Education's Assumption Stack - A Conversation with Brad Carter

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

So huge amounts of money, lots of knowledge about how to teach people, pretty intelligent about curriculum and things, but education reform, it tends to focus on structure and pedagogy of schools, and I think we need to step back and look at the whole social contract.

Hi again. Thanks for joining us on the Future Learning Design Podcast for another episode. This week I'm speaking with Brad Carter, who I have the great privilege of working with at Notosh, the consultancy run by Ewan McIntosh. Brad has spent 20 years exploring the role of education in society and the way we go about educating people. As a former leadership development executive with Apple and the head of the innovative Think Global School, his work has taken him across Europe, Australia, China, and North America. And he now lives in Tokyo, Japan. A highly creative thinker with a talent for finding clarity in complexity, he brings his global expertise to innovative curriculum building and a deep study of the learning process, whether in formal school settings, communities, or enterprise. As a former teacher and school administrator, Brad was Director of the Centre for Innovation at Mulgrave School in Vancouver and the Assistant Head of School at Island Pacific School on Bowen Island. Brad and I dive straight into the conversation this week, so I do hope you enjoy it. So maybe we can move into— because I'd love to hear about Think Global as well, but how do those kind of ideas inform your work now?

Yeah, well, the thing I'm tinkering around with— I just kind of kicked off my own blog again, and there's been sort of an erratic train of thought, but something seems to be emerging, and it's kind of a two-part thing. But what I'm trying to look at is stepping way back and looking at the place of education in society, almost like as a social contract, not how do we perform education, or what are we doing there? What's the practice? I actually think that's pretty good. And we can talk about, you know, where I think the problems are in that in a moment. But I'm really interested in what are these really big assumptions we've made about education, and that if we don't look at those, we might be trying to reform the wrong thing. So I think there are 4 big problems in education. One of them is, you know, calling it the curriculum problem. What is the stuff that we teach people. And that probably has two parts. One of them is going to be the things you just need to know to be a functioning human being, and a little bit more to be sort of enlightened. I mean that with a very small e, but that you can function in society beyond just being able to read and write something. So, and those things are probably timeless and exist for everyone everywhere. There's nothing cultural about them. They might be interpreted culturally, but you've got to read and write and do some arithmetic and be able to have a discussion with somebody and, you know, appeals to reason and so on and so forth. And then there's another chunk of it that is kind of of the moment. We might have said, you know, in the early 20th century when public education was really getting going, it's about equipping everybody to read and write so that they can work in a rapidly industrializing society. And today we might say it has something to do with climate change, human rights, and those kinds of things. We want to teach content that we need right now. The second big bucket is pedagogy. How do we do all that? And that, I think a lot of education reform focuses on pedagogy and the structure of schools. And I think that's misplaced. We actually know an awful lot about teaching. We've had great teachers for a long, long time. Think of Socrates, Lao Tzu, any culture has always had great teachers that deeply understand how human beings learn, right? What I think they're actually critiquing is what I call a distribution problem. Like, how do you get great education to everybody? How do you get great teachers? Teacher training, distribution of this kinds of stuff. And then the final one is the economic problem, which isn't as big a problem as it's more of a distribution of money. Because the US budget, I was just digging up some numbers the other day, the US budget is projected to be something like $800 billion in the next couple of years. So approaching a trillion dollars, right? So that's total spending, you know, capital, that's K to 20, probably, and it's not just primary or grade school education, but nevertheless, and in most developed countries, education is usually second after healthcare in terms of total expenditure. So huge amounts of money, lots of knowledge about how to teach people, pretty intelligent about curriculum and things like that. Yeah. And, you know, we have this distribution problem, but education is focusing on— when we talk about education reform, rather, it tends to focus on structure and pedagogy of schools. It's this inward-looking thing. And I think we need to step back and look at the whole social contract. I like to take things back to really simple equations or thinking about that. So if it's true that education is a social contract, social contract. You know, state will pay for education in order to get an educated citizenry that will pay taxes and stuff. That's the return on their investment, that kind of thing. If it's a social contract and all we're doing is reforming one half of the contract, what education provides, people go, that's not what I bought, right? We need to engage the other half of the social contract. It's like I go to Tim and say, I want to buy— you're a knife maker. I want to buy a knife made a particular way. And you start changing the way you make it. Hang on a second. I wanted that old way of doing it. That's what I was buying. Right. And that, you know, that's a really simplistic way, but I think it gets so deep into our culture. And then I would say there's probably sort of two versions of that contract. There's one that you would hear politicians talk about, and that's, you know, preparing our global workforce. And then there's a kind of an unwritten contract that everybody has about what is school. And that's probably informed by what my experience at school— look, you know, I'm doing okay. Yeah. Making good money. I moved to Japan recently and I didn't have crazy school with cutting-edge pedagogy. It's pretty standard. Yeah. So that's what I'm trying to step back and do is take a look. Are we sort of in too deep here? Do we have to step back and so we can see the forest and, and maybe renegotiate the way we think about that.

