Is Systemic Change in Education Possible? A Conversation with Alex Beard

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

When I set off, I kind of thought, okay, I'm going to find the perfect school or the best teacher or the way of doing things. But then what I realized soon was there were different versions of education for different purposes. And what impresses me is people pursuing a particular purpose, taking other people with them and doing it to a high bar of excellence.

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us again this week. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. There are very different ways of doing education all around the world, and my guest this week has spent many years exploring and deeply understanding many of them. As Alex Beard highlights in this conversation really powerfully, does the purpose match the how or the process? And how does this align with the values of the communities involved? When there is so much ideological warfare and polarization around the questions of education, I think we need more wise voices like Alex who are deeply expert and evidence-based, but also strongly oriented around values and purpose. After starting out as a teacher in a London comprehensive, Alex did his MA at the Institute of Education before joining Teach For All, a global network of independent organizations working in more than 60 countries to ensure that every child has access to an excellent education. While building collective leadership and driving systemic changes from within and outside the education sector. Alex is Senior Director at Teach For All and leads the Global Learning Lab, supporting leaders around the world working to drive systemic change in the fields of social innovation, school leadership, teacher training, and policymaking. He's written extensively about his experiences in search of the practices that will shape the future of learning in publications such as The Guardian, Financial Times, and Wired Magazine. He's the author of Natural Born Learners: Our Incredible Capacity to Learn and How We Can Harness It. And he wrote and presented The Learning Revolution, a 3-part series on the future of education for BBC Radio 4. You can find more links to Alex's work in the show notes. And I've also had the privilege of chatting to Wendy Kopp, Alex's colleague and founder and CEO of Teach For All, in episode 79. So do also check that one out.

Hi Tim, how are you doing?

Yeah, I'm good. Very, very happy to be having this conversation with you. You've been, I have to say, if I can just for a moment indulge myself, a bit of a hero of mine for a while. I was joking with some of your Teach For All colleagues that you were a kind of an educational celebrity. So there we go. I get to talk to you now.

Oh no.

So this is super exciting.

Doesn't feel like that at all.

But no, just, I mean, you know, since Natural Born Learners in what, 2018? And then the brilliant Learning Revolution piece you did on the BBC. In 2020. So, you know, I just really appreciate the contributions you've been making to this space. Just really happy to be able to chat.

Thanks, Tim.

So one other thing, maybe we can start with, at the beginning of your Natural Born Learners book, you throw in this beautiful quote, and I just, I wanted to bring it in and, you know, maybe ask you why you chose that one and what particularly resonated with you about that. But it's the Flaubert quote, life must be a constant education. 'One must learn everything from speaking to dying.' It's a good quote.

Well, first of all, because I was a student of French literature and thought when I was at university, so I've always loved Flaubert. But on a more personal level, it encapsulated for me the idea that from the moment we're born to the moment that we die, our brains are in a continual process of learning, learning from our environment, from the tools and technologies that we have, from other people especially. So, you know, we are a species of teachers and learners, and our most effective learning happens in a social context. So that's happening whether you like it or not. And so then the question it raises is, okay, so what do we do with that process of learning as educators, as parents, as societies, to make the most of it, to direct it in the ways we want, to turn the attention of it to the issues that matter most? And so for me, it was just this beautiful— because it didn't come from an education context either. Here's somebody who is just a writer, someone who's thought a lot about the human experience, and they've noticed this thing. We're all always learning throughout our lives.

And I mean, the thing that it spoke to for me was almost more than that, that uses the word education. And I think sometimes education as a concept gets a bad rap because people bracket it as schoolishness or, you know, just formal education. And actually, you know, life must be a constant education. It's not just learning. I was like, people use the word learning in all sorts of different ways, but there's something I think, I've always thought, really, really powerful about the concept of education as a relationship that affords learning somehow. So it speaks to me, some of your—

