Education for Human Flourishing - A Conversation with Michael Stevenson

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

We may have been talking education for labor markets for 80 years, but actually, was that the blip? The real continuity is with a profound interest in what it takes for a human being to reach their fullest potential through concepts of flourishing.

Hi everyone, my name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. Just over a month ago, on the 7th of November, the OECD published a very significant statement of intent on education for human flourishing. It's a conceptual framework that they say is helping to shape the international conversation about the future of education, national education policymaking, as well as the development of OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA. And it's the product of a significant collaboration since 2018 among countries in the High Performing Systems for Tomorrow initiative. I was very keen to explore this in more detail with the lead author and convener of this work, Michael Stevenson. So I'm really happy this week to be able to bring you this episode where Michael and I talk through the development and structure of the framework itself and explore some of the possibilities and pushbacks. Prior to founding and leading this important OECD initiative, Michael has led education at large global organizations such as the BBC, GE and Cisco Systems, as well as directing major research projects, for example, on learning ecosystems in Latin America, Africa, and India with the Learning Planet Institute in Paris. Michael has also led the creation of a talent and innovation ecosystem in his hometown of Doncaster in the UK. You can find more links to Michael's broader work around human flourishing in the show notes, as well as links to the OECD conceptual framework paper.

Amazing. Thank you, Michael. I've been very excited to read the new technical paper, the Education for Human Flourishing conceptual work that you've been leading with OECD has been published recently, but I know it's a, it's the product of a lot of discussion and amazing work that's been going on for quite a number of years. So no, it's absolute pleasure to be able to have this conversation with you today. Thanks for joining me.

Pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Fantastic. So, I mean, maybe then that's a good place to start, just giving people some context about where has this come from in terms of the work? Because I mean, there's a lot in the conceptual framework, but clearly it's a product of a lot of collaborative work globally, I think. So yeah, perhaps you could just lead people into where has this come from? And also I'd be curious to hear why is it that you personally care about it? You know, obviously you've been a key player in this work with many others, I'm sure, as you'll describe. But yeah, I'm interested in where's your heart in all of this work as well.

Thank you. Well, I think it goes back about 6 years now, 2019 or so. And some of the countries that do so well in PISA were asking themselves, where next? And this was Singapore, Estonia, Finland, British Columbia in Canada, and latterly, though not at the very start, the UK, Australia, and Germany with the IB in the wings. And they were saying, you know, here we are, we continue to assess our 15-year-olds every 3 or 4 years in math, science, and reading, and they all do very well, and we are high in the international league tables. But is that it? And it led to a conversation about the real purposes of education. Could those jurisdictions working with the OECD and talking amongst themselves develop a new perspective on the purposes of education? And might that indeed, over time, be an influence on PISA itself and begin to evolve the survey? So that became a series of policy dialogues. The most senior civil servants in those jurisdictions. It might be a permanent secretary, might be a secretary general, sitting down around a table with the OECD and talking that through. And little by little, we saw some of the things we didn't like about the purposes of education today. We can go on to talk about that if you want to, Tim Logan. And we began to evolve system principles for the future, and it took us to something we now call the Education for Human Flourishing Framework, which, as you said, was actually published very recently indeed. So that's the origin of it. A really important recognition that things have changed since the sort of education systems that were put in place principally in the second half of the last century, and some things have gone wrong, and it was time to scroll back and think from scratch about education purposes. And that appealed to me since you kindly asked why I'm involved. And, you know, I'd always had an interest going back to earlier days in broadcasting in some of the deeper values that drive cultural, societal, political life. And in coming to education over the last 20 years or so, I've really looked for ways to hold that conversation, or at least to help orchestrate that conversation. And this was a moment for me to seize that opportunity. And it's been a fabulous experience and I feel very privileged to have been having it.

