Learning at the Heart of Community - A Conversation with Andreia Mitrea

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The destination of the curriculum together with the parents, and it's based on a very real lived adult experience. So I hope this is going to remove us from that fake grade-oriented, exam-oriented purpose of schools. Just makes all relevance of education just go tumbling down.

Hi everybody, and welcome back to the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan, brought to you in partnership with Intrepid Ed News. This week's episode is a great conversation I had with Andrea Mitria, who is the CEO of Kalina Learning Center, a new educational project seeking to change the way people think about learning. As part of the Kalina Nua residential development in Romania, Kalina Learning Center is developing a new educational concept in response to the question, how might we use school to serve the learning of both children and adults. As the residential development and school grow, Andreea is leading the development of an innovative integrated adult-child curriculum. With a background in the corporate sector, Andreea is now an experienced educational entrepreneur. In 2007, she co-founded the Avenor College and Foundation, which has now become one of the best reputed private schools in Bucharest. Andreea is passionate about organizational learning and systemic approaches. And has a Master's in Educational Leadership from the Institute of Education in London. You can connect with Andrea through LinkedIn @andreamitria.

Brilliant. Well, thank you. I'm really happy to be able to talk to you.

This is amazing.

Me too. Yeah.

So exciting to be here.

What I'd love to talk to you about is Kaleena Nua. Such an interesting project. That obviously I've heard about through my work with you and McIntosh, but I would just love to talk about that project and your role in that, but also the amazing vision around it. Maybe to start off with, if you could just perhaps give a little description for people that haven't heard of what the project is, and then we'll dive into some of the specifics.

Yeah, definitely. And I'm gonna start by actually making a comment on what you just said, which is actually where the differentiation comes. I find it surprising that most of the people, just even in Romania, they still refer to that project as Colina No, although that's the residential name of the residential project. Colina No. We are Colina Learning Center. So yes, we have the same name, the same umbrella name, but what's really special about this project is that it actually blends how you approach creating a residential area in the middle of the hills somewhere in Romania, and there's almost nothing around, which means everything is possible. This is the great thing about it. And they needed a school, but now what we are doing together is we're actually realizing that the school is what can make a community and a residential project to turn into a really thriving, happy, great community, not just a place where you end up having random people who may or may not have good relationships together. So we're literally placing the school as the center of the community. I keep saying, the way I see it is that, and this may be related to Collina Nuova or not, this is a message for me for everybody developing a school anywhere. I think we are the last, the truly last communal institutions that we still have in society. Because where everybody in the end, all families with children, not people who don't have children, they end up being linked to a school. And then they stay there for many, many years. So, you know, if you have 2 children and they are 2 years apart and you go from preschool all the way to high school, you may end up being, I don't know, 20 years 16, 18, 20 years. So for us and the way, the way I see the role of a school is really the opportunity to bring a great contribution to not only the children, but the family and also the community.

Yeah.

Amazing.

So yeah.

Very cool. Yeah. That idea of the school being heart of a community and a public space and a public forum and a relationship building and is amazing, but you're doing it clearly in a really intentional way from scratch, right? From a blank canvas.

Exactly. And it's more than the heart because, like you say, we saw that the school is being the heart, it's about relationship. But we actually are developing a holistic curriculum that is everything that we need for the heart, emotions, for the mind, intellectual, for the physical, the body and the physical world, the physical and also for the spiritual. We actually have these 4 areas of development. So the school is not only the heart, For me, I also see it can be the mind, it can be the physical center of the community, and also the place where we can go for the spiritual needs, to connect to our values, to connect to our identity. So we're moving from the school being just a relational place from the community to a place of learning and development. So the school actually has 3 student bodies: the students themselves, But also the students are all individual adults. So every single individual in the community is a student. The family is a student. There's another learner we call them, and the community is learner. So actually designing learning for these three different categories of students.

Interesting. Yeah, that's really interesting. And that's, that I think is one of the really, I think you've said it like truly innovative idea of taking the role of the parent and building that, like really placing that at the heart of what's going on because we know clearly parents have a huge influence on the outcomes for children. Whatever school you go to, whatever teacher you have, you go home and you interact in a home environment and the parents clearly have a huge role there. But that idea of a dual curriculum— integrated, integrated, sorry, not dual, it sounds like they're parallel, but yeah, an integrated curriculum.

