Going Back to First Principles to Replace "School" - A Conversation with Dr Kapono Ciotti

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

It's really a red pill, blue pill moment where we need to really spend time understanding the heightened importance of human in system, or we're about to be taken over by a tsunami and our boat is in harbor, and that's not the place for a boat in a tsunami.

Hi, and thanks for joining me again this week on the podcast. My name's Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. If we're going to radically rethink and perhaps replace schools as the dominant institutions of education, what are the first principles questions that we should be asking? And where should we be looking for a sense of guidance for these questions? Perhaps in cultural rootedness and traditions. I can't think of a better person to be exploring this with than Dr. Kaponoʻi Sioti, whose work in leadership and collaboration across countries, cultures, and systems, and across decades has allowed him to see and participate in these fundamental and urgent questions from many different perspectives. Kapono is the CEO of the Pacific American Foundation in Hawaiʻi, and drawing from his own native Hawaiian heritage, he works to build pilina, meaning deep connections between people, systems, and ideas to empower and support the transformation of communities. Prior to this role, he worked as the Executive Director of What School Could Be, led and supported many national and international schools all over the world, and inspired many people as a sought-after speaker and facilitator. Capono is the co-author of The Landscape Model of Learning: Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion, which he co-authored with Jennifer D.

Klein. Awesome, thank you, Capono. I'm Super excited about having this conversation. We've been very kindly introduced via Indonesia to Bordeaux and Hawaii, and we find ourselves here and just, yeah, super happy to be able to dive into some of the fantastic stuff. Yeah. So I thought, given your previous role, I'd love to talk about where you are now and what you're doing now, but just given your previous role, I just thought I'd start with the slightly provocative question. What could school be? Could school be not school?

Yeah, so, you know, I just had a really interesting conversation with an amazing thinker who lives in New York. He's an AI venture lab guy. He runs an AI lab studio and does this for like equity stake. And so he gets to work and talk with a lot of really interesting people. And yesterday we were on a call and just with a lot of synergy around that question, like what could school be? And maybe, you know, even it was a little bit further where we started the call. Where we started the call was like, will school need to be in the future? And what might it need to be? Might we need to totally reconceptualize what school is or what it could be or what it should be? And, and I think, you know, what I've, what I've been excited about and haven't ever been able to do is get a bunch of really cool people that I really respect and like in a room and do two separate design thinking sessions. I would love to, get some thinkers together and say, let's deconflate childcare and education. And let's do a design thinking session. If childcare was taken care of, if kids were safe, happy, healthy, stimulated, and taken care of, what would we really want education to look like? And if education was like, you know, blue wave beamed into your brain and you could be and do anything you wanted in the world, what would we want, you know, the daily minutes and hours of a child's life, specifically a young child, I'm thinking, life to look like? And, you know, with this AI revolution on the precipice and seeing what tech companies are able to do right now, I do think we're at a point where we have to ask, what do we want our time together to be like and to be for? Uh, and even I would even like take the word school out of that completely. And like, what is, what could time be? What could place be? What could relationship be? And I think we, it's time to ask that question cuz it's gonna take time to design it. And build it and get ready for, you know, this wave of tech company and publishers impose changes on us.

Yeah. I mean, that's actually, in a way, that was why I was asking the question, because given your previous role with What School Could Be as the executive director, I was, so my own kind of holding of that question, how I get, I think I would say it's probably become more radical than I used to be. You know, I used to be of a, of a mind that we need to use the existing infrastructure. And it's not going anywhere, so, you know, you may as well use it. But actually now I'm very much with you that, and that's why I think this idea of what school could be is the wrong question because, and you know, TED is doing amazing work and, you know, a lot of people doing amazing work, but what school could be is the wrong question because it's anchored around the concept of school. And so the question is somewhat different, right? As you're saying, what could relationship be or what could time be or this? I think we're being invited into much more first principles kinds of questions right now. That is like, critically important.