No, no, I like that distinction. I think I wrote somewhere else, I bastardized a quote from Rousseau as well, 'Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,' and I said, 'Kids are born free and everywhere they're in schools.' And I agree with you, but I like the distinction between learning and and education. You know, I think, you know, learning is something that we're just kind of actively doing all the time. We're taking information from our environment. And for me, it just sort of exists. You can't help but learn as a human, like, whatever context you're in. And this is where you get the behaviorists, and they sort of see learning as this thing that you can, uh, stylize, control, and condition. And I think that probably is true of learning on some levels. Whereas with education, I feel like there's something there which is perhaps implicitly heading to a larger purpose. You know, there's some idea that there's some agency and some sense of purpose involved in that activity of education. And education— Flaubert actually wrote a book called Sentimental Education, Éducation Sentimentale, which is kind of about the emotional awakening and learning of somebody through their lives, who they're falling in love with, a woman they never, you know, finally get together with. But I like that idea, the idea that sort of it's building on something over the course of a childhood or a lifetime. So I like that distinction. And learning for me feels much more like it's, somehow kind of inherent in us. It's always going on. And I feel like it's a bit different to an education.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, the other thing for me, I mean, learning to die, right, is an interesting thing that Flaubert's bringing into that quote, right? And that's almost Montaignean to me, like, as I live in Bordeaux and Montaigne's a bit of a hero of mine. So sorry, this is suddenly becoming like a French literature podcast. No, no, we're not going there. But there's something I think, again, quite profound about that, that there's this kind of deep grammar of what it means to be human that is involved in, yes, the process of learning, but this kind of relationality, to invoke Bister, it's like a world-centered education. Like we have a relationship with the world that we are learning from and with as we co-evolve. I think that's educational. That, yeah, something, again, a broader purpose perhaps, as you say, but I think, I don't know, there's something, it's not just this kind of individualized, often view of what learning is. It's a bigger relationality that's kind of co-evolving.

And no, I like that. I guess it makes me think that you could think about learning according to different layers. Like, there's sort of some base layer, like, you know, the way that you learn language or the way that you learn to move, which you just learn naturally through interaction with the world and with the people around you. And we innately set up for that kind of learning. Then there's another kind of learning, which is to do with, you know, learning the tools and techniques to participate in the world as it is. And that includes things like reading and writing. You know, those aren't innate to humans, but we learn. Or it includes these days, you know, learning to use generative AI, or, you know, whatever it might be. And then there's another kind of learning, which is about the deeper questions of how to live and why to do things and of meaning that come, I guess, through a process of engaging with the wisdom that has been accrued over the centuries by our ancestors and our societies and that is inherent in our cultures. And sort of you get through to more of an investigation, perhaps one that can't only be individualistic, but has to be rooted in who you are in relation to others in our society and history and so on. And probably, you know, all of those things that were going on a little bit at different times. But there's, you know, from an educational perspective, sometimes helpful to think about those as separate enterprises. Albeit interrelated ones.

Yeah. And, and I think that's, I mean, I'd really invite people to listen to the Learning Revolution series cuz you've got knowing, teaching, and learning as the three different parts. And that was a really powerful, I think, articulation of some of the differences of opinion about some of those things. Like often there's quite broad agreement that we want to work towards, like maybe call it wisdom or, you know, some meaning in life, but there's radically different opinions about how we might enable young people to get there, right? And then, so you're interviewing Daisy Christodoulou and Katherine Birbal Singh, and, you know, radically different perspective on how to get there versus some of the others like Andy Clark or Rose Luckin. So it's, it's a really interesting view of that.

But yeah, you know, that was, that was one of my big realizations going around the world looking for outstanding education institutions. I think when I set off I kind of thought, okay, I'm going to find the perfect school or the best teacher or the way of doing things. But then what I realized soon was there were different versions of education for different purposes. And what you see in common across different institutions is, and what impresses me, is people pursuing a particular purpose, taking other people with them and doing it to a high bar of excellence. So you have, you know, you go to a primary school in Shanghai and experience a highly stylized math lesson. It's like 35 minutes long. All the activities are like 3, 4, 5 minutes in length. There's lots of call and response with the teacher. Kids are making things with, you know, bits of paper. There's some individual work time, and they're using a mastery learning approach there. And that mastery learning approach is all about getting knowledge into kids' heads, you know, whether it's for maths or science or whatever. And it works. Those kids do very well on PISA tests. But it is only knowledge. Like, here's a system where we're gonna take knowledge and knowledge mastery really seriously and do it really well. And that extends to the teachers who not only teach their subject, but teach their subject to a particular year group. So those teachers might teach the same lesson like 5 times to like the same age group in the same subject. So they're getting really good at that thing. What you don't get there is, you know, a lot of creative thinking, collaboration, critical problem solving. And if you speak to Shanghai policymakers, they'll tell you that's a problem that we face in our system today. They're aware of it and they're wondering what to do about it. On the other hand, you go somewhere like High Tech High in Silicon Valley, set up by a bunch of parents with sort of tech-adjacent jobs, like, how do we prepare our kids here to have the skills they need to participate in the world of tomorrow, maybe work in the tech industry, whatever it is? And that's half project-based learning, half kind of regular school, and it's these big interdisciplinary projects. And, you know, students are learning to make seed pods and make their own drones and like film documentaries. And it has a social purpose. Those students there are asked to look at the world around them, consider what problems they see and how they can solve them together. So it's a completely different purpose of education. A lot of the, the knowledge and skills that the children in, you know, Silicon Valley at high-tech high schools and in Shanghai in their public system are learning end up being the same, right? They're all learning some maths, they're all learning to read, they're all learning some science, they will, you know, that stuff is similar. But then the purpose is very different. Well, you know, there's enough difference in it for it to be striking, and that then leads to some differences in the how, how we then approach. Yeah, but it's all rooted in best practices. Like, you know, both those are examples from which we can all as educators learners learn a lot. But it's like that thing, like, does the purpose match the how or the process? And can you bring people along with you? And that was interesting for me going around the world, is, okay, so there are very different ways of doing this. And then it also makes a question, well, which one do I like best? Well, it depends on who you are, what your values are, what's the community in which you're working. And it's always going to be a bit of a negotiation, I think.