Yeah.

Is really an interesting idea to take learning lifelong, right? Really, truly lifelong. So what in practice does that mean? Because I'd love to get into some of the specifics of the learning centre and the curriculum and assessment and things. But before that, in terms of just for some tangible kind of visuals, if you like, of what— how does it look for the adults in the village? I've also heard you speak about taking a village to raise a child, a great village.

A great village, exactly.

To raise a child well, which is lovely. So what does that mean for the parents and the adults in the village?

To the extent to which I can, I'll share it with you, everything that we have uncovered so far, because like you said, this being the innovation to the greatest extent that we're going into, we're actually in the phase of research and development and also co-creation, just so you know. So I can give you an example of how we're going about doing it, doing this, is that actually when now when we registered and we have the first 12-15 families coming, which is great because we're literally in the middle of nowhere. There are 28 houses, there will be 600, but we only have 28 houses now.

Wow, 600!

Exactly, in a few years. Yeah. So we expect we're going to start slowly, slowly.

Yeah.

And we're going to figure out and we're going to create the best way of doing this. With the parents as well and with the community. So this is just to clarify. I also don't see— I think sometimes the schools, we make the mistake that we actually need to come with the answers and we're like this, you know, the source of enlightenment and learning. We're not going about it like that. We're actually developing this co-creation process. We have a development team and one of the main interventions and approaches that we see to it is going to be through coaching. And by creating a coaching culture, and we have a coach on board, and we're starting to do coach-like conversations with the teachers. All the teachers will be trained in coaching, but also with the community we'll have coach-like conversations. And we have a learning designer on board as well who's worked both with schools and with adults. So now, so we have the specialists, but now actually with the parents, we actually have two categories for subscription, for registrations. Regular families, you just come on board, but you stay Still, in the contract already, we included the parents as learners. So they actually signed the contract that yes, the child and the parents were all learners. This is what the child will do, this is what the parents will do. But we also have co-creator. We had a contract for co-creators. They have a lower fee than the other families, but they agreed to be with us. And these are the kind of things that we are, we are developing. First of all, we are developing our own learning model, which is those competencies that you need to be a thriving, purposeful adult, you know, on those levels: emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and physical. One of the things that we are doing also with the parents now is that we're actually piloting it. So they are the first ones that are going to look at them, try them, and say, "Is this really what is helping me to be a thriving, purposeful adult in life?" So it's one of the things we are doing, the destination of the curriculum together with the parents, and it's based on a very real lived adult experience. So I hope this is going to remove us from that fake grade-oriented, exam-oriented purpose of schools, which just makes all relevance of education just go tumbling down. So parents are developing the objectives, finally, you can say the standards, where we have these overall standards that are competencies for thriving purposeful adults. Also the way we are trying to do it now, we call them not teachers, learning designers, and we're using this Project-based-like approach expeditions. They are literally looking at the family. What is the family organically doing? And instead of just creating activities where the child learns a competency, and I'll give you an example, we will start focusing on the competency of developing great relationships. We are actually going to design moments that already exist in the life of the family, like the family, you know, the dinnertime conversation. We are going to turn, let's say, one of those conversations into a learning opportunity for the family. And we're actually going to, you know, sometimes they're awkward for families, they literally don't know. So we're actually going to design that conversation for you with our learning design.

Interesting.

We're going to give you a framework, you know.

Gets into some interesting territory of social engineering, right?

Exactly.

Very interesting. One of the things it made me think, you mentioned rituals on the, on the site where I was reading and self-leadership and these, but then these rituals that create, and I think that's That's a really interesting idea that there are, as you say, dinnertime rituals, if you like, or, you know, annual, monthly, whatever rituals that happen organically.

Exactly.

But harnessing those as learning moments.

Exactly. Because the one thing we're not going to do, Tim, in your father yourself, it's become almost overwhelming. I read this quote from this book on parenting, says it's a parenting now is almost like a condemnation. You are condemned as soon as you become a parent and you have to know all these things and to do all these things and everything else. So it's such a learning and development intensive society in which we live. There's an estimate from the World Economic Forum that adults these days for the different parts of their life but especially professionally, you need 100 extra days of learning. So we said, okay, the last thing we want to do is to say, okay, we're gonna give you extra burdens as a parent. This is the extra learning you need to do from our school.

