I work in education not because I believe it has solutions to offer, or because young people need to be job-ready, or because there is a canon of knowledge students must master. I am in education because it is where institutional failure has difficulty hiding.
Education is not separate from the larger system. It is not hermetically contained; it is nested within it. Education is a systemic force that can redirect the circulation of power, but that same circulation exercises pressure to contain education’s potential.
The system is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do: replicate power configurations.
Any attempt to change education requires a co-occurring change in other forces in the system, just as those forces require a change in education. This is the entanglement. Education is one entry point and other practitioners in other spaces have other entry points. We work together.
When schools begin to talk about innovation or reform, it is because they know that what they are doing is not working.
The question is whether this change expands horizons and erodes existing structures, or whether it patches the cracks and enacts self-preservation.
The same question applies to regenerative education.
Is this transformation that forces institutions to give something up, or is it the co-opting of a buzzword to patch the cracks?
When schools speak of regeneration as healing the planet, net-positive impact, or sustainability+, they remain anchored in the same mechanistic, managerial narratives. The language changes but the logic does not.
Regenerative education is not a model or a framework. It is not something that can be bought off the shelf and added to curriculum.
Regenerative education is transformation through learning, witnessed in the evolving quality of reciprocity.
It does not require a eureka moment or sudden enlightenment. It does require responsibility, the recognition of complicity, and the willingness to shed inherited patterns.
It is not an upgrade or a point of arrival.
It is movement.
Movement that requires a threshold, the moment when institutions must decide whether they are willing to let go of inherited assumptions about success, progress, growth, and control, or continue performing them despite knowing better.
Most responses try to soften this moment: new language while principles remain unchanged, new metrics while sorting remains the game, new initiatives that are not so new, and renewed optimism that peters out when we return to normal.
I am interested in what happens when it is not softened.
When regeneration is approached not as something to be implemented, but as a test of what an institution is actually willing to change, including what it must stop doing, stop promising, or stop protecting.
My work sits vertically: with young people in classrooms, inside leadership and pedagogical architecture, and in the uncomfortable space where thinking meets consequence.
I am not interested in performing regeneration. I am interested in whether institutions are willing to cross the threshold, including the transformation that entails, including the losses.
If this terrain matters to you, you will recognize it. If not, you probably won’t.
Coconut Thinking 