Yeah. And I mean, that's an incredibly— it's an amazing and highly complex question, isn't it? Because it's You know, who gets to decide, right? Is it up to parents? Then you get back, you know, get into more of a kind of free market approach to, well, let's just give parents the opportunity as consumers to decide what they want. And then the, you know, the most popular version of what education is will win out because that's what parents want to choose. Or should it be, you know, is there something, as you say, more values-based or ideology-based, some would challenge, that governments might decide that it's for them to be making the choice about what is available? So it's, I find that an incredibly complex complex question.

It's very complex, and at the moment it's a very live issue. So in our work at Teach For All, we are firmly behind the idea of what we call developing contextual visions. So whether you're a teacher or a school leader or a local, you know, civil society leader or a policymaker, we advocate for a kind of consultative, deliberative approach to establishing that sense of purpose. That we believe in general that the purpose of education is a little bit restrictive in most systems. There's kind of a we think, an overly narrow focus on a sort of core set of knowledge and skills. And you see that with the debates around foundational learning, though of course you understand why people are saying that, because it is very important for kids to learn to read and to be able to do maths. So we proposed that whoever you are, you bring together the stakeholders in the system, whether they be parents or students or, you know, business leaders or whatever it might be, whoever that constituent group is, to do some deliberating. What do we think the purpose of education is here? Like, what are the opportunities? What are the needs that we see around us?

What do people want?

What's the What's the context? What's the history of this place? Like, who needs to be at this table to begin to shape that story? And, you know, we see that working beautifully, you know, around our network where we have these sort of mission-driven teachers, school leaders, policymakers doing that stuff at the level of whole systems in Peru, in their kind of, in Ancash, in the Andes there. In Delhi, that's kind of happened at a whole system level, in lots of our classrooms, in school systems, and in different places. And it leads to this, you know, we want to develop kids to change the world and do better. And, and it's also on the other side of the coin, what you see in, you know, Arkansas in the US right now, a large number of parents who don't like the way that the wind is blowing sort of culturally, deciding that what we want for our kids is creationism. And like, so then it is very complex, because in the end, whose values, you know, get to determine like what happens in the classroom and in the school. And, you know, over here we're saying it's fine for these parents to decide, but over here, but for these parents, no, no, they can't decide, we think they're wrong. So we should— it's quite tricky.

It is, right? Because, yeah, because if you genuinely value pluralism as an ideal— not everybody does, but that's something that I find quite compelling— you then inevitably will end up with some aspects within that pluralism that you really fundamentally disagree with. So, you know, there is— how do you hold the boundaries around that. So that's, I mean, that's a fascinating question, but also I would, what you were saying there, it felt to me like collective leadership is the how as well as the what in a way, right? Like, because collective leadership, obviously, and I spoke to Wendy on the podcast a couple of years ago a bit about collective leadership, but I know that's an incredibly powerful and important concept for you, for Teach For All. But in what you were just saying, it struck me that the collective leadership is also the muscle that's being built by the deliberative process, right?