This is your homework.

Exactly, this is your homework. So we said, this is also not the way. So we said, let's do it whatever you already need to do, whatever is organic, whatever is already there. How can we look at these rituals? Because every family will have them, even if we We don't call that that. They're already there. How can we turn them, just give them more richness in the learning and development opportunities, doing them more deliberately? For instance, whatever exists in the school, if you start looking at it through this frame, for instance, we're talking now about assemblies. Okay. We said, why don't we have an assembly once a month for the whole community? And if we're at the theme of close relationships, let's do a practice of conversations teachers and students and parents, so as we call them learners, everyone is a learner, learning designers, you know. And also, and how do you turn it into an assembly instead of just a place, you know, what it is in schools, of showcase, school-related, just focused on children. If we do it holistically, why can't that just be like a place of joy and gratitude, which is what we're missing. We don't have these places anymore, unless maybe you're religious and you go to a you go to churches. So he said, why don't we make that a place where as a community we come together to practice something but also to be uplifted in a holistic way? So we're gonna do like gratitude or appreciation ceremonies, or we're going to do something that is joyful, simply. So we go out of the craziness. So it's basically, I think I like the word engineering. Everything that already exists, if you just look at the true broader need that we have. Like, we need this holistic life and we all need to learn and develop. We cannot escape it these days.

Yeah.

So I'm sure that over the years we'll keep finding all these, all these new dimensions we can add to already existing moments, rites, rituals.

Yeah, amazing. And just, I would love, obviously from an educational perspective, really would love to talk about the expeditionary learning and these things, but just before we go there One of the things I'm also really interested in is the idea of inclusiveness versus exclusiveness, because this is a big one, right? You're creating an intentional community in an incredible place with an amazing, I mean, just an amazing opportunity for learning, for growth, for just an amazing childhood for these children, a family environment. But I've also heard Don, who's the primary investor, right? Talking about the fact that you didn't want it to become an international elite kind of ghetto, if you like, but actually accessible to Romanians who would— it would be desirable for them to come and live there. So I guess my question is, how realistic is that? Is that seeming to be coming through in reality? But then also, how do you balance that tension of being very intentional as a community without being cliquey or cult-like almost? You know, some skeptics might go there, right? But there are similarities with that idea, right? How do you balance those things?

It's one of the biggest concerns that I have, and I don't have all the answers to it yet. But we've made a commitment, I can tell you, even from the investors, because they are supporting the investors of Kolina NOAH are for now the investors of Kolina Learning Center. It doesn't need to be like this long-term. But one of the biggest commitments we made is to go into this really like mid-market fees, which is, you know, it's easy to do innovation where you attract talent by paying them a lot of money. And it's easy, even then it's not easy actually, it's hard to do innovation, but it feels easier when you know you can attract this talent, you know? So we said, no, we're just gonna, first of all, we know where we're gonna place ourselves financially. That's a huge commitment towards inclusive business. It's still going to be a fee-paying kind of school, so that leaves people out, but it is at the level of prices that an average Romanian family can afford, and it's much lower, I can tell you, than international schools. You know, we have Cambridge here on the door, so it's lower than Cambridge schools or IB schools or anything like that. Yeah, but some of the approaches that— what I looked at, and you know, I've done this before in a school in Bucharest for 10 years, and we ended up having hybrid Romanian-Cambridge school, and then you enter into that competition for salaries.

Of course.

You know, everything that entails. So I said, I went about it the other way around. This is the opportunity to start something new. Everything that— all the methodology, all the models I looked at were from public schools, just so you know. Like, expeditionary learning was created for public schools in the US. It's not an exclusive methodology for this very elite schools. The culture and the adult learning, it came from both directions, you know. Also, I see it's a necessity for parents and for everyone, and I know parents are more important than the school. Together we can do great, but parents are the first educators, and we will never be able— we can complement but never replace them. So we may as well work with the parents. But also, I looked at the outstanding educational systems and schools who have this coaching culture. Yeah. So I know, for instance, if I'm gonna give you an example, and I went to visit this school in England. Colbourne Atwell is the principal of this school near London who turned an underperforming public school in an outstanding public school with no investment in teacher training, no recruitment costs, whatever, you know, private schools goes into this. And how did he do it? It took him 5 years, and I think it's gonna take us a while, but he created this outstanding learning culture by looking at the cultures of organizational learning from workplace situations. So I think there are many interventions we can use in schools who have been working in other places, but we're just not used to it. We're just used to, I don't know, paying for things, making things more and more expensive.