That's exactly what I mean. Like, as if you were listening in on our conversation, that's exactly where we went. We're like, what are the first principles that we need to take this thing down to, like, even on the education side, right? Even on that, okay, so a software company that bought a testing company that owns a publishing company comes in and says, like, it's tested, right? In 2 hours a day on this software, your kid will advance, you know, a typical 3 years every year, and it's engaging and it's good for your brain and all this stuff. They're gonna come and tell us that in a little bit, right? Like, what is our first principles even of that education side of it? And I think if you go back to some of the, you know, Ted's work, if you go back to some of the documentary Most Likely to Succeed, you know, you go back to that Horace Mann story of going to Prussia and seeing what the Prussians were doing after they lost the war and their amazing, you know, at that point, super innovative conception of grade levels and disciplines, right? And creating this grid of school. It was for something, right? It was to upskill the general population at that point, you know, the masses of boys to a certain level of education to have a more prepared Prussian army. And then that idea exported to the United States to prepare civil society to be better workers in, you know, factories. And that's what education was for then. I'm wondering what edu— what's the first principles of what education is even for in the next little bit. I mean, certainly I want my kid to read, write, do arithmetic, all those kind of things. But I even think that whole, like, for what? For, you know, a world maybe of universal basic income or maybe a world of machines taking over or maybe, you know, I don't know what for. It's just so up in the air right now.

Yeah, no, it is. And I'm, you know, that the kind of Horace Mann pressure story gets told a lot. And I wonder, and I've just doing some reading recently, like in the civilization building of like of thousands of years prior, there was, it was still a feature of civilization building was the emergence of formal education as a means to train, one could say biologically secondary knowledge and skills, if you wanna call it that literacy, numeracy, market pricing, et cetera. These were really important features of building a large-scale civilization, right? So I also think there is a thread that runs back much further than Prussia that we also need to address. But I still think what you are saying holds now because, and, and maybe this is far too techno-optimist of us to be going here, but it does feel, as you say, that you can never remove this feature. Just as you said, you want that for your kids. I want that for my kids. Of course they need to be able to be, you know, trained again in the kind of important social technologies of the day, literacy, numeracy, they're not going anywhere. And in fact, maybe they're becoming even more important right now. But the fact is the way that young people can acquire those competencies maybe is being radically shifted by the technology and therefore freeing up space. And you, I mean, you're seeing schools that even doing this now, still calling themselves schools, but they are doing this. And then freeing up time for something else. So what is that something else? What are those many somethings else that we actually want to be spending some time thinking about? What do we need civilizationally and in community and in relationship and in our families?

At the risk of going too deep down this rabbit hole on a short podcast, when we were exploring these first principles, my new role as CEO and president of the Pacific American Foundation, the organization that I'm a part of and leading is very much grounded in indigenous wisdom, what we call ike kupuna or ike Hawai'i, the knowledge and wisdom of Hawai'i, the knowledge and wisdom of kupuna, our elders. And we're looking at our organization around three epistemological views, three worldviews, three ways that we see the world. And we're conceiving of those three concepts as our first principles for education as we move forward. And not education, school, like to go back to your question, not what school could be, but really like our role in community, in holding together society and advancing together. And if I were to be super brief about those three, one is an idea of mo'oku'auhou, which means, it's a big term for genealogy., and we're, we're helping explain, you know, a one-word term using, you know, in Hawaiian, what we call an ʻōlelo no ʻeau, a proverb. And the ʻōlelo no ʻeau that we're looking at is kava ma moa, kava ma hope, the time behind and the time in front. And it alludes to, you know, what might this first principle be, or one of these first principles be, these core principles that as we move to the future, as, as we're moving forward in time, we do so looking backwards and learning from our elders, our ancestors, et cetera. We're, we're, we're moving forward, but we're looking backwards. So, and by looking backwards, we are navigating towards our course. And then as we look forward to the future, we're actually moving backwards. We are becoming good ancestors. So we face the future, but the movement that we're, we're doing when we're facing the future is backwards to become good ancestors for future generations. And then there's actually a third component, which is acknowledging the challenges and opportunities for the current generation, that our role is to help the current generation thrive as well. So it's this multi-generational genealogical view that we believe is core to everything we do that we instill in the next generation. So, you know, rather than what school could be for us, we're looking at what, you know, what society could be, what our role could be, what, you know, what humans could be, And that's just one of our three core principles. I won't get into the other three, but I think it's something like that that we need to explore in the future.

