Ideas don’t come from nowhere, ex nihilo. They don’t pop out of the sky. This is a Platonic vision of the ideal, that the idea sits whole, somewhere outside us, waiting to be apprehended. The reality is that ideas come from a confluence of experiences. Other ideas that morph and transform into some-thing, not a fixed-thing, a momentary-thing that continues to morph and transform itself and others. How we bring things together. How we have experiences at different times. How we have encounters with other people, other things, in the moment. Reflections. Things that fester. Things that are nourished. Things that percolate in our minds.
Ideas are a confluence of all these phenomena. There is no idealized idea outside of us. They are evolving, non-tangible notions that live and exist and continue to be transformed as they encounter other things.
And yet, schools see ideas as living on their own, and most often don’t even give them any credence. They don’t think about ideas, because schools assess kids based on what they do with others’ ideas. Look at Bloom’s taxonomy: the biggest verbs are analyze, evaluate, justify, synthesize, critique, argue, defend, judge, create. These are real cognitive operations and they matter, but they are not the whole of thinking, and as an assessment apparatus, it stops there.
It stops at the operation. It does not delve into the transformation, the metabolic process. It does not value the life that the idea now breathes. It does not ask what festered, what was nourished, what percolated. The ideas have already arrived from elsewhere, and the student’s job is to manipulate them well enough to be marked. At most, you’ll be asked for a list of references, sources, the genealogy of your work. This honors accumulation, not regeneration. The very structure of the apparatus hierarchizes and devalues your ideas because they stand in comparison to others’. When you respond to a prompt, your response is contained, compared, comprised of others. Your ideas stop. They may not come from nowhere – – you have to prove what you know – – but they don’t go anywhere either.
Your ideas are DOA. Dead on assessment.
Regenerative education is not about having ideas die at the point of assessment. It is about learning&doing that takes on a life afterwards. About projects, about ideas that take on new life and go beyond us. Rather than being assessed at the point of marking, rubric in hand, it is about how ideas live on in the world. About other people being moved by those ideas, living with them, taking (on) those ideas, those projects, as their own to be shared.
Take Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream. You don’t need an assessment rubric to know that was an amazing speech. It still sends shivers down your spine, and it has had a tremendous impact: motivating people, creating political movements, getting people to think differently, getting people to rise up and disobey unjust structures. Regenerative education is about how we take our ideas and give them life. They are springboards to other things. The assessment piece isn’t in the work in-itself, for-itself; it is in how the work has changed, and can change, other people’s lives. A beginning, not an end. A birth, not a death.
Even the word regeneration tells us where this comes from. It is about the ripples that are created, the fact that the work exists well after the work itself.
Ultimately, the quality is based on reciprocity. That gifting, that receiving. I put work out there, projects out there, learning&doing out there. I gift it, not in a transactional way, but through deepening reciprocity. Beware the word relationship: a master and a slave have a relationship. The quality of reciprocity is what matters. The question is whether the work creates the conditions conducive to life. The totalitarian dictator from the 1930s also moved audiences. There is a relationship there with other beings, but the quality of reciprocity isn’t there: it does not create the conditions conducive to life.
So the moving has to be layered with reciprocity. Regenerative education is about what happens afterwards. That could be ten, twenty, four hundred years later. It happens in second, third, fourth order ripples, things we don’t even know about. The traditions, the sediments, the vibrations of someone’s work well beyond the work itself. This is what distinguishes it from traditional education, which is all about the point of assessment, and then it goes nowhere.
So how do we know? We collect the voices of the community, human and other-than-human. We gather the data: qualitative testimonials, how people were moved, how the work continues to live on years later, the momentum it gained, the force of the movement it set in motion. That is the assessment. Not at the point of marking, but in the listening that comes years, decades, generations after.
Consider a couple of examples from Green School, specifically the Greenstone (our two-year capstone, itself a class) which brings together craft, commitment, and community. This isn’t a passion project, it is the idea that we take something important to us, which might be our passion, and we work towards a project that contributes to community. It contributes in order to allow those ripples to go out, so the change happens not through the work alone, but through how it resonates with other people.