There's potentially an interesting— as I've also heard Don talking about the participation of the parents and how much they're willing to participate and volunteer almost into the Learning Center, then there's, you know, maybe a different fee structure for them. So that's interesting. But also I had the question, will the Learning Center only serve the children of the families who live in Kalinānua, or will it also be accessible or open to anyone who wants to come, bearing in mind the geographic location of it?

For me, and also talking about accessibility, the solution in education is to make great education accessible to as many children as possible. So I don't see ourselves as going to be only there. I think, and especially for middle school and high school, I think you can have so many scalable models that you can create. Also because, and I know this is the kind of education we believe in, if you don't have the focus on the teacher teaching but on the learner learning, actually you can have teachers doing a lot as well. We don't even call them teachers. Teachers anymore. We said you're a learning designer. Your job is to design learning. If you make yourself redundant in a way, just because you end up creating these wonderful experiences that children are leading themselves and knowing what to do, then you can actually serve hundreds of children with the same— instead of tens of children with the same amount of teachers. So this is our model. We're just starting now with preschool and primary. Yeah, and preschool and primary, because of the ages of children, you still need to be, of course, near them just for supervision and their level of autonomy. It's normal. But from middle school and high school, I can see how we're going to have this model of outstanding learning designers that can be subject experts somewhere. But in many places, we can just have these coaches near children, and then you can, you can serve a lot. Yeah, I think, yeah, and it's one model that works.

Yeah. And so then let's, all right, let's get into the specifics of the experience and the way that you've set it up. Because I know you've been working with Ewan to do some of that and then some amazing people. And I bought her book.

Yes.

Olympia. Yeah. Amazing. And so it's based on—

In the US, who's a public high school principal who created an innovative—

Oh, good. Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah.

What's his name?

Doug Nader.

Doug Nader. Yeah.

Brilliant.

Fantastic. And so you've based the methodology on expeditionary learning, but you've given it your own twist.

Yeah.

Because I've seen some of that work. It's really interesting. You want to just perhaps talk through what that means in practice again for students as a process?

Sure. Basically what we're trying to do, and it's very encouraging and fascinating as long as you have this long-term view of learning, there's also a lifelong And you also think about parents, what works as parents. So how does learning work? We've actually tried to take these steps that work at learning at all levels, you know, so it's beyond learning a subject and then getting a grade for it and then taking the test. So we actually looked at how does learning work, and this is Olympia's contribution because this is what she's passionate about. She's actually synthesized the steps of learning, and we said let's just have an expedition, it's just a learning journey. And learning has just a few very basic steps. And the first one is whenever we want to learn something as adults, because sometimes we don't even ask children, "What you want?" you know, but as adults we would not learn something we don't want to. So the first thing is for you to be exposed to something that gives you an impulse to learn. So this is why we call the first step "Discover." And every expedition will have that step, "Discover." This is a place where we're always going to hear children and this is where they're going to feel, because learning sometimes is very different from what you think you want to intellectually and what you're actually engaged in. So Discover is to really go down to what's important there and also what does the world need because it's not— the world doesn't need a 10 in Romania, it's 1 to 10, and B, the world doesn't need a great, you know, so Discover, this is the first step, is what do I want to do but what's also useful for the world. So this is the first one. Then the second one we call it Dream. It's 5 steps just to tell them to you in advance is: Discover, Dream, Research, Do, Transform. So they're thought to lead to transformation. I think it's gonna put a pressure on us, again, to seek because it's not leading—

High ambition.

It's not leading to exams. Has something literally changed in yourself and around you because of this learning expedition? Or have we just created more bureaucracy like we have stack of papers and we feel successful.

Done.

And then we put them in the bin at the end of the year.

Exactly.

My children have just done it even yesterday.

All in the bin.

All my diplomas. My diplomas, I have never looked at them ever again. They're there somewhere, you know. Okay, so you discover, then dream is something that I believe is a very, very important concept. And I know this was the only disagreement.

Yeah, a healthy disagreement.

