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 [...]
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 is service of Life, not lifestyle. 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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 an abridged form in Getting Smart on 14 June 2023. It was also published on Intrepid Ed News on 5 July 2023. I'm not getting myself all worked up over how generative AI is going to revolutionize the world of education. I'm not spending too much time trying to find [...]
This article was published in IntrepidEd News on 5 May 2023. [T]he only true atom is the universe—that total system of interdependent "thing-events" which can be separated from each other only in name.—Alan Watts Regenerative practice can never be achieved or ticked off a list. Regenerative practice is just that, practice. Regeneration is dynamic and [...]
This article was published in Intrepid Ed News on 1 May 2023. Those who “believe” they have the answers to present urgencies are terribly dangerous.—Donna Haraway When we try to solve problems, when we see ourselves as change-makers, and when we endeavor to save the world, we play the role of a tinkering celestial watchmaker [...]
This article was published in IntrepidEd News on 13 March 2023 under the title "Where do we begin and where do we end?" Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilisation. —Mahatma Gandhi Shortly after the birth of my daughter, I picked up one of those [...]
This article was published in Intrepid Ed News on 25 August 2022. Part 1 Part 2 Sometimes you just need a good ol’ crisis to shake things up, to get things moving. It’s like the story of the frog you put in tepid water and slowly turn up the heat. The frog won’t ever realize [...]
by Charlotte Hankin As I type these words on my laptop, I am sitting in a wooden chair at my dining room table. I am not ergonomically positioned and as a result, I sense a dull ache in my lower back. I hear the gentle whirring of the fan trying to cool the room down. [...]
Our knowledge will take its revenge on us, just as ignorance exacted its revenge during the Middle Ages. —Friedrich Nietzsche In the previous article, I asked “What if schools’ primary purpose was to nurture thriving relationships?” I did so thinking about “21st-century skills,” which are so often pushed by industry and education. I am not [...]
This article was published on Intrepid Ed News on 27 July 2022. Quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote, “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” I think the same can be said about what we look for in our students; it’s all about the questions we ask. When [...]
This article was published on Intrepid Ed News on 14 July 2022. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the previous four chapters, I have tried to bring to light the tension between the emerging infinite world—where the Metaverse may [...]
This article was published in IntrepidEd News on 9 June 2022. There is no distinction at all between the everyday world (samsara) and freedom (nirvana). There is no distinction between freedom and the everyday world. —Nagarjuna Futurephobia is not a word that we come across very frequently considering its potential impact. You’ll find only a [...]
This article was published on Intrepid Ed News on 12 May 2022. I ended the previous chapter with a teaser, one that I promised in this installment to explore: Can we really have learner-centered and competency-based education in our current education system? The thing is, this might be the wrong question to ask because it [...]
This article was published on UNESCO’s IDEAS LAB on 11 March 2022. While the UNESCO report Futures of Education came out with much fanfare and generated much excitement, its most powerful consideration has received surprisingly little attention. It’s not that the authors haven’t put this consideration front and center—on the contrary—yet somehow it has eluded [...]
This article was published in Intrepid Ed News on 23 March 2022. This is the first installment of a longer series, a long conversation. It builds on the idea that there is no one future of education because we are all on our own journeys and this includes schools. With not even one-fourth of the [...]
Coconut Thinking 