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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Coconut Thinking 