Yeah. Uh, that's amazing. I mean, it is interesting. I mean, I've been, I have different conversations on the podcast around adjacent things, I would say, from different traditions, different cultural traditions, or, and those things do feel incredibly important now as groundings. And, and yet there are a lot of people who are very uprooted from those things, right? I mean, you are there in Hawaii grounded in a place. In community. And of course that, you know, that continues to be massively disrupted by colonialism and violence and all of those things. And there are also people all over the world who don't feel connected to place or tradition or those, that cultural heritage that provides a sense of, or could provide a sense of guidance for those big questions, right? So it's quite interesting, right? As a moment where people are, I feel many people are looking around and just thinking, what is, What is around to guide me in my decision-making about these really fundamental questions right now, given that I've been uprooted from all these different kinds of traditions? It's, it's a really interesting problem, I think.

I worked at Maryknoll High School for 12 years, and the Maryknoll Sisters were some of my favorite people ever. And one of the things that they would always share as they worked around the world is this idea that we are all indigenous somewhere. And we need to know where that is. We can learn from that. We can learn from other people's indigeneity as well. But this idea that, you know, we should seek that place and know our place, know where we're visitors, know where we're home, and that we can learn from home. And them coming from an order in New York linked to an, you know, a church in Vatican City in Italy, that there is this deep-rootedness of each one of the cultures. And so no matter which culture we're from, there are all these forces acting, forces of colonialism, forces of cutting roots, forces of regrowing roots, and sometimes it takes a little longer to remember the experience of our culture for hundreds or thousands of years back. I really appreciated everything that they shared.

That's fascinating. And one of the other things that, somewhat related to this perhaps, is the way that we talk and think about the world. And one of the things I've really appreciated about your work is you highlight metaphors quite in really interesting ways about the way we use metaphors to think through, right? So the idea, I mean, you know, you've got some great examples that you've used in your work, obviously the landscape model being one in your book, but I think there's something interesting there about kind of guiding, connecting metaphors or disconnecting metaphors, depending on, you know, which ones we're using. But there's, yeah, there was something interesting there. So perhaps, I don't know, I guess I'd leave it open like that. If you— what comes to mind in terms of that idea of metaphor? And then maybe if you could give some examples of how useful that is.

Yeah, I really like working in metaphors, as you pointed out and have seen. And sometimes it gets a little annoying for people because metaphors can be really abstract. So, you know, I've kind of gone from, uh, hey, metaphors are the best, to being informed by one of my kupuna, one of my elders, Aunty Puanani Burgess, who's passed a little over a year ago, And she would really push us to think about the role of template, framework, and metaphor. And one of the things she would always, what would tell us, tell me, is, you know, that they each have their place and you need to know how and when to use each one. Templates are, you know, typically boxes that have, you know, a right, wrong, or approximately right or wrong answer that goes in the boxes. They're very guided. They're scaffolded, they're structured, and they're, they might, you know, to, to In one version, they're pretty low-end. They don't demand a lot of thinking, but you know, there is a use for them. They're really awesome when you need to guide somebody in what they're constructing. Maybe when somebody's new to a very complex idea or skillset, they, they can be really useful. Specifically if you're trying to get somebody who hasn't done something to a certain point on their own with some minimal guidance. And then she was saying in framework, framework is kind of like the skeleton in our body. We all end up looking about the same because we have a really similar skeletal structure. But it's really for us, the entity, to put the life on that skeletal structure. So she said, you know, really embrace the framework. Frameworks are awesome. They give us that framework. They give us the skeleton. It gives us the ability to, you know, be, be doing something that is functionally really similar, that my version of the framework, your version of the framework can and should be able to interact with each other. But we bring it to life in a way that's salient and important and customized and contextual to us. And then there's metaphor. And she's saying, you know, metaphor ha— plays an important role, the one oftentimes we don't go to enough, that it— metaphor demands a certain level of, you know, cognitive, intellectual, even spiritual load on us as we figure out, you know, not just how it works, but if it works. Metaphors don't always work in every case. And when we force them, are, are, are we forcing them to work? Are they working naturally? How are they informing Guidance of something. So, you know, to go to the book, Landscape Model of Learning, I think that the landscape metaphor is one that we feel is really, really important for learning. Again, like we said, beyond school, for learning, that as a metaphor, it can really help guide us forward. It's a metaphor that lots of other people have kind of tapped into for different ways. But yeah, I think Antipua has really helped shape my thinking with regard to metaphor and my use of it.