Yeah. No, amazing. And I mean, it would be interesting actually just to dig in a little bit to where was the dissatisfaction coming from? Because I mean, it's an interesting group of constituents you're talking about there. And I think the group was called the High Performing Systems. And actually there's an interesting irony there because they're clearly doing very well, but they were seeing very well on some metrics, let's say. But I mean, you alluded there to what was it that they were seeing that where they were dissatisfied, what was not working for them around the purposes and the way that they were by many of the standard metrics doing incredibly well on?

I think they were driven firstly by what they were seeing and secondly by a sense of responsibility. They were seeing, I suppose, in their own schools, Young people who were excelling by traditional metrics, knocking the foundational literacies out of the park. Did that make them necessarily innovative, collaborative, courageous, resilient? Did it mean that they were going to lead those countries forward over the next 50 years, come what may, in the face of all the challenges we know about? No. And I think more and more we're all seeing the stories of the teenagers who become 20-somethings with top jobs after top universities, but aren't coping in their 30s with all that life brings. So the assumption is that experience they had in school and beyond, though it pushed them and called them the best of the best, nevertheless left them short of what they really needed to thrive and flourish. So that was what they were seeing. Responsibility, I think it's sometimes the countries, the leaders who've done best in the old world who can see that actually things are changing. And the task is to show others that there might be a new world to be considered and that people are prepared to take a risk on inventing the new, even if they don't go on to lead. So I think there was something of that, and that was very striking and very impressive.

Yeah. No, it's interesting. And you've used the word new a couple of times, and actually our friend Aristotle kind of makes an early appearance in the conceptual framework. So actually a lot of these ideas are not actually very new.

Yeah. Well, we never had big budgets, so it's important to find specialist experts who didn't require payment. But it's really important, the point you make, there is just as much continuity as change in this framework. If you are dealing with something as contested as education, where the more progressive are battling it out as they see it with the more conservative, small c, it's quite important to go back in time and to root yourself in older values, older ways of seeing, And you know, Aristotle's incredibly good at playing that role, but at the same time, he is a Western thinker and it was pretty important to think about the extent there was continuity between that Western perspective going back 3,000 years and other perspectives, indigenous, Confucius, Buddhism. We wanted to think quite hard about a broader base of philosophy and thought. And that of course helped us emphasize something that Aristotle may have thought, but he didn't always say, which is that flourishing is not just for the individual. It's not just you, it's not just me, but it's the flourishing of others, families, communities, and indeed the planet.

Yeah.

With all of its species. Right. And indeed lives not yet lived. So, um, that I think is how I would think about Aristotle's unique free contribution to our world.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean, I'd love to pick up actually on, on a couple of those maybe tensions between the individual and the collective and the universal and the pluralist ideas. I think those are really critically important. So maybe we'll come back to those, but could you perhaps just give a, a kind of pithy content definition of what is it we are talking about? When you, when you say the phrase education for human flourishing, just to orient people before we then go a bit deeper into the framework, what is it are we actually talking about there?

Well, policymakers since 1945 and beyond have rarely said, but usually thought, it was education for labor markets, equipping people to find that place in the economy. Increasingly the knowledge economy, where they could make their contribution to their lives, but centrally to GDP. When we talk about education for human flourishing, we are subsuming that idea. I'm not sure we're abandoning it yet, but we are certainly subsuming it into a bigger concept of flourishing. Flourishing as happiness, as meaning in your life, relationships, accomplishment and accomplishment beyond exam certificates. What do you think accomplishment is for you? And therefore education for human flourishing is about the process of development that we can go through, supported by others, that equips us for flourishing defined in those ways. And how would you know? Well, the hardcore say, the flourishing hardcore say, you would know at the end.

That's a while to wait, hopefully.

Right at the end. It's a while to wait, hopefully. And then you could judge and objectively judge by agreed criteria whether you were happy, you did find meaning, you did find relationships, you did accomplish. So that's the core concept, reshaping the learning experience for people so that they can lead a flourishing life. In all of those ways, which builds upon much that we value and recognize in today's education systems, but is not limited to that. We've done well with the foundational literacies, but let's now build on those foundations.