Yes, so in my role at Teach For All, I get to work with thousands of leaders across more than 60 countries in our network to ask two questions really. What are we learning about how system change in education really comes about? Like what really makes that happen behind the scenes? Like what are the real drivers? And secondly, what's the leadership that we need to get more of that change in our systems? Like those are kind of the two big questions. And I spent years, I've been very fortunate to spend years working with these leaders who are a range of people in different countries. They might be a teacher in a class, they might be a student leader, they might be someone running a school network, they might be a policymaker working, you know, for national government or local government. And we like to bring these quite diverse groups of people together to ask these questions. And, you know, when I was a teacher, I used to think we're going to solve this problem of educational equity, or we're going to transform our systems to better meet the needs of the future. If we can just recruit and train like many, many more teachers. And then I saw this talk from Dylan William. He's like, there is no teacher island with the magic teachers waiting to join your system. You have to work with the teachers in the system. Oh yeah, of course that's true. You know, we're not going to get suddenly globally 150 million new teachers to replace. No, no, we have— of course it's the teachers who are there. And they're like, okay, what we then need to do is to get the government to pass some like new policies. That's going to transform everything. And then I like just reflected on my own experience as a teacher. I was like, hold on a minute, am I not sitting here as a teacher lamenting the ineffectual efforts of government to ever change anything? And I don't— big national agenda on wellbeing becomes, you know, an A4 printout on my classroom wall that I pay no attention to. You're like, okay, so actually it's not policy, it's not policy. And I was like, no, delivery, like that Michael Barber stuff, that it's like how you implement the thing. And then I was like, no, no, no. And so over time I was like, no, all of these methods for improving education, like they're all very flawed. And so what I came to realize through these conversations with people everywhere is the way you change systems is not just with the focus on the technical system, the policy, the program, the teacher training approach. It's the people side of things. It's the culture in the system, the purpose the system is working towards. It's the relationships, the power, like how the system learns, how it evolves. And then you, what you come to realize, what I came to realize is that an education system is a human system. An education system is made up of literally many millions of people. And people, their daily habits are not determined by a policy, they're determined by their beliefs, their abilities, their connections, their relationships, their biases, their friendships, you know, their culture, like their own stories. Like all of these things are what's determining what goes on in a classroom for a kid or for a teacher or for a school leader from day to day. And once you kind of have that realization, you realize, oh, hold on a minute, education system change can't come just through policies. It has to come through, you know, how we motivate people, how we build shared purpose, how we strengthen connections, how we include how we include more people in the process of change, how we give agency to more people, how we learn. And that's sort of, you know, where our understanding of system change came from. So you do need the formal system to be working well. You do need good policies. You do need well-trained people. Like, all of that stuff is important. But historically, that's all we focused on as a kind of global community trying to improve education. And like, what we're trying to do at Teach For All is like say, no, we need to put an equal attention on the people side of things. And that's where this idea of collective leadership comes in. Like, we sort of broadly say what you need to improve education is people at all levels of the an ecosystem around children who are diverse and representing different backgrounds, working together towards a clear shared purpose to change education, to complement the stuff that's happening. And sort of, we think collective leadership sort of creates, you know, the fertile ground in which some of those more technical interventions and approaches might be more likely to take root.

Yeah, no, that's amazing. And I'll share the link to the Missing Piece report because a lot of what you've just articulated is really powerfully laid out there. And I just, maybe if I pick up on a couple of things, one is what you said about the wider ecosystem around children, because I think as you're articulating this complex web of interconnected pieces that, you know, the way I show up today is also a bit different to the way I might show up next week because I'm a complex ecosystem myself, you know? So there's that interacting with the wider ecosystem. And often we treat then the school system as if we're talking just about formal education, as a differentiable aspect, as a thing with boundaries. And it's not really because there is this wider, as you say in the report, the wider ecosystem around children, which is parenting and it's healthcare and it's, you know, how they spend their holiday time and where are they living, what are they eating and how are they sleeping? And all of these very human aspects that all have their own habits and dynamics. And so it's like it explodes into just an insanely complex web. So the idea of where, I mean, I think that's so much of what goes on is the idea of where to intervene in the system to have the most impact is a huge and alive question for so many people that we work with, right? In our networks. And in a way, the way I kind of hear you talk about collective leadership is we need people intervening at multiple aspects of the system in order to shift, but inevitably that won't be one coordinated direction because there won't necessarily be clear shared purpose.