Yeah, no, that's interesting. Maybe I'd— it feels like it's an opening to actually maybe say a bit more about what the landscape model is, but just, just for my own curiosity, was the guidance she was giving you there about how much of that, those templates, frameworks, and metaphors are being inherited through cultural tradition and where's the, the kind of the agency for the invention of new? Templates and frameworks.

And yeah, you know, Auntie Puanani was kind of like my Hawaiian Japanese Yoda. She was about that height, she had the wisdom of somebody 750 years old even though she was not, and she certainly had this way of ensuring that everything she shared was deeply rooted somewhere in something that she could speak to genuinely, but also had this interesting way of being universal in some sort of way, and she was really special in that way. So, you know, her sharing of template, framework, and metaphor certainly wasn't tied to any particular culture. I mean, those are ideas that were expressed in English that I don't even know the translation into Hawaiian or whatever other language it might be, you know, and I think we'd have to actually reconceptualize the idea of template. There is— there are ideas for that in in another language, but she really did try to share things that were rooted but also really universal.

That's amazing. So, so interesting. So yeah, perhaps you could then say a bit more about— so if we are thinking of learning and work, whether it's in schools or more generally learning and more broadly non-formal informal education out in the world, homeschooling, etc., what would the metaphor of being in a landscape afford to our thinking about what learning is or what good learning could be?

Yeah. You know, this is the first— I'm excited for our conversation today because it's just so timely. I think this is the first time that I've been asked that question after really thinking about moving beyond that word school and all the trappings. Like there's nothing wrong with the word school, but all of those trappings we have assuming what school is. So it's kind of fun to think about that question you just asked. The book that we wrote, I mean, you know, it's formally kind of in this setting of like expanding beyond the trappings of the word school or the assumptions of that word. So, you know, the metaphor, the landscape model of learning, Jennifer Klein, co-author, and I sat around a couple times at, you know, conferences in the lobbies after we've, you know, we were presenters, facilitators, and participants in a couple different experiences and education conferences together. And we were looking at this, like this idea of access. We were somewhere and the topic was like, you know, universal. It wasn't universal access, but it was the idea of access. And we were like, This is so important, access, and it's also just the beginning. To set up systems where everybody has access is necessary. And isn't there something beyond that? Wouldn't we want everybody to succeed, not just have access? So from there, we, you know, we were thinking about this and really kind of getting down to first principles. And we're inspired by lots of work, including the work of Sir Ken Robinson, who was, you know, talked about moving from this construction metaphor to a gardening metaphor. And that metaphor certainly sat with us. The work of Sarah Fine sat with us as well as, and other people who were amazing thinkers. And so conceived of the landscape with 3 elements that education is not so much like a racetrack. As a young educator, there were forces working on me in my class. It felt like a racetrack. It felt like the principal waved a flag in, you know, in August in Hawaii, we start school in August, waved the checkered flag and the kids who were, you know, neatly lined up on the starting line. We're off. And they were all assumed to be in their tuned F1 racers zooming around the track. 