Yeah. Fantastic. No, and I mean, as you would, I'm sure, be very prepared for and would welcome that clearly not everybody's gonna just jump on board with this new idea and you know, there have been some interesting, I've just been noticing some interesting gentle pushbacks, let's say, to this idea. And I just, if we can, before going into some of the competencies, I'd love to just raise those with you because I think that, I think it's really important to really interrogate it because I think there's a lot of power in the framework and the idea, but I think it's also worth acknowledging, you know, some of those important criticisms, let's say. So for example, one of them being that this is, there's an interesting phrase I saw on social media that flourishing is the latest form of gaslighting. Education is known for its jargon and its kind of, its cycles of new phrases that come through in the zeitgeist. And then, you know, there's a set of policy initiatives that attach to them and teachers are all in different, obviously different jurisdictions, but that is a pattern that we see in educational change. How would you respond to that one firstly in the sense that, this isn't just the latest form of new educational jargon?

Well, I think that if you go back as far as these countries have gone, you know, 2,500 years to the deepest sources of educational thought and wisdom, you've got some claim to be looking after the charge of faddism. It's not to say that an interest in Aristotle in 2025 hasn't gone out the window by 2028. But I think if it did, it would be saying more about us than about Aristotle. Right. So I think there's a really deep investment and not just in the Greeks or, you know, Confucius or Buddhism, it's a deep investment in the way that societies have thought about the development of human beings over thousands of years. And if anything, the boldness is in saying we may have been talking maths, science, and reading for 30 years. We may have been talking education for labor markets for 80 years, but actually, was that the blip? The real continuity is with a profound interest in what it takes for a human being to reach their fullest potential through concepts of flourishing.

Yeah. Oh, I love that because actually there's a lot of alignment with what we've been exploring on the podcast for the last 5 years in exactly that, that this, the wide boundary version of what education actually is in terms of communities raising young people to be full, you know, to step into their fullest humanity and relationality. I mean, that's education, right? Or to me, that's education. We've got trapped sometimes in this formal schooling version of what, and some people like to call industrial schooling version of what education is in this very narrow boundary way. And actually, I think what I heard you speaking to there is just opening up that conversation back into the kind of, let's say, pre-modern or very ancient actually idea of raising young people in community, let's say.

Yes, that's exactly right. This is, this is a very big set of ideas which sees education in some ways as the very best engine, if I can use that technocratic word, we could possibly have to drive the kind of society, global society and planetary survival that we're all desperately striving for. Yeah. You've got to reopen the conversation about what education is and make it more than an incremental process via higher scores in maths, science, and reading in order to get more kids into universities and through into the knowledge economy. Yeah. Even if the price of that is an awful lot more kids who fall by the wayside because they weren't good at cognitive exams and find themselves, well, anything but flourishing.

Yeah. No, no, 100%. Thank you. And then the second one I think is also even in the title of the conceptual framework is this idea of human flourishing. This is the second criticism that people have been raising is that there's a level of kind of humanism or human exceptionalism in this thing. And actually part of some of the changes that we're seeking is acknowledging the deep embeddedness of our species in the web of life, in the relationality of nature and the planet and beyond. I mean, clearly you've made a strategic choice to call it Education for Human Flourishing, and other people are using language of human and planetary flourishing. How do you hold those questions?