It's really interesting. And I think it's definitely important. I mean, it's the big why behind education in a way, right? So let's maybe explore that forest a little bit then, because, you know, there's all sorts of reasons why we educate, right? As you said, like preparing employees for the workforce and engaged and informed citizenry. There's the whole socialization aspect. So where is it that perhaps we need to renegotiate? Like, what are the aspects that we have perhaps lost sight of in our tinkering of reform?

Yeah, I think I'm working with this idea, a phrase I coined called an assumption stack. So there's a bunch of assumptions that are working together that are all kind of mutually reinforcing, and it makes them very difficult to tackle. You know, assumption is something that I'm choosing to take without really having proof that it's the case, right? Um, and I'm not talking about that. I'm not saying that things that education has assumed are necessarily wrong. They might be. What I'm more interested in is how they all work together and make it really difficult to pull them apart. So, you know, there are a bunch of assumptions, things like education should happen in a school setting, like a brick-and-mortar thing. That's an assumption that it should. There's nothing that says it has to do that. There's an assumption that the state should pay for the education. That may or may not, but that's an assumption, and we don't have to take that. There's an assumption not only that it should happen in schools, but that it is the best way. Like, we're not really trying to come up with alternatives. We're just tweaking this thing, you know, and there's assumptions about the structure of school itself, that it happens 8 to 4-ish, more or less, and there's a couple of months off in the summer or something like that. There's no reason that we need to keep those things going. There's a lot of assumptions about the competency and jurisdiction of schools. There's some things they're probably competent to do, to teach academic subjects and things like that, and they probably have the jurisdiction to do that. But there's a lot of other stuff that maybe formally belonged in other institutions in society, maybe religious organizations, organizations or community-based things or around the, around the well or something like that, right?

Yeah.

That fill those functions, right? But we keep offloading more and more. Is that the right thing to be doing?

Maybe as those elements of society have perhaps dwindled or, you know, perhaps less community as more rapid urbanization or whatever, as, as local communities might have broken down somewhat, then maybe more emphasis is being put on the role of the teacher to fill those gaps of the things that perhaps we value, but we, we don't quite know where to put them. So it's, oh, let's add them into the curriculum or let's give them—

Exactly. I think that's happened over and over again, right? Yeah. There's another assumption that trained teachers are the only people from whom you can get an education, at least one that gets any recognition. Right now, the only recognition you get is for teaching or learning that happens from a recognized teacher in a recognized institution. So there's this whole accreditation thing and you, you know, we can get where that comes from. There's sort of a quality assurance idea behind it, but nevertheless, it's an assumption.

And look at all the other people that you learn from in your life, right? Really competent people, real masters of their art or whatever, their trade or whatever that you learn from incredibly successfully, but they're not accredited to be educators as such, right? It's just a byproduct of being passionate and articulate or, you know, all these other skills around their craft.

Exactly. Once you're out of the school system at whatever age you might leave, you know, everybody would say they continue to learn. Whether they're self-taught or from friends or watching YouTube clips or something like that. We continue to learn. So it can't be true that the only place you get credit for is those places, because clearly we learn from many other places, not least of all our parents and just sort of basic values and things like that. Right. You know, there are assumptions that the current curriculum that we deliver is a good thing to be teaching people. So I just think it's worth stepping back and starting to look at some of these things and worry less about the pedagogy. I'm not saying that pedagogy is uniformly great pedagogy is there uniformly delivered, but it's not a pedagogy problem, it's a delivery or a structuring problem.