9 months later, we saw where they all finished. We gave them a grade for how many laps they went around the track and how fast they went around. And my job was this like, you know, neat sanitary race director. And it would be lovely if that's what learning was like, but it's not. And we really sat with that and being like, teaching is so hard because we're working in a false metaphor. When we ask people to work in one metaphor, but it doesn't work for what the real environment— that's when the struggles happen. That's why teachers are so exhausted. That's why there's so many like struggles and complaints around teaching and how hard it is because we're set up in a false metaphor. That's not what it's like. The start of the school year, August, September, whenever it's sort of your school year is, January, Southern Hemisphere, whatever it is, you know, we're standing there on the prairie of our landscape and yeah, most of the kids show up there with us. And we're kind of off meandering, trying to form, you know, norms and habits together of how we do things and how we work together as a team. Everybody brings something to the landscape, me as a teacher, the students there, the environment we're in. And so, you know, context matters, the individual experiences of kids, my experience, where we are, the school, et cetera, all matters. That's element number 1. Element number 2 is the horizon and that the individual and collective goals of kids and community also matters that, you know, as we navigate towards these horizons, to standardize things really doesn't make sense. That we have— there's a myth for each of these elements. And the myth for the horizon is that, you know, I want well-rounded opportunities for my kid, but I don't want my kid to be well-rounded because that infers like filing down of their peaks to fill the valleys. Like, let my kids' peaks be their peaks. Let their strengths be their strengths. And at the same time, help them fill in the valleys. So we can help uplift areas where they need to grow, but also let them continue to be amazing in those peak areas. And then the third element being the pathway that, you know, we all navigate differently towards the pathway. And I think when we share the landscape model of learning, the book and the metaphor in general, what really resonates with teachers is, you know, I'm here on the landscape, I'm here on the prairie, and I'm moving, you know, 80% of my class forward together. There's always that kid. Over there like, "Mr., Mr., Mr." Well, you look around and they're like stuck in the bog way over there. And you're like, "Class, okay, class, wait, you guys keep walking, walk really slowly. I gotta go get Johnny." And I like run over and get Johnny stuck in the bog, pull Johnny out of the bog, and now we gotta traverse the stream to meet the rest of the class. And your choice is metaphorically, you know, okay, is it time to teach Johnny to swim across the stream so that the next stream we get to, he's got the skills? No, don't have time. Stick Johnny on your back, go meet the rest of everybody. And now you got Johnny, but Johnny still doesn't know how to swim. And as you go forward, you know, somebody else, you know, Katie, Kanoa, whoever is up on the hill being like, "Mr. Mr., everybody come look." And they have a different perspective. And then, you know, 2 months later, somebody else just joins the prairie, a kid joining your class later on. You know, life and learning is much more like a landscape. It is harder to prepare for learning to be that way, but that is what learning is like. And if we prepare for what is real and what is there, we're more successful. If we blind ourselves and think that learning is this like standards-based racetrack, it is not. And we're gonna bang our heads into the wall every single day, because we can't reach every kid, because we're not doing enough for those kids who need advancement, because we're not able to have enough time for those kids who really need our help, because the kids in the middle are losing out because of, you know, and again, these are really simplistic versions that we could go deeper into of ahead, middle, and behind. Like even those conceptions are just, I think, so antiquated. And I think the landscape helps us address those and unpack even those terms.