Well, in thinking about flourishing, I think we've got the broadest concept, which is definitely planetary, definitely about other species. This is not some sort of introverted save Homo sapiens project. On the other hand, what's the best title? A few years ago when we first began to talk, you know, not as widely as we are now, but first began to talk about human flourishing, there was quite a lot of pushback from people who thought it ought to be human and planetary. Though they clearly don't work for newspapers because those words are not going to go into a headline. Education for human and planetary flourishing. You'd need the whole page. Nowadays, I hear much less concern about the feared exclusivity of the word human. And a lot of people are thinking, actually, given what's going on in some places in the world, it'd be quite good to be talking about humans as opposed to AI or arguably city institutions. So I think the important thing is that the word is resonating in many, many places. It really is. But to be able to emphasize that our concept of the world is absolutely every dimension that humans can influence and certainly the lives and the flourishing of everybody and everything that exists on this planet and beyond.

Yeah, interesting. And I mean, it makes me think of, I've had Helen Street on the podcast previously with, and she does this amazing work on what she calls contextual wellbeing. And there was resonances in the, and you talk about positive psychology and, and wellbeing, subjective wellbeing in the paper and the PERMA framework. I don't know if, if people aren't familiar with it, but actually many of the things you're talking about, meaning accomplishment, relationships, positive emotions, it's all there in the subjective wellbeing frame. But what Helen does is, is say, well, that's all very well, but how can you flourish or be well in a context that is not well, in a context that is not thriving? And so, giving some acknowledgement to the interrelationality of humans in context, I think has to be part of the conversation. Obviously that's in a wellbeing language, but here we're talking in a flourishing, um, set of concepts, which I think is, is, as you say, is much broader, but has the same resonance of you can't flourish if the people and things and environment and nature around you that you are also a part of are not also flourishing.

That's true. But who do we have to educate but ourselves? Our human, right? The entities in the classroom, if we're gonna stick with classrooms, are, are humans. The vital thing is that those humans conceive of a much, as you say, broader flourishing environment that they then set out to shape and nurture. Right. That's the critical thing.

Absolutely. But I would say there is also a humility there though, of, in the etymology of the word human, let's say maybe, but there is a humility there that is that we can learn with and from nature and not be led down this path that us humans are going to figure it all out. As long as we can be smart enough and clever enough and have enough technocratic solutions, then we'll be okay. So there's underlying it, I think is Is an important humility there that is critically important to this whole conversation, I feel personally.

Yes, there is. You have to sort of take your chances on the title and Education for Human Flourishing is that title for this particular dimension of the work. There are many others in the field, but you do need then, as you say, to go on and give the context. And convey this idea of humans in service of other species and the planet as a whole, and learning through processes of education to exercise that service just as generously and as humbly as they can.

Yeah. And I mean, if I may just jump to it, there is, there's an interesting question that came up for me reading this about universalism and pluralism, because in a way what you're speaking to there is is this a framework that actually universally applies? Because for me, the evocation of the word flourishing is a diverse ecosystem, a diverse ecology of living things. A machine, let's say machines don't flourish, right? Ecologies flourish, living things flourish. And I wonder how you hold that idea of pluralism in there. Maybe it's whether it's ethical, moral pluralism or purpose pluralism you talk about in the paper as well. Just that idea that different communities, different histories, different cultures will have different perspectives on the world and that all that together may lead to flourishing. But yeah, there's something there around how this is held as a universal framing and how much it allows in pluralism into it.

In some ways, it's a remarkable thing that any organisation could put forward a framing for the future of education. The OECD has taken on that role over the last 30 years or so, and PISA has tightened the grip. Arguably, no organisation has such a responsibility as the OECD to think the next set of thoughts with its leading countries. And that, I think, is what in part is going on here. But then there is a judgment about the balance between framework and detail. And what we've tried to do with this framework is to develop a bold set of inspiring and authentic ideas, which could then be moved forward, shaped, shifted according to setting and culture. Mm-hmm. And not just in OECD countries. Or even in the 80 countries who do PISA. You know, one of the most interesting questions is how younger countries, they might be in Africa or in South Asia, they might be in Latin America, would take on these values and principles and orientations and make them real for their traditions and the challenges of their young people. Well, it'll be for others to judge whether that balance has been correctly struck. But that's certainly the intent. But unless you get out there and say, the way it was, it may be okay to think again, and here's a version of what the way it might be could look like. Unless you make that move, I think, you know, you might not get the change that's clearly needed. The OECD has taken on a responsibility to encourage some of its most thoughtful contributing jurisdictions, the OECD has made that leap.