I mean, we've spoken about this before, but there's also the elephant in the room of the babysitting problem, right? Yeah, like, you know, just as we've seen with the pandemic, clearly it's hugely disruptive if the schools are closed and the children are suddenly at home with families, what do we do with them, right? How do I juggle work and the washing up, all of that other work, walking the dog, and etc., and educating my children? And it's just not possible, right?

Right.

So in order to stay as a functional and successful economic participant in society, as well as doing all these other things. So that is part of the picture, right? We've assumed that the job of schools is partially babysitting.

Yeah, it is, right? And that was one of the things that really spurred my thinking when I was watching schools come crashing down down, trying to figure out what on earth are we going to do. And then more the sort of the second crisis when they're restarting. So they sort of managed their way through shutting down and getting through to the end of the school year. At least that's the timing in the Northern Hemisphere. Yeah, it was the restart again and the urgency to do it. It was pretty clear that the urgency was to get to babysit kids again. And I would have felt more comfortable if that was explicitly stated. Don't hide it behind things that kids will fall behind. I think it was— do you read Doug Belshaw's work? He was talking about about the myth of kids falling behind when they're out of school. He said all they're falling behind is this assumption that the curriculum is what a kid by the end of grade 2 needs to know, and that's an entirely arbitrary set, right? So how do you fall behind something that's arbitrary? It was a really good question. So that was kind of the moment where I started to think, hey, we might be looking at the wrong things. I've spent a long time trying to improve schools and schooling, which is, you know, it's a worthwhile pursuit for everybody, and I'm not knocking that, I'm puzzled that given the extraordinary effort that's gone into reforming schools for half a century at least, you know, you read Neil Postman, Ivan Illich, Alfie Kohn, Hilda Neatby wrote a book and I think it was 1953, it's a savage, just searing critique of Canadian education. Except for the language, it sounds like it was written yesterday. So nothing's changed despite, you know, $800 billion in the US kind of thing. Or come at it from the other place these sort of philanthropic efforts by tech companies and founders, you know, the Gateses and Zuckerbergs of the world, we're not able to make a change. So it just makes me feel like we're focusing on not so much the wrong thing, but we need to focus on something else.

I like that framing of it as an assumption stack, because you're absolutely right. These things all kind of combine and become bigger than the sum of their parts, which create this immovable object, right? Really an immovable object. And it, well, let's say it's a complex problem, right? But that maybe leads me, so you introduced me to Kinevo. Kinevin a while ago, and I— it's kind of the way when you get a new thing that you enjoy, you kind of see everything in the frame, right, for a while, right? But at the same time, I do find it phenomenally useful in even just listening to you talk there. So much of what we have done is we've framed it as a complicated problem.

Yeah.

So we, we frame education as a clear problem or a complicated problem in Kinevin terms, right? So therefore it's a technical problem that we solve. And it, all it needs is more experts, right? More best practice, more good practice, more consultants, more, you know, training, then we'll solve the problem. And actually it's fundamentally not that, right? It's fundamentally a complex adaptive human ecology and a massive human problem. And I think again, that's one of the brilliant things from the pandemic has shown that it is a fundamentally fluid and interconnected kind of adaptive problem.

Yeah.

Just reading John Hattie again and finding some effect sizes for what's the best teaching method or the best, you know, the highest impact strategy is just, it's not going to cut it anymore.

No.

You know, this is a fundamentally complex problem. So we need to shift the way that we approach the problem entirely. Right.

And that's the, I think you've hit it right there. That shift is the problem we need to focus on. I think what I'm trying to get at with this idea, and I'm still exploring it up assumptions. Stacks is because they're so interconnected and so big. Normally, when you have an assumption, if you're talking about a single assumption, the way you check it is to step outside and say, what does it look like from another perspective? But if you try to step out, the assumption stack is kind of too big to step outside, right? And so then you do see everything as kind of this linear, mechanical, complicated sort of solution train. And then you get stuck into— with SMART goals, for example, You know, complex solutions aren't amenable to SMART goals, right? Because as soon as you start doing that, you're locking yourself into this other kind of thinking. So what's the practice we need to cultivate in order to start changing our thinking?

