This post was influenced by Nate Hagens. You know the feeling. You eat a doughnut and it felt oh so deliciously wonderful in the moment yet within a few short minutes the pleasure is reversed. You feel gross. Your body tells you. You didn't need to analyze anything, you sensed what happened to you when [...]
I like to imagine an instrument which would enable us to break up patterns of social behavior as the physicist breaks up a beam of rays. Looking through this sociological spectroscope we would see spread out under the diffraction grating the rainbow-colored spectrum of all possible human attitudes to life. The whole distressing muddle would become [...]
Thirty-five years after Jomtien, the grammar of international cooperation in education still assumes that progress depends on alignment between states and shared global targets. What passes for cooperation follows a logic of alignment without mutual transformation, one that can no longer hold in a world whose boundaries have dissolved. The idea that states and institutions (transnational [...]
Schools tend to position learning, growth, and reflection as unambiguously good. When learners are encouraged to think more critically, develop themselves, become more conscious of their actions, and adapt to complexity, this is taken as evidence of progress. Schools speak of structural and programmatic cultures that develop young people into global citizens. Systems that promote [...]
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 [...]
Next academic year’s incoming high school class will be the first to graduate on the other side of 2030. This matters because the year carries an unusual symbolic weight, perhaps greater than any other date in lived memory, even 2000. 2030. It is, in one sense, an arbitrary marker, a new decade in the Common [...]
This article came out in What School Could Be on 31 Oct 2026 Student voice doesn’t matter much if no one is listening. Even if someone listens, it doesn’t guarantee that what is voiced will be taken in, digested, or make any difference in what happens in a school. “Giving students voice,” in spite of [...]
Metabolic ontology begins from a simple observation: nothing lives by remaining what it is. Existence persists only through continual transformation, through the conversion of decay into the conditions for further life. Entropy is not disorder but the movement that makes order temporary. Biology calls this metabolism: the exchange of matter, energy, and information that maintains [...]
Lately, as artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes our world, there’s a growing chorus urging us to protect and celebrate what makes us uniquely human. We hear calls to huddle inside some metaphorical fortress, defining ourselves by a laundry list of traits: creativity, emotional connection, love; everything AI supposedly can’t replicate. But in doing so, we risk echoing [...]
Mastery- and competency-based assessment are the same old sorting and ranking system just in sheep’s clothing.Both start from the same ontological delusion: that something can be mastered, that we stand apart from knowledge, that learning is a discrete event that can be demonstrated once and then carried across every context. It’s the fantasy of decontextualization, [...]
We aren’t going to change the system. We can’t. The very idea that we can change the system is what keeps it intact. It feeds the illusion that we stand outside it, looking down like engineers or gods, swapping one system for another. But that separation is false. We are not outside. We are the [...]
There’s a difference between reform and experiments in schools. Reform legitimizes and justifies schools as existing structures. Experiments exploit cracks, creating flows that wash away sediment and make space for new worlds to emerge.Reform means to “take new form,” but only within the logic of old forms. It sees cracks and tries to patch them [...]
What if climate education contributed to the problem of ecological breakdown? What if it just delayed the inevitable? What if it was fool’s gold? This is a call for education that deepens reciprocity, not rebrand extraction. Climate change as a term itself is a euphemism for what promises to be physical and biological devastation. It’s [...]
Pushing “student agency,” “real-world experiences,” and “competencies” will never transform education. It’s all window dressing or delusion. Education will be transformed when we stop believing assessment of learning is the end goal.As long as we are measuring individual outputs, we will remain stuck in the same paradigm. We still consider learning as something we can [...]
What if we stopped talking about neurodiversity and started considering bodymind complexities? This shift might help us avoid superficial labels, honor the agency of relationships, and recognize that it’s not all in our heads.Let’s break this down.Diversity suggests there are many different kinds of people. Of course, that’s true. But let’s not be reductionist. Framing [...]
Regenerative education rejects the old ways of assessing students as individuals, considering skills as ends, and allowing projects to languish on the Google drive. Instead, it invites us to listen deeply to the voices in our community (human and other-than-human) who have engaged with and been affected by each project. Regenerative education calls for new [...]
Published in the International School Network Magazine in January 2025. This is not a call to action. We have enough of those. It is an invitation to slow down and consider, to ask questions and to dialogue. Social Media created the conditions for a post-truth world. AI might create the conditions for a post-trust [...]
Many of us think of sustainability as finding equilibrium. Let’s be carbon neutral. If we take stuff, we need to make sure to replenish materials. Let’s leave the planet in as good condition as we found it. Sustainability often means shooting for zero. The Brundtland Commission’s 1987 report Our Common Future, popularized sustainability as “meeting [...]
This post was published on IntrepidEd News on 26 August 2024. My family and I travel to Paris every other year to visit my mother. We spend a week there, then take the train to the West Midlands in England to visit Charlotte’s parents. These trips are a mix of the familiar and the new: [...]
This article was published on IntrepidEd on 18 May 2024. The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed—William Gibson We might find comfort–even some excitement—when we witness schools unveil and roll out their sustainability programs. We hear about fresh new solar panel installations, commitments to reduce printing by 50%, the deployment of [...]
This article was published in Intrepid Ed News on 16 February 2024. Life is a dance of opposites, each necessary to the other.—David Orr In the late nineteenth century, French writer and scholar Georges Polti wrote that all stories can be distilled down to a limited number (36, to be exact) of dramatic situations. In [...]
This article was published in IntrepidEd News on 6 January 2024. No two persons ever read the same book.—Edmund Wilson My grandfather passed away when I was 11 years old. He was a remarkable man, as I recall, and since I was raised by a single parent, he served as the most important male figure [...]
This article was published in IntrepidEd News on 28 December 2023. All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.—Friedrich Nietzsche I used to teach Global Politics. One of the throughlines of the course was the concept of power. We started the year [...]
This article was posted on IntrepidEd News on 23 March 2023. I sometimes wonder whether reading is the cause of my insomnia. Reading is often what people do to help them fall asleep, but in my case it wakes me up. I can’t remember the last time I slept past 5:15. That feels luxurious. Getting [...]
This article was published in a slightly abridged version on IntrepidEd News on 1 August 2023. No two journeys are ever alike, because no two pupils are ever alike —Daniel Quinn I spent the best two months of my life during the summer of 2019. I’m not suggesting it was the easiest or most relaxing [...]
Coconut Thinking 