Yeah.

And I think it's been right to do so. It will now be for others, you know, it'll be for countries themselves. Indeed, it'll be for the PISA Governing Board, whose governance lies in the hands of those countries that take PISA, to decide exactly how they want to move forward and the extent to which they move forward. But the move has been made.

Yeah, no, I think that's really, I really appreciate that. And actually, you know, in full transparency, my pushback to some of the people that I noticed were doing some of the criticizing was we could get trapped in some splitting of hairs around language and some of these questions, but actually broadly we need to move radically. Our young people are telling us we need to move significantly, and if we get caught up in partisan debates about specifics. I mean, clearly there are some fundamental important issues, but I think if we get caught up in some of those more particular debates about detail in theory rather than in practice, then I think we are really missing a trick because we are not moving, as you say, to bring some significant change that our young people, I think, are really asking for.

Exactly. Exactly.

Amazing. So, I mean, just for listeners, just maybe we could get into a little bit of detail. I know we haven't got a lot of time, but maybe just to focus in on one, and obviously I'll put in the link for the conceptual framework in the show notes, but maybe one piece is the 5 competencies, because that sits in an architecture that you've, you know, clearly a lot of thinking has gone into that around foundational literacies and then the flourishing outcomes that you've talked about. But this middle layer of the 5 competencies I think is really interesting, and I particularly appreciate the language in which that's been couched. So yeah, perhaps could you just give a brief overview of what those 5 competencies are?

The lead competency we call acting in the world, learning to find your intent, your purpose, to shape your activities to support that purpose and intent. To be someone who acts in the world, you might need to draw on two other competencies, which I think are slightly closer to home in today's education world. One, adaptive problem solving, that ability to look at a novel, maybe a unique problem, and to draw on every problem you ever solved in order to solve this one. You might need technology to, to solve that problem, AI, AI not only shapes the world for which we need to educate people, but also AI can help us as we exercise our competencies. And you would probably, as an adaptive problem solver, draw on your science, your mathematics, your critical thinking. That's one thing that would support you to act in the world. The other thing that would support you is ethical competency. Estonia took the lead in developing this thinking for the OECD here, and it's recognizing the ethical nature of a problem, thinking about it, reaching a decision and acting on it. But it's centrally about weighing your needs and interests with the needs and interests of others. And then to go back to acting in the world, it is one of three meaning-making competencies as we see it. The other two, one, Understanding the world, the other appreciating the world. Understanding the world, we see, is a lot to do with recognizing and reconciling different worldviews. Lena Anderson has contributed a lot to this thinking, but, you know, in today's classroom, certainly in British Columbia or Australia, which have worked with us, you might find four views all at once. A modern view, certainly, but also an indigenous perspective, maybe a pre-modern perspective, probably a post-modern perspective. How do we enable young people to recognize and respect and reconcile all of those and perhaps draw on all of those as they think about particular issues? Appreciating the world is really centrally about beauty. It doesn't just have to be a remarkable painting from 500 years ago. It might be a sunset as you walk home after rain, or it might be looking at a crystal through a microscope. But it's about recognizing that beauty and asking yourself, might I be framing me and the world in a different way in the light of that remarkable impact? For some, appreciating the world may move out from beauty into something closer to a spiritual perspective. And, and that It would be natural, though not what the high-performing systems have written about. So there you have 5 competencies, all quite complex, all consisting of knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes. And importantly, as you said in your question, all of them, one, enabling you to flourish in those 4 dimensions— happiness, meaning, relationships, and accomplishment— but all grounded in a more traditional curriculum experience. You know, yes, the foundational literacies. You're not gonna be an adaptive problem solver unless you're thinking like a mathematician. Yes, the rest of the curriculum, the humanities, the social sciences, and the social and emotional skills, of course, which go hand in hand. So that's the three-part architecture, human flourishing, the competencies, and the foundation. Within which the detail of the competencies sits. And I hope that if you put it all together, it's aspirational. There's important continuity with what we've cared most about in recent decades. And yet there is a really rigorous and ambitious account of the competencies that young people will need for the years ahead, which will actually bring a new sense of content and purpose back into the education process.