Exactly. Yeah. And perhaps, I don't know, how about this? Has the pandemic, because it's thrown up, you know, it's throwing up all the cards into the air, right? And has it created a bunch of safe-to-fail experiments? You know, because we're just trying to figure out how to respond in this situation. So, you know, lots of people have responded in, in very different ways, right? So, you know, you might like this idea of pods, right? You know, small groups of kids in a local community with a— they find a teacher or a tutor and they create this little learning pod. Obviously it's got some heritage in homeschooling and that kind of thing, but you know, that's kind of been thrown up as a little experiment within the pandemic space because we had to do something. I don't know, has the pandemic helped us to kind of think a bit differently about the way that we approach the problem?

I think it has at the very least in a sense that more people than before will be sort of scratching their heads at least, if not asking some bigger questions, right? Putting the babysitting question aside, for example, like, you know, how do parents come together? And then the other big part of that is that might work if you've got enough enough assets between a couple of families that can spare people, right? There are lots of people who can't. I think there may be some other approaches. You know, if we took a kind of a community-based approach and rethink how we do this, it might be possible. But I think at the very least, it does have people kind of wondering about this. Questions I don't know the answers to is, is that being picked up in the kind of way that will produce large-scale change?

Yeah.

You know, I don't know if that means whether that's an organization, maybe the state picks that up, or whether it's a completely grassroots thing that everybody thinks, okay, this is fine, we'll do neighborhood schooling or whatever it might be. I don't know, but I do think people are open to a few more questions than they were 18 months ago. So, you know, potentially that helps. I'm sure if, you know, you were to talk to a parent on the street a year and a half ago and raise some questions, it'd be a 50/50 chance whether or not they'd be interested at all. They go, what are you talking about? My kid's happy, we're happy, it's all good. Yeah, right. Now they go, hmm, okay, that's an interesting question, I think. Yeah, and that's a good thing, as it is with a lot of other issues besides education, you know, human rights, governance. I think all of these things are really closely tied to each other.

Definitely interesting. So then, I mean, maybe that's a nice point to think about think global as a concept, right? Because you were part of the founding team, right?

Yep.

And that in itself is a totally different kind of model or concept of what a high school might look like practically, like literally look like, because you didn't have a building and, you know, so for people that haven't heard of it, maybe if you could just give a little bit of a synopsis of what it is, but then maybe we can talk about where that idea came from and how that might have some learning from that to then think about about how education responds in general now.

Sure, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was a, it's a real one-off kind of thing. I don't think it's replicable or scalable, but it wasn't really intended to. It was sort of classically hatched around a dinner table, you know, a big what-if question, like what if we just wiped the slate clean and didn't make any assumptions about what education could be, and we brought a group of kids together and some people who can teach them some things, and let's do something really crazy like travel around the world. So Think Global School has no building, anywhere. I mean, it's got an office headquarters, but students and faculty move around the world every year. When I was there, it was 3 different cities in the year. So we would have 3, 3-month terms. 90 days was the length of a student visa, right? So we could go and park ourselves in a country for 90 days, give everybody a month off, and then go do another 90 days. But it was a really bold idea. Like, let's start from— let's just, let's do that, you know, and had some great funding to allow the school to do that. It's changed in some details, but the principles are the same. And let's bring kids from all over the world, right? You know, not, not kids who can afford to travel around the world. Let's set up a foundation and enable kids from all walks of life to do this because we wanted— that was one of the other things. If it only works for a certain kind of kid, you know, upper class or upper middle class kids with certain sensibilities, that's no good. So we had in the first year, we had 15 kids from 11 countries and all walks of life, you know, so first world countries, third world countries. They only The only real restrictions we put on were that kids had to be able to function in English. We just didn't have the resources that we could move around the world to work in multiple languages. Yeah. And kids had to have— we couldn't really support kids who had any, any serious learning challenges for the same reason, right? Yeah. But we weren't looking for super high academic kids either. You know, the— when, when I was interviewing students, you know, the question that would come up, and the one that I paid the most attention to, was, you know, why do you want to come to Think Global School and travel around the world? And they said, you know, to see the world. Yeah, okay, so who doesn't, right? But every now and then you get a kid, like we had this one Palestinian girl who said, you know, everybody hears about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but nobody talks about the kind of Arab-Arab conflict. I've heard that there are towns, places in the world where people live in peace. They don't hate each other. I'd like to see some of those so I can go back to my village and show people this is how you can live in peace. And they go, okay, you're in, right?

