This chapter summarizes the evidence provided in the previous chapters that Anglo-European developmental psychology and education have been limited by a pervasive bias toward individualism. This is despite the focus of international educational assessment bodies on collaborative skills as being necessary for all students. The result of this has been a lack of robust findings, especially regarding social development, and an education system that is largely ineffective for students who are not from Anglo-European backgrounds. Addressing these related issues requires a shift in educational practice and policy toward collective achievement and collaborative forms of pedagogy. The chapter recommends the first steps toward moving education away from an individualistic paradigm. These include changing the unit of analysis from the individual to the interaction, creating group-level outcome variables, and restructuring learning environments. Multiple levels of schooling – the curriculum, instructional designs, the structure of schools, policy, assessment, and teacher training – are all discussed in terms of how they would need to shift to support collaborative competence as a goal for all children.

Chapter 6 examines the evolution of associational freedoms from the time of de Tocqueville through the modern era. It begins by discussing the myriad ways in which even nonpolitical associations, organized around a vast variety of topics and causes, helped shape our democracy from the nineteenth through much of the twentieth centuries. Such groups helped politically marginalized individuals such as women and minorities to develop the organizational and leadership skills needed to participate in political life. They also were vehicles that, given a push, could evolve to pursue political objectives. And importantly, such associations permitted citizens possessing a diversity of social and political views to mingle and exchange thoughts. Recently, however, as Robert Putnam has extensively shown, civil society in the United States has collapsed. Instead of participating in broad associations, people are increasingly siloed into narrow groups with shared political and social values, a process that the Internet and social media have vastly exacerbated. The chapter concludes by exploring how certain surviving associations – notably book clubs and beer groups – might present a pattern for how we might bring about an associational revival, and how the Internet might become a tool rather than a barrier in that quest.