Yeah.

No, I love it.

Absolutely. And I was just thinking as you were talking, often some of the criticisms of those kinds of narratives are that, well, it's inclusive and therefore you're reducing the level of the common to the lowest common denominator. So you can make sure Johnny like stays with you, right? With the group. But interestingly, I was, I don't know if you know Terence Tao, the mathematician.

Yeah.

Amazing. Just unbelievable. I was listening to him today on a podcast and and he was just saying how, what a travesty standardizing maths instruction is because as he has experienced, there are so many ways to think mathematically or to work mathematically, either that are visual, that are symbolic, that are like through language, through code, through like so many different ways of doing maths. And then we say, we, as you say, we just kind of like monoculture that into this standardized, oh no, this is how you do maths in this school and you're gonna learn it like this. Irrespective of these, you know, people who could be absolutely flying with maths if they were thinking about it in a, or allowed the space to explore maths as a landscape maybe in a different kind of way, right? So it was just so interesting to hear one of like the greatest mathematicians in history talking about effectively the same thing, this like horrendous pull to, you know, regression to the mean. Everybody is like, we're trying to end up in in this strange place of average, which fits no one, as Todd Rose said, and also leaves no space for passion or exploration or whatever. So it's, yeah.

3 quick things, and they will each be super quick. End of Average, awesome book. Everybody should read it. My now 15-year-old, when he was in second grade, loved math. And I never had that passion for math. And I was asking him, like, what do you, what gets you so excited about math? And he's like, Dad, Everything is math. Everything is math. And it just kind of makes sense as a way— he didn't say this part of it, but I'm paraphrasing this other part— is it makes sense as a way to explore and understand the world. And as a second grader to have that love, and then, you know, have that love erode because of, like you said, the standardization of it is not so exciting. And then I think on that idea of standardization, I would challenge all educators because really good educators, I hear saying like, I teach the standards, we got to plan to the standards. And I would challenge us because really good, really passionate, really compassionate educators are trained to think and say that. And my challenge would be, and our challenge from the book, The Landscape Model of Learning, is what if we stopped saying that, I teach the standards, and what if we taught kids? What if kids learned maybe? And what does it mean for planning, for structuring? Yeah, that's a little harder. But what does it mean in the end for passionate educators, for amazing kids, for learning? And I think if we really just explored the opportunities of teaching kids being the lens rather than saying or starting from I teach standards.

No, totally. But I would also go to one of your other metaphors, which I think was, is really interesting and really made me think because sometimes there's this overly romantic Rousseauian idea that, you know, the teacher is there to light the fire and to inspire and to bring out this, you know, this amazing potentiality, realizing this potential of this young person. Sure, that does happen, but also there's this idea of the irrigation infrastructure, which doesn't sound quite so exciting. But I found that really interesting as a metaphor because that is also really important. So I'm like, I'm not explaining it because I'd love you to explain it because you'll do a much better job than me. But I think that's a really important insight hidden in that.

Yeah, actually. So being a conversation, I would love to hear what did stick out to you on the irrigation metaphor, even, you know, just at the surface level of it, because there's so much we could talk about. But I think that, you know, what stuck out to you about it?

Yeah, sure. Okay. So the thing I've found this, it speaks to an interest of mine, which I'll go to in a moment. But I, what I understood by that was that we can, a really passionate, committed, charismatic, and wonderful educator can pour the water on this beautiful flower that's in the desert, right? As you know, it's not growing and you, you know, this wonderful educator comes along and pours on the water on this, this child on this plant and it grows, it thrives, right? Isn't that brilliant? And that educator then moves away, something happens, that child, you know, progresses up to the next grade level with a different teacher, but they, that kid potentially is still in the desert, right? That plant is still growing in the desert. Therefore, there is a need for some forward thinking about not only how relying on these particularly passionate individuals who are gonna water these plants, but, but having a broader understanding of infrastructure, so social technologies in my language, this is where it connects with something I'm interested in. It's like social technologies are, they emerge, but they're critically important as human beings, as we coordinate, that we understand their role because an irrigation infrastructure would ensure over the longer term that plant, that child continues to thrive. And you hope they're surrounded by really charismatic and passionate teachers.

I'm glad I asked you because the idea of social infrastructure really helped me actually think, think through, you know, what I would share about it. So, you know, the idea that, again, metaphor, saying, proverb, a little rain has a thousand flowers bloom in the desert. It's a beautiful vision and it does happen, right? A tiny little rain can have, you know, thousands and tens of thousands of flowers bloom in the desert. And it's such a beautiful sight to see what just a little rain can do in parched environments. And I think it's really inspiring. And then, and then what, right? And then we, the observer, we, the investor in education, we, the, you know, consultant, you know, the nonprofit, the whatever, we walk away and we're like, look at the amazing good we did. That was a really cool Genius Hour that we inspired at the school. That was a really cool, you know, aquaponics project that we helped them do, a really cool art exhibition. And you walk away and that rain that maybe you helped inspire, you helped cause, you brought in. Goes away and kids are left in the same environment. And so really the idea was about ensuring that we are also looking at the infrastructure that's created. I hadn't thought through it in the idea of, you know, that, that's the social aspect of it. I'd love to talk to you more about that and get your insight on that. But certainly I think that as we do these things, it's a both and. A little rain does cause a thousand flowers to bloom, and we also need to think about when, you know, any of us who are lucky enough to be podcast guests, to work in this sphere, like, you know, I, I've been a school leader several times over and a classroom teacher for, you know, two decades. And it's just this amazing kind of like place to be now to have ideas, support schools. And I think we in these roles have to be really careful that we are not just a little rain, that we're also helping the communities. Create their own infrastructures and that we don't overestimate our impact when we help cause 1,000 flowers to bloom and walk away and then people are left like, well, great, next year, what do we do? That was a wonderful grant that got, you know, kids inspired and that, and now what? So I'd love to, you know, explore more with you about that, you know, the social infrastructure, because I think that that is the key that I need to think about more.