The other—

yeah, I guess the other criteria was you had to be reasonably independent, because— meaning, you know, if you were— I had a girl from Ghana in the first year. If you were homesick, there was nobody else from Ghana that you could sort of reminisce from home. You know, you might have to go talk to the kid from Sweden and commiserate there, but that was it, you know. And this crazy experiment to see what we could do.

Amazing. Yeah. And in terms of the programming planning for the education aspect. Where did that come from?

Yeah, so it was, it was an interesting struggle at the beginning. Like, we set out to kind of do our own thing, but we ran into this issue that we had, you know, kids from all over the world going back to towns all over the world. They needed some kind of ticket, at least until the school had got onto, on its feet. So we, you know, we ultimately brought in the IB Diploma Program, and I think, I think they're, they're running with that for now. We'll see what evolves, but they needed some kind of ticket. But what we were trying to do within that was, look, the best way to learn about the world was to learn in it. So we had a team of people that worked with us to go into— we had a way of qualifying a city or a country, and you know, there's security issues and things, but lots, you know, how rich was this going to be? And they would go in and talk to schools and they would come up with a reading list. If we're in China, what should we read? If we're in Sweden, what what should we read? And then, you know, work with our faculty in advance. Okay, how are we going to teach, you know, certain subjects when we're in these countries? How can we make that happen on location? You know, so that was kind of at the macro level, you know. So we did things like progression. We had— we knew when we got in the first year, the 3 countries we were going to were Sweden, Australia, and China. So when we're in Sweden, we gave all the kids swimming lessons because we knew when we got to Australia, we're going to give them all scuba diving lessons. So we can go diving on the Great Barrier Reef with a marine biologist That's how we're going to do our part of our science study. And we did, right? You know, and then that broke down the model. I don't think they're using it quite the same way. What, you know, what I was trying to build there was I called it a field school model. It could just— it was kind of a working title. It was based on field anthropology and how does an anthropologist go into a completely unfamiliar space and start to try and make sense out of it. So we had 3 layers to that. So we would go into— well, here we are in Sydney Harbour, for example, we're staying at a sort of hostile kind of place, teaching the kids to scuba dive. But what we did was we started with a baseline literacy. What are the things, the tools and basic skills you need to have in order to go do something? So we taught them, you know, first how to snorkel and then scuba dive and then how to lay underwater transit lines and count species of things underwater because we partnered up with the University of Sydney. They have a longitudinal study of the health of Sydney Harbor and apparently sea urchins are kind of a canary species. So So we said, yep, we'll send our kids down there to count sea urchins. So the baseline skill is scuba diving, laying transit lines, writing underwater with a grease pencil. Then you come out and you take all your data and you dump it into a spreadsheet and you learn how to do statistical analysis. That's still more baseline stuff because you could be doing statistical analysis on anything. The application, so after baseline is application, the application Sydney Harbour research study. This is a real-world application. And then the extension would be, you know, maybe we've got to go off and do more, like we don't, you know, we've got to figure out how to spend more time down there because there's more going on or something. Yeah. And then you loop back to more baseline. So it's this baseline, applied skill, and then extending it to new problems, right? Yeah. And that, you know, had incredible spin-off things because we, we always had a host school because there were things we couldn't travel with, like a science lab. And part of the diploma program is, you know, you need to do certain things, right? And a library. Yeah. So we partnered up with schools, and that way we could say, yeah, we have access to that. But the way we paid back was we would sponsor lectures in, you know, in the gymnasium or even in a public lecture hall. We would pay for, you know, we had Peter Singer, you know, the philosopher. We had Hans Rosling when we were in— oh wow, yeah, amazing, right? Like stunning. I'll tell you about that later. But wow. So we would do that, and then at the end of it, there'd be the Q&A, and we would, you know, all the students are room. And this is like only our third full term of operation. We're in China. And because the kids had sort of this baseline application extension, they were used to working in the real-world context. We had two different speakers talking about environmentalism when we were in China. And when we heard the second one speak, you know, any questions, the local kids tended not to put their hands up. And they asked her— and this is not an exaggeration— but my kids would put their hands up and they say, you know, excuse me, last week we had so-and-so here who presented this case, blah, blah, blah. You're saying something almost completely different. And here's where we think they contradict each other. Can you reconcile that for us?