It also includes craft. There is an element of having to solidify, to make more robust, the work, because we have to know what we are talking about. The ripples will only gain force and momentum if we have a certain amount of craft in them. A historian’s craft, a cobbler’s craft. You have the skills. You have the knowledge. You have the expertise. But you also put your heart and your soul into it. That is the difference between craft and rigor. And commitment matters because there are ups and downs, which require resilience, perseverance, and the willingness to keep showing up. It isn’t about wanting to please ourselves. It is about being committed to the work.
So: craft, commitment, and community. Some examples.
One student, whose sister was injured in a surf accident, decided for his Greenstone to make surf helmets out of recycled and recyclable materials. When I grew up, wearing a bike helmet just never happened, and now it is everywhere. Same with skiing. He wants to do nothing less than to change the world of surf so that everyone wears the helmet, because there are over a million surfing injuries to the head each year. So the question becomes: how might we design a surf helmet? That involves taking classes in industrial design, working with financiers, backers, and manufacturing, testing it out, starting his own business. Not to make profit, but as a B Corp, to change the surf industry, and to make sure we are kind to mother earth.
How do you assess the learning there? That project only takes on life when people, five, ten years down the road, all wear surf helmets. That is why it is regenerative. The Greenstone was the launch pad. The quality is thought about way after. We have to get a sense of whether there is a possibility for this to have legs. This is a beautiful project that could save countless lives, and it deserves more than a rubric where we check off whether it has all the design patterns. This comes from the heart, the mind, and the body, and from commitment to other people, reciprocity, and trying to do good.
Another project: a girl wanted to fight a local bottling company that produces single-serve plastic bottles. She set up a recharge well, putting water into the ground so that people can extract it, filtrate it, and drink. She went to a local area and worked with local people to create rain capture structures so they could drink rainwater. When she realised that the kids there didn’t understand that plastics weren’t biodegradable – – they thought if you put them in the ground, they would biodegrade in three days – – she worked with the local community to help them understand how to dispose of plastic waste in a way that makes sense. All of this done in a way that wasn’t let me come teach you, but where they learned from one another. She says to this day that she is grateful to them, because she learned as much from them as, hopefully, they learned from her.
How do we assess a project like this if the final piece is a process journal? What really matters is that in five, ten, fifteen years, people have clean drinking water. No process journal will ever tell that story.
Another: a girl who is an artist and loves the ocean is creating a large water structure that will go under the water, on which she will plant coral reefs to restore them. Here it is regenerative not just because the structure might hold coral reefs and look beautiful, but because it is a piece of art that might inspire others, make people look and care, not only for the beauty of the artistic structure, but for the beauty of the coral reefs. But here is the best part. As part of her Greenstone, she is going to train local divers and get them their PADI license, so they can continue to care for the coral reefs after she is gone. After she leaves Bali, other people will come and commit and help. The project lives well beyond her. It is a springboard for this to live and to affect the entire community, human and other-than-human, local as well as planetary.
And another: a student looking at labour invisibility in Bali, at how many people support expats and are unfortunately not seen, disregarded. How might we shift people’s thinking in terms of how we relate to local folks, and stop being blind to their presence? How might we foster and develop relationships? We don’t all have to be friends, and we can’t assume that local people want to be approached. But there is the question of how we might stop labour invisibility. Raising awareness is difficult, and it isn’t necessarily cause and effect. You can’t say I used to not see my helper, but now I do, and have it stop there. That is a very linear way of looking at things. It is more a question of how this opens our minds to this and to other things, and continues to transform us.
And this is where, ultimately, if you look at all these projects, the difference with Bloom’s taxonomy of synthesis comes into play.
It is not synthesis, it is metabolism. Transformation that fundamentally transforms who we are, and keeps going because it transforms others and nourishes the confluence. It keeps moving in ways that can’t be known, that can’t be expected or predicted. Transformed and transforming at the same time.
Coconut Thinking 