Yeah, no, I love it. I think you're so right. And I think there's a lot of hubris in the surrounding, the edtech companies, the consultants that, you know, that actually think they are are helping flowers to bloom and they're probably really not. Maybe they're, you know, and, and I think there's some really hard questions to ask around that. But I think briefly, the thing that I find interesting, particularly where we started this conversation is, so I think it's really beholden on us right now if we're sitting here saying school is no longer fit for purpose as a concept, as a social technology, right? As a social institution that has been designed and has evolved and emerged over time. Due to all sorts of historical and cultural political constraints. If not that, then what alternative infrastructures are emerging that will become the new infrastructure that will be needed to sustain this effort? Because it's not about a new pedagogy or a new curriculum. It's about, as Indi Johar, who's coming on the podcast this week, actually talks about the boring revolution, right? It's the, the boring revolution is the layer of kind of bureaucracy and social technologies that underpin everything else that I think is critically important. And it's not super sexy work, right? It's not getting up on stage and giving a big keynote or, you know, with your new shiny edtech platform. It's some really sustained work with community in place with the people doing the work, helping to understand what is emerging as a set of norms, agreements, ways of contracting, ways of being and organizing together that might be based on a different set of logics, right? Might allow for some of the, the blooming flowers, the thriving that we actually want to see more of that needs an infrastructure to sustain it. So it's, it's around that. My, I mean, thinking still very emergent around it, but I think it's, it feels like an important, significant piece of work.

Completely agree. I think we need a whole nother hour to explore that. That's amazing.

Well, let's, let's definitely do that. But I mean, just, just, I would love to ask you, cause one of the other things I I think gets missed often in this, that you speak to really powerfully, is the role of the educators in all of this talk, right? You know, Tim Logan and Capone are having this really big, you know, like highfalutin ambitious conversation about the future of education, right? So what, right? Because there are millions of educators doing the hard work in classes every day and in, you know, in communities and in all sorts of other non-formal and informal education spaces. But you talk about the reprofessionalization of education. And I think in really powerful ways, because I think that's a key piece. So yeah, maybe we could just kind of finish there thinking about what does that mean to you?

Yeah, I think I have one potential dystopian future that I don't think is a low chance of happening because I see it happening in this, again, privileged seat I have being a former head of school, getting, you know, these sales pitches from software companies and publishers. I see something happening in the market. I see, you know, huge publishers like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt buying huge student testing companies like NWEA, 50 million unique users between those two, that merger now every year. And that's just one merger, right? And, you know, if I analyze what the market is in my kind of amateurish sort of way, you know, you have educational publishers, $18 billion a year industry, I think something like that. I could be misquoting that number, that know that the firewall between their product and the consumer has fallen. Like there's no longer a reason to pay $200 for a textbook on a certain subject. I, I can put into any really good AI, you know, Perplexity that I use often, you know, create a textbook chapter on this chemistry topic for Capono. Here's his reading level, here's his math level, here's his past assessments, what he knows, what he doesn't know. Here's where I am, you know, here's cultural context and place context. Write the textbook chapter for him with some review questions and find some good videos. And it'll do that. And so this, what I see happening with publishers, education assessment companies is that figuring out how to commoditize student data, cuz it's been really hard to figure out how to make money off of under-18 data. We know how to do it off of adults. And I, and this vertical integration that they're doing, this kind of cyclical integration of testing, then informing learning. I have now lots of content I can give you, teacher. I also own a learning management system platform, an alternative to Google Classroom, and I'll pre-populate that for you. Through some really good AI technology. I'll give you an assessment that you can use, that assessment standards-based, because I, as, as a technology company, have created the assessment for you personalized, and it can now, I can now grade it for you. And because, you know, maybe we're PowerSchool or another company, we own a gradebook as well. I can help you put it into the gradebook and then I can, you know, give you the next unit for the kid personalized. That's not like fantasy. That's happening right now. I've sat through several of those. Pitches. And my fear— not my fear, what I know is happening is educators— it's really a red pill, blue pill moment where school systems, school leaders, us as educators, we need to decide, are we going to reprofessionalize education and really take back the reality that educators, teachers, are the most important profession ever to walk the earth? That, as my friend Ross Wenner from World Leadership School says, we're humans teaching humans to be human. Yes, with assistive technology, but like you said, you know, human technologies, social technologies are also important. And why education? If, if that's the case, we need to really spend time understanding the role of human and the heightened importance of human in system, or we're about to be taken over by a tsunami and our boat is in harbor. And that's not the place for a boat in a tsunami. We're going to be taken by it.