Amazing.

You know, so completely different level of engagement. So, you know, exceptionally powerful learning, I think. But then we quickly ran into some other real problems, like how do you scale this? Like my faculty was, we're living with these kids 24/7. Burnout was a big issue, right? It was super fun. I remember sitting down at breakfast, and one of the kids at breakfast was asking, hey, you know, in Chapter 4, that book we're reading, I would go, yeah, and then the other kids would go, yeah, we had the same question. And then at the end of breakfast, we go, okay, we can skip English class.

That was it. You've just done it.

We've just done it, right? So we had this amazing flexibility. Like Sunday evenings, we would sit down with the faculty and the students, and we knew we had a certain number of hours that we needed to get through. But we also knew we wanted to do certain things in these local communities. And, you know, one of the kids would hear, hey, we just heard something amazing is happening, can we go do it? And we'd go, yeah, but we're gonna have to move math class to after dinner. Are you guys cool with that? They go, yep. And, and they were, you know, amazing.

The capacity for emergence, right, for allowing emergence in that process is incredible, right? An emergent curriculum, because you, you know, you, you roll with it and you adapt adapt as you learn new things and then you apply it. And what an incredible opportunity to be able to let those things come up.

Yeah. Although one of the things we did learn was that you still need structure. Like a lot of people need— well, everybody needs a different amount of structure. I'm happy with not much at all. I quite like it. But, you know, and that's maybe why I like certain pursuits like trekking and things like that, where you're not really quite sure what tomorrow's going to bring, right? Other people need a lot more. And to build a community of learners, you need to respect all of that, right, and give that flexibility. So that was a challenge, but it was an important thing to learn. And I think we could say when we learn these things, we learn them because we started with a blank slate. Let's try everything, right? And we wouldn't figure out what works and what doesn't.

Yeah, there's a certain, I guess, safety and security and routine, just for sure, in some ways, so that you can actually physically and kind of psychologically relax a little bit more into a routine, right? Whereas if you're constantly vigilant for the next thing because you're not, you're not in a routine, that's, as you say, potential for burnout. And it's quite an exhausting process for everybody, the learners and the faculty and everybody. Yeah, that's interesting.

The thing I'd want to bring in there is, is some of the work of Josh Waitzkin. He wrote a book called The Art of Learning. So he was a chess prodigy. Strategy and then switched and decided to take up combat tai chi. And now he does super elite training, right? You know, if you're at the top 1%, he takes half of that and works on that for, you know, squeezing the last little bit of human achievement out of us kind of thing. But it's this sort of cyclical thing between, you know, periods of just sort of drill and repetition and routine and then bursts of super high performance, and then you come back down. So, and it seems to and I'm just doing a bunch of reading on this now, kind of a natural rhythm for human beings. Like, you have lots of practice, lots of drill, but it's at maybe 60%, 70% of your capacity. And the reason you do it like that is I can work out every day at 60%, or I can work out 3 days a week at 100%, 110%. The difference is if I work out 5 days at 60%, it's goofy math, but I'm sort of doing 300 units easily. Or I could do it all week. I can do 7, so 420 units, as opposed to 3 days at 110%. So over time I get more practice. And then when I need an intense burst of activity, I'm capable of doing that. So I think I would want to loop that back into this baseline application and extension. Baseline has more training, or maybe the application is more, and then you're ready to go out and do something really crazy and intense, come back and start the cycle over again. But that may be something there. You know, when we look at the model of schooling now, which is kind of consistent pace all the way along, long might not be the best structure. Like, maybe we should have lots of downtime and high-burst activities, and then more just simple stuff and high-burst activities. And then—

yeah, no, interesting. I think sometimes there's also the feeling for learners that it's never quite arriving, it's never quite getting anywhere. You never get to any sense of real completion. And that's— I think in a way, ironically, sometimes that's why the exam feels so good, right? Because you've, you've kind of got to an end point, right? It's like, actually, yeah, I did it. I've got some satisfaction. I've actually done something. Now I can forget it all. Perfect.

