gap between commitment and delivery is not abstract to me. It is the reason I write with some frequency and some urgency.
That distance is what I am trying to close.
The role I have gradually taken on — or perhaps accepted — is that of a translator. Not an expert handing down conclusions. Not a journalist chasing the news cycle. Something closer to a person who has spent considerable time in one room, learned the language spoken there, and now wants to carry some of that language into other rooms where it might actually do something.
The problem is that translation is genuinely hard.
The Complexity Problem
Sustainability is not a topic. It is a neighborhood of topics, and every street connects to every other street.
Climate connects to agriculture connects to migration connects to governance connects to education connects to equity connects to economics connects to health. Write about one and you are implicitly writing about all of them. Leave out the connections and the article feels thin. Include them and it becomes a graduate seminar.
Education for Sustainable Development — ESD, in the field’s shorthand — makes this worse, not better. Most people who encounter the phrase assume it means teaching children to recycle or showing students a documentary about coral reefs. The actual field is far broader: it includes helping students map how local decisions connect to global systems, build the capacity to imagine genuinely different futures, and develop the values and skills to participate in shaping them. It is part curriculum, part pedagogy, part philosophy. It is vast. It is contested. It is genuinely important.
And the deeper my understanding becomes, the harder it sometimes is to write a clean 1,200-word piece about any of it.
This is the paradox of expertise: it does not make things simpler. It reveals how many asterisks belong next to every confident statement. The challenge is not ignorance. The challenge is compression — deciding what to include, what to leave out, and whether what remains is still true.
The Audience Problem
Before I write a single sentence, I face a question I cannot fully answer: who is this for?
Teachers want to know what to do on Monday. Researchers want conceptual precision. Sustainability professionals want evidence and application. General readers want relevance and a reason to keep reading. Policymakers, when they read at all, want something they can use in a meeting.
These are not the same people. They are not reading for the same reasons. They do not share the same vocabulary, the same context, or the same tolerance for abstraction.
Every article I write implicitly chooses some of these readers over others. There is no universal entry point. There is no sentence that simultaneously satisfies the teacher looking for a lesson plan and the researcher tracking shifts in SDG implementation frameworks.
When I am stuck between audiences, my working heuristic is to ask: who has the least access to this idea and the most to gain from it? That question usually points me toward the teacher or the curious general reader rather than the specialist — not because specialists don’t matter, but because they already have access to the ideas through other channels.
This is not a complaint. It is a constraint I have learned to work within rather than around. Choosing an audience is not the same as excluding everyone else. It means deciding whose questions get centered — and being honest with myself that this is always a choice.
The Values Question
I have values. They shape what I write about, how I frame it, and what I think is at stake.
I should be transparent about what that means in practice. I align with liberal and left-leaning policy positions. I am not a neutral observer of sustainability debates — I am an advocate and an activist who believes the SDGs represent a genuine moral commitment that has been significantly underdelivered. Globally, progress on poverty, biodiversity, and climate targets has fallen well short of what was promised in 2015.
I am also a white, straight, college-educated man writing primarily from within Western educational frameworks — which means I carry both access and blind spots that are worth naming. My ethical orientation is humanist and atheist: I ground my concern for sustainability not in religious tradition but in a commitment to human dignity, intergenerational responsibility, and the intrinsic value of the living world. I hold a PhD in education, and I am currently working as an independent scholar — unaffiliated with any institution — which means I have no employer shaping what I am allowed to say or incentivizing particular conclusions. That is a kind of freedom I try not to waste.
I believe education is more than preparation for the labor market — it is one of the primary mechanisms through which societies decide what kind of future they are willing to imagine and work toward. I believe urgency is real. I believe systems change is slow. And I believe these two facts have to coexist in the same mind without one canceling out the other.
How explicitly should those convictions appear on the page?
This is a question I return to constantly. Strong convictions attract some readers and alienate others. Writing that feels like advocacy can close the door on people who might otherwise have walked through it. But writing that performs neutrality it doesn’t actually feel can become a kind of dishonesty — a way of hiding behind balance to avoid saying what you actually think.
I have not fully resolved this. My working position is to be clear about what I believe while remaining genuinely curious about where I might be wrong — and to communicate urgency without manufacturing despair. In practice, that means I try to show my reasoning rather than just my conclusions, so readers can follow the thinking and push back on it if they want to.
