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