And that's the inoculation theory of education, right? You know, oh, I've done, I've done math, I'm good now. Exactly.

But there's perhaps something in that, that the, there's always an increasing level of intensity towards the final, towards the deadline, towards—

yeah, there's, yeah, there's no question that it's good to be tested. Like, how much can I do? How high can I jump? How fast can I run? You know, am I capable? And if not, then I go and train some more kind of thing. So that kind of test is, is great, right?

We need to know Of course, there's very many different ways to achieve that feeling of evidencing what you've just developed, putting it into practice. And, and there's way more meaningful ways to do it that therefore have the knock-on benefit, of course, of staying with you. Like, as you said, those are the example, taking that, that learning to China. If they'd just finished their exam and forgotten everything, they perhaps wouldn't be engaging on that level with the next stage because they've kind of forgotten it all because they just crammed for the exam.

Right. Yeah. But it's, I think the whole, if I was to answer what's the purpose of education? I think it's to make sense out of the world. And sensemaking is a very particular thing, right? It's not just like, I get it, but, you know, novel situation comes up, like, what's going on here? Being— having that capacity, you know, sometimes you have to interrogate things, sometimes you have to just go with it. And all that, that capacity is what we want to develop. And that moves over again into that, you know, that's where that complexity is, like you said, it It's human, it's adaptive, it's emergent. Yeah, it's all of those things.

Definitely.

And I think that the now is so complex that you can't get your hands on it. Right. So if you cannot, by definition, get your hands on it, you have to approach it with certain mindsets or attitudes or dispositions. That's all you can do. So you want healthy dispositions and attitudes. Right. The Canadian Constitution is a fascinating document. It's quite short. And it says these are, you know, it sort of lists some values and things. But one of the key things in there, it says that, you know, when this Constitution is tested, it must always be interpreted in a way that preserves these values. So it describes how we interpret things. So when there's a test case, and there will always be test cases when we move in complex systems, right? We're always being bombarded by things. What we do kind of matters less than how we approach what we're going to try to do. You know, if we make a decision based on the principles that are important to us, to us, we'll be happier than if we try to come to a fixed outcome. Yeah, because we don't really have control over the outcome. There are just too many variables. We can influence it, but it's impossible to be sure of, and impossible to— of course, exactly the way you want, right?

Yeah, interesting.

So it's really about, you know, these assumption stacks that I'm getting at is if we can find a mechanism for, first of all, getting us to see these assumptions and question them fairly. We might want to keep some, but just that, or to at least recognize that there are assumptions about things, that there are things that we've chosen to work with, and that they're open to question. And however complex or difficult it might be to change them, that's not the point. But if we can get to the kind of mindset that allows us to do that, and then we say those things that are those mindsets, that's the way we want to work, right? That headspace, those values, yeah, that, that's the kind kind of community we want to be in. Yeah.

It's interesting. I mean, the other way I've heard Snowden frame it is as negative boundaries. It's like, these are, these are stories that we don't want. Right. So we want more stories like this, but less stories like this. So we don't want, you know, the planet to keep heating up. Right. That's a negative boundary that we set. And then, and therefore that also influences the direction because there's a constraint around the negative thing that we're trying to avoid. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's, it's good mental gymnastics, but it's also good to kind of come back down to the reality of kids or all of us learning. But I don't think it's that in a place—