What Graduate School Did and Did Not Teach Me
My academic training taught me to write for committees, peer reviewers, and dissertation advisors. It taught me rigor, citation, hedging, and the protective coloration of passive voice.
It did not teach me to write for people who have no professional obligation to keep reading.
Public writing operates on entirely different physics. Readers are not captive audiences. They are not grading you. They owe you nothing. Every paragraph has to justify its own existence. Clarity is not a stylistic preference — it is the basic condition under which communication can occur.
Learning to write publicly has meant unlearning a significant amount of what graduate school rewarded. Shorter sentences. Earlier payoffs. Less scaffolding before the point. More willingness to say what I actually mean in the first paragraph rather than building to it across several pages of literature review.
It has also meant accepting that writing is part of thinking, not merely reporting conclusions I have already reached. Some of my clearest ideas emerged during the writing rather than before it. Some articles I thought were finished turned out to be first drafts of something I did not yet understand.
Why Translation Matters to Me Personally
I came to Education for Sustainable Development largely on my own. My doctoral committee did not specialize in ESD or the Sustainable Development Goals. The field was not a road I was walked down — it was terrain I navigated by reading widely, following citations, and occasionally feeling completely lost.
I remember what it felt like to encounter important ideas without a guide. To sense that something mattered without knowing how the pieces fit together. To wish that someone had laid out a clearer map earlier.
That experience is the engine behind what I do now. I want to be the writer I would have found useful when I was trying to understand these ideas for the first time. Not a simplifier. Not someone who strips away the difficulty to make it more palatable. A translator — someone who has done enough work with the material to know where the entry points are and can help others find them.
The Question Behind Every Article
Every piece I write is ultimately an attempt to navigate the same recurring tension: How do you communicate complexity and urgency to people with varying levels of context, limited time, and no particular obligation to care?
There is no formula. There is only the recurring exercise of asking: What does this reader actually need? What is the minimum context required for this idea to land? What am I assuming they already know that they might not? What am I leaving out because it complicates my argument, and should I be leaving it out?
And underneath all of that: Is this worth their time?
That question keeps me honest in a way that nothing else does. Because the honest answer is sometimes no — not yet, not this version, not this framing. And the only useful response to that answer is to revise.
Why I Keep Writing
The 2030 deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals is not a technicality. It is a marker of how seriously — or not seriously — the world has addressed commitments it made to itself.
Educational transformation is slow. Systems change is slow. Public understanding of why any of this matters is slow.
Writing is not going to accelerate that meaningfully on its own. I hold no illusions about the reach of a Substack essay relative to the scale of the problems I write about.
But ideas become more useful when they circulate. Understanding compounds when it is shared. And the alternative — keeping the translation work inside specialist communities where it can be precise but inaccessible — does not seem better.
I am doing this work without institutional affiliation at the moment — which clarifies the motivation considerably. Nobody is requiring this. There is no department expecting output, no grant funding the hours, no committee waiting on results. I write because I think it matters. That turns out to be enough.
So I keep writing. Not because I have everything figured out, and not from a position of neutrality. But because I believe these conversations are too important to leave only to the people who are already having them — and because I would rather be imperfectly present in the work than perfectly absent from it.
If any of this resonated — or if you think I am getting something wrong — I would genuinely like to hear from you in the comments. And if there is a topic you would like me to dig into — something that has been sitting with you, something you cannot quite find good writing on — please reach out. That kind of signal genuinely shapes what I write next.
If you are finding value here, subscribing — even at the free level — helps this work reach more people. So does liking, commenting, and reposting. In a crowded information environment, those small actions matter more than most people realize. I notice every one of them, and I am sincerely grateful for each.
Thank you for reading. It means more than I can easily say.
I am an independent scholar with a PhD in education, writing about sustainability, Education for Sustainable Development, and the future of learning. I am available for research collaboration, consulting, and teaching opportunities — linkedin.com/in/kylecbartlett.
Kyle I would like to understand better the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and how those goals referenced here and in your previously written posts can be tied back to education. I know you have touched on several goals previously but maybe a one by one goal disection.
Kyle - this is an incredibly thoughtful piece (a manifesto in the best possible way.) You are finding your way and you will find your audience. Onward!