Exactly, exactly. But I believe, you know, like Martin Luther Martin Luther King, "I have a dream," or even me for this is, "I have a dream," and actually it was very hard for me to allow, give myself permission to dream first of all that I can do something big. Probably you had your own journey to get to the point where you said, "I have a dream and I'm gonna do this in the world." So we're going to create opportunities for children to dream big, like, "Oh, what have I seen? This needs to change in the world. Okay, now who's gonna change it?

What's your dream for that?" Interesting that it comes after Discover. I like that. Because often we put pressure on people to kind of know their purpose and know their dream and lead with that. But actually, sometimes you just don't know what you don't know. So you need some time to look around and discover, and then you can kind of formulate your dream.

It's nice. And also, like, discover— that's why it's also like, what really motivates you? Because you go directly into the intellectual, what do I want? It's almost like it's very frustrating. Some— you don't get the answer if you don't have this divergence. First of all. So dream is where you converge and you actually allow yourself to say, let's try to do something, even in these 6-7 weeks of expeditions, let's try to do something great that the world actually needs, that you want to do. But then you have objectives with it. And then you go, the other steps are more like what you traditionally, you can also have in this dream, you would definitely have a dream of having a great basic education. We also have standards, you're going to learn to read, you're going to learn to do math. It will be connected to something in real life. It's not going to be too connected. Do you have a dream to be an astronomer? Do you have a dream to have a business? You need to know maths, to be able to do budget and finances and all of these things.

So they're dreams that are individualized, personalized, or some of the dreams are collective dreams, are they? I just— that's a question in terms of the expedition. So in terms of the way you're setting it up, will children be pursuing their own expeditions individually, or are there collaborative aspects to that?

We think collaboration is something absolutely essential because it is in the world, honestly. I don't know anyone, no matter what they do, to be able to be truly alone. Even if you go into this research mode, you are actually collaborating with a whole global cohort of researchers of your time and other times.

Standing on the shoulders of giants.

Exactly, exactly. So we do also have the concept of working in crews, and we'll also have these limitations of, I think, are lifelike. I always have this life check to everything that we do. Is this like in life? Or is this just a school thing where we ended up doing this because it suits us? But in life you have limitations. How much you can pursue your own dream, you have the people around you, you have limitations from other people, your family, your partner. You can't always do only what you want. Or there's a big choice with that.

No, I think that's a really important aspect, isn't it?

So we'll have part of the conversation and also it's where we have the community because we actually want to to do some of these expeditions with the adults and with it, like, what can we change in the community? And then there will be a common voice that's going to be of all these individual voices. And there may be more routes, like individual, but there will be a common and collective approach to it in the dream. This is how I see it. And then you're going to research is more of whatever dream you have. And even in learning, there is a room for information, there is a room for learning in the old style, and this is in research, we'll have a lot of room for that. And then you get into doing. This is something for me, it's very important because unfortunately a lot of the old style education, the one I went through, was more like research. Nobody— I didn't discover anything, I had no dream, nobody ever asked me anything. It's basically just like a lot of research.

You definitely don't do anything.

You don't do anything, exactly. So it's like, okay, if our goal is like now How we discuss with the community is our close relationships. You know, we'll actually get into doing like, let's, let's see how we invite the community, how we meet families, how we practice this communication skill, how we choose the reading that is related to relationships. And then the ultimate thing in the end, and this is is going to be, I think, how we measure what we do, the assessment is what has transformed. What has actually changed. And this is where we use, we're now devising this assessment. I'm using also concept from the new kind of businesses that exist like benefit corporations or conscious capitalism where they are moving from one bottom line, the profit. For me, it's like the profit is the continuation of the grade. We have this arbitrary metric in school, a number.

And we value that above everything else.

Exactly. And then you go into businesses and you have this arbitrary— because money is our invention in the end, and that's what we measure. But now in business it has become— there are models, and I know some of them, to stop doing that because it has led us to a lack of sustainability and a crazy world because we're only looking and money. So it's triple bottom line, which is profit, people, and planet. So now we're going to measure in our assessment, then we're devising it. I don't have the answer to how we're going to do every single thing, but we'll have a triple bottom line approach to assessment, which is the first P is personal mastery of subjects. We need that and competencies and skills. So there is like, what have I learned, even information, but then you have people What was the impact of what we did in this expedition on the people around us? Has anything changed? And on the planet? With the resources that we used in the expedition, with the focus of the expedition, with how we moved, what happened in school and around us in the families, how have we impacted the planet? So we're always going to have like 6, 7, we'll see, different expedition cycles. We'll always check at the end, just triple bottom line approach.