I think, you know, one of the things that all of us, you know, working in education globally, I think, go around or try to make progress on but struggle to is that sense of a shared narrative. And it's difficult, as you say, if you're a pluralist, you believe in that different, you know, there being diversity being a strength. But I think we've always lacked at a global level and also in most countries around the world. A positive, motivating story about education. Well, at least we have in modern times. There are some exceptions. If you look at Estonia or Finland or Singapore, these countries, you know, they tend to be a bit smaller and more homogenous, but where education has rapidly improved over time, there's always been this powerful shared story that we are going to become an educated country. And that there's no one more important in our society than our teachers. Whether we're preparing ourselves for the knowledge economy of the future, or we're building our nation to stand up to threats from, you know, bigger powers, it's about us, our people, and our teachers are the ones that are helping to build that people. And I firmly believe that. I think our teachers globally are our most important resource in our societies, especially in this time of climate change, of an explosion of AI, in the breakdown of social fabric and growing inequality. You know, we're running out of resources, we're running out of space, we're running out of land, we're running out of stuff. Like, our human brainpower is this unlimited resource that we have to cultivate. Like, that's the frontier, right? The frontier of the mind is the last frontier, and we can continue to cultivate that. And it's our teachers that do that. But we lack a sort of mobilizing narrative, a sense of shared purpose on that front. And we've tried things, we're like, there's a global learning crisis, oh no! And that doesn't seem to really mobilize many people. That's not really getting people going, makes people feel a bit sad, but then doesn't get any headlines. Like, you never see this education stuff like really cutting through powerfully anywhere. And I don't know the answer to this question, by the way. I wish I did, you know. If I did, I'd be a very happy man. But like, but there are places— like, I think there's an implicit narrative in the work that, you know, you guys do with the IB, a story of like who we want to be as, uh, you know, people globally. And I think it's a powerful story that people like, like, you know, students that are in it, teachers that are in are motivated by that story and mobilized by it. You see it in, you know, UWC schools. There's this kind of great sense of, like, companionship and, like, we're in this together and we're going to stay together and, like, we have this sense of purpose. So, like, these mobilizing purposes could be really powerful, but we sort of lack one around education generally. Like, all of the education stories you ever see are just about how people are, you know, teaching unions are a real pain, aren't they? Or, oh no, kids don't like exams. Or, like, the whole every public narrative. There's no celebrating of this stuff anymore, and I wonder if there could be. I wonder, because I think when these things first started, like the first Education Act, like the NHS, like these were big exciting things for whole populations, and like there were things to be celebrated. But now they sort of lost their luster a bit at the time when we most need to kind of invigorate that, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. But the thing that comes up for me as you're saying that is that often it's a, it's quite a tribal story, right? It's like us. It's how do we support our children? And the our, who are we? And as we're coming, I think I would hope, but I think many people are coming to a more of a planetary consciousness around there are certain things facing us, which we're going to struggle to deal with if we stay tribal. And then obviously there will be others who disagree that perhaps just it's in our nature as humans to be tribal. But that's part of what motivates me and perhaps also with as you mentioned, the IB or UWC, those kinds of stories around what does it mean to educate in a way that enables more of a planetary story to develop, which sounds, I mean, it sounds grand and ridiculous in a way, right?

But necessary.

Well, I think it is necessary. And at the same time, it feels that at the same time as the kind of the doubling down on the tribal in the populist narratives that we're seeing, There's also a kind of, you know, there's an emergence of things like bioregionalism or, you know, things thinking around post-nation-state ideas. And, you know, again, as soon as we start talking about the narratives, we then stray into the wider ecosystems around our education systems or around our children. Because you, in a way, you can't talk about a story around education without talking about nationalism or patriotism or Right. Right. So it's, it's an interesting challenge to think about what's the story around education that might transcend the tribal and transcend the, yeah, the national. Yeah. So there you go. Answer that one.

Well, you know, it makes me think, yeah, it makes me think a lot of things. It makes me think about, you know, what must be in common everywhere and what can be different by context or, or belief or value or region. And I think that sort of could help us understand what the project of education needs to be. Globally.

Yeah.

But, and like, you know, as we've already said, I think we should celebrate diversity. Like, the world is a healthier, better place where people, you know, come from somewhere, like, you know, lean on a certain tradition. Like, one of, one of the great sort of unifying education projects in history is the colonial education project. Like, let's get rid of all the languages and the different ways of thinking and the different ways of being. And that, of course, was not a happy story at all. So there's a version of that where it's like, 'Da da da, it puts these values and it's not good.' But it doesn't mean to say that the idea of the project, with climate change in mind, with the need to limit our resource use and find our happy doughnuts where we all have a certain standard of living, but we're not extracting too much from the planet and sort of find that balance, that seems necessary everywhere. And rather than it being like a trade-off between countries, there should be sort of some commonality, but allowing for difference. And I think Weirdly, I think, I don't know, this is just pure conjecture, but isn't that how kids see things a bit anyway? I sort of feel like young people innately sort of have this sense of solidarity with each other, perhaps because they're not yet engaged in the politics of the world. But you bring young people together across lines of difference and they want to get on, they want to see what's in common. They do have a lot of things in common. But they learn, usually I would say, after school rather than in school. Maybe it's through society. They begin to operate in a world in which those differences exist. And you become more and more, I think, as you get older, part of, you know, your home tribe, because the world is a difficult place, right? You have to make ends meet, you need to, like, support your family, you need to make your way in the world. And that is becoming harder and harder and harder for all young people today. So you start with this, like, Great War material, and I think we're doing, you know, we do an okay job with the universal values stuff, but it tends to be less universal values, doesn't it, more universal skills. Like all kids read and write and do some maths. Like, that's our big project. Somewhere in there, there's like global citizenship. Like, that's in the OECD talks about that, people talk about it, but it's not sort of at the heart of education.