Yeah, amazing. I mean, as I said to you off air, I, I'd really appreciate that language because I think particularly these 5 competencies, because I think again, trend in education is to get locked into a technocratic set of languages or jargon. There's something very plain speaking about those meaning-making competencies particularly, but there's also something deeply human about moving through the world, acting in the world, understanding and appreciating the world that, you know, any living organism, actually not just humans, do. They move through the world, they act in it to ultimately cultivate meaning, whatever that means for different organisms, right? But there is a particular way that humans do that in a very special way, I think. That is, it speaks to that, which I think is incredibly powerful. And leaves me a little worried about then where it goes in future around metrics of that, because that to me is almost, I hesitate, but borderline sacred space of humans moving through the world. As soon as you then start bringing measurement into that, that feels like a, and I know Andreas has been on the podcast before and I'd love to have this conversation with him actually, because that feels like a very, very precarious relationship that we need to be incredibly sensitive and approach with deep care. But back to the competencies, I think there's something that can speak to all contexts actually of humans exploring their world in very powerful ways.

Well, thank you, but you are right to pose the next question, you know, about assessment, and maybe we don't want to go into that deeply here, but On the one hand, once you've identified what it is to be human again, if anyone ever forgot, and said that education needs to do a lot more to develop those dimensions of humanity. Once you've said that, you kind of feel that you've moved out and beyond the sphere of exams and tests. On the other hand, the institutions, the organizations, the teachers, who will work hardest over the years ahead to make some of this happen, if they do, have every right to ask, how will we know that anyone is benefiting from these processes? Now, that doesn't imply that you instantly reinvent the next set of high-stakes tests. It really doesn't. But it does imply some very hard thinking in the education community about how we might answer that question, how will you know? And perhaps new ways of making those judgments. They could look quite different from what we do today. And at international level, it may well be that countries absolutely think they need to compare and contrast one country and another with mathematics capacity at 15, but they don't need to compare and contrast appreciating the world. At 15 with other countries. So, so much to think through, but Education for Human Flourishing and the work of the high-performing systems is simply an invitation to begin that conversation and a validation of the legitimacy of that conversation.

Yeah. No, I love it. I mean, definitely let's open up that space to have that conversation because I think there's almost a recursive dimension to it. How much are we inviting in the ability to appreciate, understand, and act in the world through the measurement, through whatever assessment measurement evidencing devices we might, or apparatus we might design? Is that honoring the idea of appreciating that humans act and understand the world in very beautiful ways, but radically different? And so as soon— that's why I'm just very sensitive to this idea of designing metric for those things, have we lost our ability to appreciate the diversity of the living world, humans included, by designing a set of rubrics or measurements to say this is a good way of acting in the world and this is not so good way of acting. And so you, you, there's a lot of traps there that I think we need to be incredibly sensitive to. And perhaps that's a follow-up conversation we could invite Andreas into to discuss, because I think it needs to be had. Actually, in order to honor the depth of those competencies.

