It's Pub Day!
Learning as If Life Depended on It: Why we must see the world anew and figure out what follows.
No, not that kind of pub.
It’s publication day. The publishing industry, in the UK at least, likes to chortle away with the double-meaning of the abbreviation. I don’t generally use AI art, but at moments like this, it helps to laugh at it:
Learning as If Life Depended on It: Why We Must See the World Anew and Figure Out What Follows, by Olli-Pekka Heinonen, is officially published by Perspectiva Press today, November 4th 2025, so please order it now. Here is the link to bookshop.org, which helps support local bookstores (which are public goods!) but if you feel like going to a local bookstore and ordering it and then coming back after pub day, say, on Friday, that would be even better in its analogue, slow, old world charm. A book’s main asset these days is, after all, its merciful lack of hyperlinks.
If you live overseas, we now have the same distribution network as Penguin Random House, and there are lots of places to buy it. Stay away from Amazon if you can, but it’s there too, in case the habit-inertia-familiarity vortex is just too strong to resist.
Pub Day was once the day the physical books hit the shops and became available to buy, but it’s a curious phenomenon in the digital age. For starters, review copies are often ready many months beforehand, and authors have started sharing extracts and even doing interviews on social media long before the book is ‘out’. Some publishers even publish the book six months before publication day, so that people are already talking about it by the time it comes out. It’s also a lot of effort to persuade online vendors that the book is coming out on one day rather than another, and they are not always very interested - for them it’s like: Whatever, just give us your data and chill. Then ebooks and audiobooks sometimes come out on different days, and then…well let’s just say it’s not simply a calendar matter.
It’s a ritual, is what it is, and all the more important to mark. Just as we care about our official dates of birth and celebrate our birthdays, books have birth days too, and today is one that Perspectiva has helped with.
*Some but not all of what follows is repeated from our request to pre-order, which gives a fuller overview of the book.*
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Learning as if Life Depended on it is a work of planetary reckoning by the Director General of the International Baccalaureate, Olli-Pekka Heinonen. Informed by his statesmanship and Finnish cultural heritage, Heinonen explains why the root cause of global crises is the failure to perceive the ideas we live and work with. Heinonen offers a four-part journey through our current predicament, the illusions we live by, our untapped potential, and transformative pathways. Education, he argues, must now become a collective act of reorientation. As Olli Pekka Heinonen (or OPH as we’ve been referring to him internally) puts it in a recent interview:
As humankind, we were failing, but we were not learning from the failings.
That’s the essence of why he wrote the book.
Olli-Pekka Heinonen has served as Director General of the International Baccalaureate (IB) since 2021, advancing its mission to develop inquiring, knowledgeable, and caring students. He emphasises the IB’s commitment to critical thinking, intercultural understanding, and holistic, learner-centred education that equips students for meaningful contributions to a more peaceful, sustainable world.
Before joining the IB, Mr Heinonen served as Director General of the Finnish National Agency for Education, State Secretary to the Finnish Prime Minister and as Director of Yle, Finland’s national public broadcaster. Earlier, Mr Heinonen was a prominent figure in Finnish politics, serving as Minister of Education and Science, Minister of Transport and Communication, and as a Member of Parliament.
A graduate of the University of Helsinki with a Master of Laws, Mr Heinonen holds honorary doctorates from the University of Jyväskylä and the University of Turku. He is married and has three children. In his free time, he enjoys sports, cooking, history, and playing the trumpet.
We have more endorsements to share, but I particularly like the statatement of my former PhD supervisor Guy Claxton, which goes on the back of the book.
Civilisation is under threat. Large numbers of people who are thoughtful, ethical and brave are required to protect it. Education ought to be the incubator of such people. Educationists who can see clearly what’s needed, and show schools the way back to their fundamental purpose are in short supply – but Olli-Pekka Heinonen has emerged as the leader of this small but crucial pack. In this wise, lucid and heartfelt book he offers us hope and direction, not just for the regeneration of education, but for the preservation of our planetary home.
– Professor Guy Claxton, author of The Future of Teaching and the Myths That Hold It Back.
The book began as an English translation by Eva Malkki, from the original Finnish text, Eletaan Ihmisiksi - Yhteisollista viisautta etsimassa by Olli-Pekka Heinonen. That translation was adapted and edited in close collaboration with the author, to reshape the structure and expression for a new readership, as you can see in what are hopefully intriguing contents pages:
I see the book as a work of epistemic leadership - it’s about encouraging educators to wholeheartedly reckon with the state of the world and consider what follows for how we encourage each other to try to understand it.
There will be more to say soon, but we are very proud to be publishing it, and for now I just wanted to mark Pub Day. We are very grateful for your support in buying it.
And if you want to read it down the pub, or talk about it there, so much the better.
Will there be an e-book edition (please)?
Not yet in uk.bookshop.org?