Yeah, maybe for me, there's a lot that comes up around what you said about contextual vision in a Teach for All context. And certainly for, you know, in my own learning for the last few years, that has been coming up a lot. Like take the word responsibility, right? When I now think about that, I think about our ability to respond to context, right? Because often what the global or planetary scale education project has been, has been how do we decide on all the things that we want people to know and do, and therefore now we just export that everywhere, right? Maybe that's the wrong question. I think that's radically the wrong question because So as an example, Daisy Christodoulou, in your— I can't remember which episode, Knowing episode, maybe— you're talking about knowing that, right? So we want to decide on all these different know-that's, right? So then we argue about who should know what and what's going to stand the test of time, et cetera. And as quite a traditional educator, she then comes to, as you did, brought in with the foundational learning, numeracy and literacy, right? Probably the stuff that's coming up really rapidly through AI or these, you know, scientific advances now. May be transcended quite quickly and may not be around for that long. But the things that will probably stick around for a long, long time are the fundamental grammars. And you talk about it like the operating systems of our culture, right? And I think there's something there for me because I wouldn't say that those were knowing that, and that might be a bit controversial. In some ways I see, and as other people talk about them, things like literacy and numeracy are social technologies that have emerged out of context, right? They have grown from a particular context.

Right.

For example, I had a previous episode with Kevin Belene, who's a Navajo language teacher in Navajo Nation, and just amazing conversation. And just to hear about the Navajo language emerging from the context in which people were living, the landscape, et cetera. It's like this social technology emerges that enables people to respond to context, to live together, to communicate together, to commune and work together, all of that stuff. Stuff. And so it was quite interesting to me to hear Daisy go back to these really fundamental knowledges, right? Grammar, et cetera. But actually, yes, unless you want to export one particular language around the world as the only language so that everybody can speak to each other, maybe there's something else going on about these social technologies emerging from deeply from context. And how do we, how do we enable young people to learn Somehow that's how humans evolve and inhabit their surroundings and relate to each other. And then they discover that there's another language called Mandarin, or there's another language called Russian. And they, then they start exploring other modalities of this, of these. Anyway, so there's something there for me around the thing that transcends is the deep humanness of how we squirm our way through our environments in order to, you know, to live and be together and figure things out. And, and life wants to live, right?

I like that. I mean, it throws up a bunch of things for me that, you know, one, English language literacy has become a pretty dominant operating system for much of the global economy and global power. And so that's, that's a fact to be reckoned with. And how do you, you know, we talk about this a lot internally, do you educate the people to become influential within the system as it is, or do you educate them for the system as you want it to be? And what are the trade-offs in that decision? Because if you learn for the system as you want it to be, do you then leave that person at a disadvantage in the long run, given the way power works right now globally? Or do you create the potential for something new? And like, you know, I think that's the thing about education. There have to be trade-offs. There's whatever you spend, about 12,000 hours in school or something. That's a finite amount of time. It's a lot of time, but it's a finite amount. And so I think that's interesting. And then I also think what and how, and like, what's our role as educators in changing the functioning of that operating system? Because that operating system is so partial and it's so absent of so many things that could be useful to us as a global species today, you know, in ways of relating to the natural world, like ways of even like naming and understanding and knowing the world, ways of valuing other cultures. Like, you've— I'm sure you've read it based on this, but there's all the fantastic work by, uh, David Graeber, the anthropologist. You know, whether it's like The Utopia of Rules or The Theory of Everything, it's just such powerful analysis. And he has this big line which is, the big secret of the world is that it's us who made it as it is, and we could just as easily have made it differently. So this idea that like the, the reality that we all inhabit is contingent. It just happened because certain groups of people happen to acquire, like, ways of asserting their influence over others. And this is amazing. I think you could follow this amazing story of education through it as well. I think about this a lot. Like, you know, human societies emerged, whatever, 150, 200,000 years ago, we think, because of the emergence of language. We don't know how it emerged, but it emerged, and we were able then to share thoughts and ideas and knowledge, pass it down between generations, cooperate, innovate in ways that we hadn't before, you know, build on the sum of human knowledge over time. So there's kind of like an education element to that as well, and an operating system element, language. And then you have like 10,000 years ago, we go from being hunter-gatherers to beginning to have sedentary lifestyles because of agriculture. Like, you know, what came first, the agriculture or the sedentary lifestyle, we don't really know. But like that then led to the first towns and village, and the first schools emerged at that same moment because suddenly you went from having these like hunter-gatherer societies, 35 to 50 people, getting on, little hierarchy, lots of freedom, to be like, hold on a minute, we now need to organize our population. Some people are going to go and work the fields, some people are therefore going to be the priests, they're going to run things. We need writing to kind of track all of this stuff. Keep— and okay, then we need to teach this new thing we've invented called writing. People also begin to need to know their place. You're like this kind of person, you're that kind of a person. And then the story of our civilization sort of goes on from there of like, you know, this educated elite controlling everybody else until about 500 years ago, when you have, thanks to Martin Luther and like, you know, down with the Catholic Church, up with Protestant doctrine, everybody can have their own relationship with God. And by the way, we've got the printing press, so everybody can learn to read and access, you know, this doctrine that they've never had access to previously. Of course, it's a very Western story I'm telling, but like, then you have this other leap forward in our education systems. Okay, we need to teach everyone to read, literacy, we can like, you know, teach whole populations, that's going to give us a competitive advantage as countries. But it also helps us manage how our countries work. And then lots of stuff that's come since then has just been variations on that operating system. And it's contingent. We could have remained hunter-gatherers. We followed that path. And what have we failed to learn from all of these different ways of being just because this one became used by so many people? And I think especially now, as our societies, economies, countries, planet begin to fray, we should be searching to kind of like ask what we can learn from these more diverse ways of knowing.