You frame the challenge perfectly. I mean, I don't think we did feel too worried about going into the ethics space, though in principle it is vulnerable to exactly the charge you've just made, that, you know, one person's right is another person's wrong. So no qualms about that space, but what you are opening up now, which is whether and how to assess these competencies does indeed need to leave a lot of scope for different ways of seeing and doing. And that will be the challenge.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I love it. And I mean, maybe just to finish, there is that question I raised, the universalism and pluralism question, but there is also that individual and collective question. And you, I actually heard you, you speaking to this on a, on a different, in a different forum. I think there's some really interesting questions about opening up who are we actually educating? Is it, are the objects of the education, the individual young people and, you know, adults and, and, you know, in all these different spaces, or is there also an, an education of community as an entity or the collective as an entity? And I've explored that in different conversations on the podcast, for example, with Indi Johar about You know, what, what would happen if you reoriented education around enhancing the collective intelligence of a community, of a particular place? And we are exploring that in other projects now. And that to me is an incredibly interesting question because sometimes, again, a lot of these beautiful concepts and ideas will be funneled back down into how do we teach these individual young people to understand these in, or enact these competencies and these, because the individual is always the object of the educational project.

Exactly. I think we're halfway along the road. We're no longer simply educating individuals for individual outcomes. We're increasingly, and this has been the tenor of our conversation, Tim Logan, we're increasingly educating individuals for collective outcomes. So is the next step, if not the end of the road, educating the collective for collective outcomes. And there are people who are thinking very profoundly about that. And Olli Pekka Heinonen at the IB is one of those. And I think that at that point, being able to draw on artificial intelligence in ambitious ways and not merely sharpening up the processes of teaching, learning, and assessment in the classroom would become very important. And also, of course, very risky for all the reasons we know. But I think that the really the next phase of this work on education for flourishing will absolutely take us into the area of educating the collective. All of us in a process of education and all the time in order to secure not just the thriving, but the survival of the human project and the planet. So figuring out what that actually means beyond grand rhetoric And how you would even, knowing even how you would think about it cogently and coherently, that's the next thing. But maybe that's for another edition of your podcast.

Yes, right, exactly. And in a way, the word education there has a lot of baggage because as soon as you flip it to, for example, learning, like for, you know, I've had Beverley and Etienne Wenger-Trainer on the podcast previously talking about communities of practice and social learning, collective learning. And that as soon as you then reframe it into learning, then it opens up into a different space. And I think that whole set, I mean, yeah, it has to be part of the discussion, I think, because the idea of only thinking about school-based institutional spaces for this work can't be the frame for it. It has to integrate informal, non-formal learning spaces in the way that communities in all sorts of different diversity will engage with young people or engage with learning as a life process, learning, and as you said, development of humans as a process that happens in many different spaces, secular, religious, you know, community, relational, whatever, as well as in, in these things, these strange places called schools, right?

Exactly. And there you wouldn't go to Class 3B in Birmingham or in, or in Boston. You might go into the suburbs of Bogotá, or you might go into states in India, and that's where you would see the potential to combine formal education, often chronically underfunded and overstretched, with inspirational non-formal learning. Yeah. Learning circle, remarkable ecosystems. And we can already see that the purview of the policymaker there in the ministry in Delhi or Bogotá is going to be, how might I integrate and support both formal and non-formal to really pursue education for human flourishing in ways that make sense and are authentic for kids in this country, be it Colombia or India. That is perhaps the setting in which some of this discussion of collective learning will move forward and itself be an inspiration for older and less daring systems in the Global North. That may well be part of the trajectory for the years ahead.

Absolutely. I love that. Yeah, it'd be so interesting. And again, brings us back to where we started in a way, in the fact that none of that is new. I mean, again, that's just ancient humans gathering around the campfire, engaging or, you know, in all sorts of spaces and rituals and ways that humans have always done this for for thousands and thousands of years. So there's something I think very profound and timeless at the core of all of this. And obviously then if we bring it back to the work, you know, there's a lot of work, as you've said, to see how this plays in relationship, in practice with people and communities, because it's all very well having a conceptual framework, but then it needs to live. And in the living, we find out a lot more, I think. So No, just thank you very much for sharing about it today. It's really fascinating and looking forward to further conversations.

Me too. Thanks a lot for having me.

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