Yeah.

So yeah, I mean, that, that we're at a point where we don't have any more time. This is a this year and next school year conversation. 3 school years from now, our school systems will have taken the pill or not. These are not technologies that are emerging. They're technologies being marketed to your superintendents, your principals, your boards of education. Now I've sat through those marketings. Already. These technologies are rolling out now that will replace the education decision-making of educators and put it in the hands of technology. Is that bad? I don't know that that's bad, but it's happening. And we need to decide, do we want it to happen or not? How should it happen instead of just letting it happen?

Right. But I would go back to where we started in the first principles questioning of, so if this is happening, What then is important? Like what's guiding us and what's important in this moment? And as you say, I love it, humans teaching humans to be human, like 100%. Because I think we are like, I had a recent episode on embodiment science and embodied practice in learning. And I think what is also happening at the same time as those things that you talk of, and it doesn't have the billions of dollars and the, you know, the lobbying power and all of these things that the big tech companies have. But it, I think it, you know, me being wildly naive, I'm sure, but I think it speaks to people at a deep level, a level of a deep grammar of what it means to be human. That at the same time that that is happening, we are also seeing an increasing, I think a growing awareness of how unbelievably extraordinary it is to be a kind of sensing human in the world, right? To be in relationship with each other, with the world. Yes, it sounds romantic, but at the same time, it's true. We do this. We are doing it now. We are in place, in relationship. We are sensing so much more than we know. We're moving through the world in the most miraculous ways. Yes, assisted by technology, by, by artificial technology, by, you know, digital technology. But what are the spaces that we can create also that can allow for those things for us to really develop our capabilities in those directions and ways that feel— they don't have the same argument of productivity and efficiency and economic success. But we're also seeing some major cracks in those systems as to why we might need to question some of those narratives as well. So there's like, it's, there's cracks opening up in everything. I think actually it's a really interesting time. I think.

It is. It's super inspiring what you said. I think it's super hopeful. Sometimes I get, you know, sucked down into this dystopian future idea. But it is totally true. The conversations are happening. People are leaning into that. I guess I would encourage more people to lean into it with a deeper sense of urgency and hope that when we explore purpose of education, the human side of education, the first principles of, you know, what we really believe education beyond the current conceptualization of school. Could and should mean, that we have an amazing opportunity right now, an opportunity that hasn't been around for, you know, 130 years. If we go back to, you know, the last big shift in how education was with Horace Mann, and like you said, every single time before that, that this has happened, that there has been a shift in how the masses have looked at, at education. So yeah, what an amazing time to be alive and to have a voice in this conversation. And I think it's also, it's also a time where individual educators have more of voice and agency in the conversation than ever before.

Yeah, I hope so. I think, I mean, there are also millions of educators struggling in really deprofessionalizing, under-resourced conditions as well, right? So I agree, like the more we can do to invite those educators into conversations about the work that are more like this one, I, it feels like, feels important and not just talking, doing as well, building. And, you know, I think that idea of these emergent social technologies, these new institutions, they will come from many, many people all over the world building simultaneously and learning from each other. So that feels to me also part of the work and something that I want to be part of is how do we share the learning of what people are seeing, like what, you know, for example, you know, that you are doing at the Pacific American Foundation, what are you learning in your context? And yes, it's distinct to the place of Hawai'i, but it can also be, there is learning there that can also then support others to think, what does that mean in our context? And I just think, yeah, super exciting moment actually. And no, thank you, Kebrenna. It's just such a pleasure to be able to talk about it with you.

Thank you, Tim Logan. This has been a really fun conversation. Can't wait for the next one.

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