Yeah, exactly. And I think you do that really powerfully in the first episode of Learning Revolution. And I would also say one of the things that we've forgotten often is that monocultures are really not very resilient, right? So the idea that we've structured— you imagine if everybody suddenly spoke English all around the world, what would you lose in terms of the nuance of understanding place and people and different ways of expressing what it means to be human in many other languages just by having this monoculture. And so you've, what you've gained in perhaps standardization and coordination potentially, you've radically lost in resilience and all of the richness of the diversity. Like this is one of the issues I have with the kind of the anti-woke backlash. There's a lot of it that is just a fundamental misunderstanding that it's not about diversity because we want to value value people and their difference. It's a fundamental human aspect of resilient systems are more resilient when there is a diversity of ways of being. And I think that plays out really clearly. And so to lose that, to say, we actually, we just want to double down on the monoculture again and have everybody be like this, do like this. Many of those ways of knowing never stopped, right? They've been marginalized radically and excluded radically and violently, but Many of them didn't stop. And now we're saying, you know, hold on a minute, maybe there's something we've missed here. We, as in the weird countries, the dominant colonial weird countries.

Yeah, I completely agree that there's this fragility that comes from monoculture. We see it now in the environment, right? You know, yeah, where we've been growing crops with fertilizers for years and the soil is becoming depleted. Like, I think we need to get our heads inside a similar metaphor in education, that diversity is strength, and like, that requires different approaches, different And the monoculture that we have currently, it also sort of indoctrinates us in an invisible ideology that none of us really see any longer, which is, you know, that education has to be about competition because humans are naturally sort of individualistic and competitive. And like, so we build our— most of us build our education systems in that image, and even our schools and our classrooms. Whereas again, that was completely contingent. Like, there's— if you look at the David Graeber stuff, he's like, no, no, you know, there are hundreds of different ways of being There's this idea that all societies had barter. No, it wasn't barter. Lots had gift economies and communal ownership of things. It was just a few of these versions of ways of being, but that's the one that's spread itself everywhere. And it's also the one that risks being spread even further with the kind of global education projects that we have in mind currently. And so I think it's at least worth questioning these approaches, because often that kind of knowledge-rich curriculum approach goes hand in hand with an invisible ideology that I don't think people would necessarily sign up to if they thought about it really explicitly. That like knowledge rich, but also the knowledge in the head of an individual child. So the individual can then use that to their own individual purposes as they go forth in life and the economy. Like that's the part of the story that no one says out loud, but is implicit that I don't know if everybody would actually ascribe to like, yes, knowledge, but you know, what end?

Absolutely. I mean, and I think part of that story is an individual capital accumulation., right? It's like I'm gonna accumulate my knowledge capital, my social capital, my, you know, qualification capital to get me to university. And it's whether you articulate it as competitive or not, it's a very individualistic paradigm of, of capital accumulation. And talk about a shared purpose, right? A collective story. What would happen if you articulated the purpose of education as enhancing collective decision-making, for example, as Indy Johar asked? Or collective wellbeing. This is not advocating for collectivism, socialism, et cetera, before people start, you know, start going there in an ideological frame, but just to recognize, as you say, it's contingent, it could have been different. And if we are going to think about different stories that might unite around systemic change in education, there are some quite significantly different frames for that sense of purpose, I think.