and I've worked in a school that was quite successful, I think, in operating that way, like recognized from the beginning. And I don't know how explicit it was, it just somehow seemed to do that, but it knew that, you know, the human experience is a complex thing, right? And bringing children into the adult world is a complex endeavor. And we're not going to be able to articulate the whole thing and map it out. We just— there's not enough time in the universe to do that, right? Because it continues to evolve. So how do we, how do we want to govern ourselves? It's almost a governance question. And the school came up with sort of its motto and one rule, and that described everything we did. And didn't matter if this was a board-level discussion, decision, didn't matter if it was kids sorting things out in the classroom, everybody was to move to work with it. So the motto was wisdom, courage, and integrity. Those were the values that we asked. So when we had a test, like, did we act wisely? Did we act courageously? And did we act with integrity? And how much of each? And then the one rule we had, we had the student handbook. There was exactly one rule. It was use your head. And so when there was a discipline issue or kids did something stupid, there was a kid who rolled, where they were rolling tires down a hill and it went awry. Went through a car window. And, you know, you get called into the office and the kids would go, "But I don't think—" "Whoa, whoa, whoa, I got one question for you. Did you use your head?" "Did you use your head?" And they'd go, "But it's—" and I'd go, "No, no, no, just answer." And they would go, "No, because when I, you know, if I had stopped to think, rolling tires downhill with cars parked at the bottom probably wasn't that smart." Okay, we're done, right? Yeah. So use your head and act with, you know, with some courage and integrity wherever possible. Yeah, nice. And so, yeah, it covered this incredibly complex thing, a school and it did it really, really well. Really well, you know. Yeah, we engineered things to, you know, put that to the test. You know, we would do things like we had a morning assembly every morning and we put a piece of garbage in the middle of the assembly room just to see if anybody picked it up. And if they didn't, we would stop the start of classes and have a discussion like, how come nobody picked this up? Yeah, it's not mine, it's not mine either, but it's our space, right? So there are all these kinds of things. So it's doable and that's exactly what we want get to is not be paralyzed by the enormity of the problem. Because you're right, we could sit here, you know, yeah, seeing how many angels we can get on the head of a pin, right? Or we can come down to some simple operational things, simple heuristics that allow us to get moving until those things become the life of the school or the organization, right? That's what I want to focus on, is how do, as communities, how do we come up with a very, very a simple set of criteria or heuristics or values that you want to live by, and they got to be dead simple. So that when, when I was working with schools, we would come, we'd say, okay, let's come up with these heuristics. And the, the rules for the heuristics are, is everyone has to be able to do it as written. So it has to be a command, you know, use your head, has to be an imperative, right? And when we said everybody has to do it, if it was written in a that a kindergarten kid would misinterpret it, then you have to rewrite it. Right. And I've been in a lot of schools where they've had things like that and it works. And then that's your ticket to operating in complexity, I think. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. Because it becomes the enabling constraint that you need. It's enough. It gives you a bit of structure and kind of boundary somehow to push up against, but it also enables space and flexibility to allow things to emerge rather than, you know, the opposite of trying to word Smith every single last, or, you know, like get the job description so clearly articulated to every single possible scenario and responsibility that this employee might, might ever face in their entire career and articulate it into this 16-page document that they get given on the first day. It's like, done, we've taken care of everything. Right. That's the opposite extreme, I guess. Yeah.

And it works. It works. Right. Because it's, it's livable for everybody. And that's the key thing is you have everybody in the community engaged in the same thing at whatever age appropriate level.

Yeah, but it requires trusting people as well, right? Because I think there's a— the implicit message of trying to articulate everything is that you don't trust people to use their judgment.

Oh yeah, as soon as you— like, that's exactly it, right? When you see lots of rules and regulations, that's an atmosphere of we don't trust, trust, right? We don't trust you. So we put policy and all that kind of thing, you know. Few rules, few policies means a high trust environment, usually, right? Yeah, yeah, which has worked. But that, but that takes a lot of work.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, it's culture building and leadership. Interesting. Oh, thanks, man. I mean, this could go on all day, but I think we better wrap it up, right? Listeners will be asleep by now. But it's good, really good stuff. I mean, it's like essential stuff, actually, particularly now at the end of the— or somewhere near the end of this pandemic anyway. You know, these are major questions that everybody is coming at from different directions and thinking about And I think it's, yeah, no, it's exciting to be in it with you. And yeah, I'm looking forward to where this goes.

Yeah, me too. Well, I'm trying to explore this over the next few blog posts over the next few weeks. So this is really helpful actually to kind of think things out loud. Yeah, good. Pick it up again. Definitely.

Cool. Brilliant. Thanks, man. All right. Take care. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the Dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.