There's a school that I love here in London called the Totridge Academy. It's a kind of turnaround school, you know, 7 or 8 years ago things weren't going well, falling roll. Now it's like, you know, top 10 schools in the country for value added for students, quite diverse population. And kids learn a lot there, but the maths and the science departments are radically different. So the science department is led by a very strong, you know, sort of knowledge-based curriculum advocate, very strong advocate for direct instruction, and kids learn a ton in science, do brilliantly in their exams. But it's more that paradigm, individual acquisition. And the maths department, again, top 10 maths department in the country in terms of value added for kids over their 5 years at the school. All of the teaching is done in teams. So students at the beginning of the year put in a team of 4, and throughout the year they receive like no marking or, you know, feedback as individuals, but only as a group. Like everything is done together. So within the same school building, like different heads of department with different philosophies for learning, maybe different philosophies about the world that they want see out there taking different approaches, but both doing it like very excellently. And that's kind of that pluralism question of like, okay, so there are different ways of getting there. We all have different views who get, like going back to our thing about who gets to decide. And I think you never want the thing like you were saying, that's centrally mandated because that's everybody doing the same thing is very fragile. But you want to say, let's aspire to excellence. Let's invest in great people. Let's have a, let's have a strong sense of purpose. Let's interrogate our purpose, why we're doing this. As standard, and then let's allow like many different ways of doing education.

Interesting. And I mean, I think actually just to kind of bring it to the concept of collective leadership as a frame and the diversity of the Teach For All network, I think is a really interesting space to explore a lot of those questions because if the frame is collective leadership and especially with, as you brought in contextual vision, that's super exciting to me because then you can see what, what needs to emerge in each context. With great people, with real vision and purpose, and building the capacity of the collective leadership. I mean, yeah, that's a, I think, a really interesting set of woven concepts to then think, how do we support our young people?

Yeah. I mean, just in the, I was trying to think, where does AI fit into all of this? Like, you know, we don't have time to go into lots of depth, but one thing is there's a version of AI in education which inscribes the kind of current paradigm and makes it permanent. It's the one where, you know, because it's a bit cheaper or a bit more efficient, you end up with many more students doing much more of their learning in a sort of one-to-one interaction with a screen and a computer. And like, I see no evidence that the quality of that is suddenly going to be like, you know, incredible transformational. But there is some evidence it's going to be good enough for governments to start saying, oh, you know, these expensive and difficult teachers, maybe we don't quite— I don't think anyone's going to get rid of teachers, but maybe we don't need quite so many of them, maybe they didn't need to be quite so well educated. And then you build this more fragile version of the system. But that's because this stuff is coming from people with a vested interest in the current system, like very rich technologists and companies. And often what they're doing shows no understanding really or kind of sensitivity to learning. On the other hand, there are some fantastic and compelling examples of where the people in the system have a sense of the purpose that they're working towards. Towards a sense of what education is for, a vision for an excellent education, kind of tinkering and experimenting with these new tools and technologies and asking how they can be put to the purpose that they're trying to work towards, in which they seem promising. And there they're kind of part of the colorful set of tools that any educator or student might choose to use in their life today. So in that sense, they add something. They add potential. Yeah, like a new collaborator or a new toy or a new thing to play with. But I don't— I still don't see compelling evidence that like suddenly we're going to have, you know, kids learning 3 times as much sitting in front of a laptop as they would in a classroom. Like, that still seems to me like sci-fi or kind of like marketing bump by, by tech.

Definitely. Yeah, absolutely. But, but again, sorry to do it again, but to go back to Learning Revolution, you lay out— I mean, you talk about it as 2100. I don't think it'll be 2100, it'd be more like 2030. 35, but the vision that you laid out there. But actually, it's a technology that, just like literacy, just like numeracy, creates another set of affordances to— as Andy Clark talks about in that, right? You use notebooks to externalize your memory. It's like your— the affordances of the AI as the little girls navigating the world. And, you know, in, in the way that you lay out in that documentary, it's brilliant because that's how I see it really adding value, is that as another set of affordances in the way that we navigate the world Absolutely. But as you say, if it just doubles down on the current paradigm to do it faster, more efficiently, more optimized, then I think, yeah, then we're going down a blind alley very fast.

Agree. I'm sorry, I would love to be able to spend now another half an hour talking about the AI stuff, but I have to run unfortunately. But yeah, it's great fun talking to you, you know, it's very enjoyable. I've had a great time.

No, good, beautiful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us at Good Impact Labs, on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.