Brilliant. That's really interesting because I think often it's that last piece, obviously the transform piece is the big ambition and that's amazing, but I think in the traditional sense, the assessment piece, it's the tail that wags the dog, right? It's the driver for the whole system. We often use that as our excuse for the traditional inertia of staying the same because of the exams and it's the universities and this is what they want, they need the grade to to get the entrance, etc. But I do think, as you were saying, that idea of being somewhat connected and true to real life, there are accountabilities in real life. And if we need to build those accountabilities into the system, because as much as we would love intrinsic motivation everywhere, clearly that's not realistic. There are things sometimes you do because you've committed to.

Yeah.

And you just have to, because you have a responsibility to do that, to come through, you know, and that's an important aspect as well. So I think that assessment piece is such a fascinating one in terms of how, you know, to be authentic, to true to that triple bottom line, but also then to maintain the drivers for the actual project as well, not just to recreate that same dynamic, but it's got to be there, right? You're going somewhere and then perhaps then you recycle around and iterate and start back in Discover because you've learned more.

Exactly. And you start with the same triple filter of people, planet, and also personal mastery of the subjects that you're studying and the competencies that you need to develop for yourself. But it keeps repeating, which is like real life. I wanted to share a moment with you. It was one of those Discover moments. For myself. I'm really happy that it was in a time of my life I was on a sabbatical, I was in between projects, where I stopped. I think this is why for me it's so important to have moments when we stop and kind of check and see what's happening with us. And sometimes it's from your body or this moment of emotions that you can reach out to bigger truths. And Tim Logan, I can tell you, like, the idea with the expedition, sometimes I think we're just gonna provide these moments to the adults, because sometimes in adult life, even if you have just that, the moment to reflect, it's already a big contribution. So one of the things that— the ways I think this is going to work with adults, we're just going to provide these moments. What each adult puts in them, it's for themselves, but we're just going to automate life-changing dynamics. They're going to be linked to the school dynamics, which is again very organic for the families who come there. But I wanted to share this discovery moment for myself. So I'm on this sabbatical. I had done that school before for 10 years. I was part of a team for 10 years. I saw children when they were 6 and then when I left they were 16. And my own niece, I remember she told me, because that's why most people start school, my sister started the school there for her children and I came along. And my own niece told me she was taking the IGCSEs.

Yeah.

And she was like, I'm very, very honest, you know, like how teenagers are, 'Come on,' she used a much worse word, but I'm not gonna use it now. 'Leave me alone with all this well-being and emotional intelligence. Give us a break because we know you're just training us for exams like animals are trained for the circus.' And we know and we want to do well on exams, but let's be honest, that's all we're doing. This is all the high school is about. So for me it was like such a pfft, you know. And I had this sense, that's when I stopped. And then I said, okay, I'm doing this sabbatical, what am I going to do next? And I'm at an international conference at ECIS, this group of schools, very fancy international schools. And I'm in this workshop about this new kind of schools that we're trying to create. And there were different very good schools presenting how they were trying this with a school within a school approach.

Micro schools and—

Yeah, exactly. Just make a part of the school like this. And opt-in for teachers, students, but not for everyone else. And there are about 30, 40 heads of schools, and, you know, really big international schools, the kind of schools that have hundreds of— tens and hundreds of millions of euros budgets, some of them. And they're very important, influential people to be in education. And they're people in position of authority, you know, they have thousands of students. If you take all the people there, 30, 40, you know, and they're very elite. As well, most of them, like you've said before. But I remember this moment, for me this is like a moment in my life I always go back to, where they're presenting a research on grades, one of these schools, and they said, "No, we realize, you know, they don't work and the other alternate assessment that we are using works a lot better." And then one of the guys in the suits, the head of school from there, starts laughing out loud and saying, 'Well, we've known for a long time that grades don't work.' And then everyone else is laughing. And for me, I had this moment, you know, it's like imagine you're at a conference of doctors and you have these people— doctors are people of trust, like Elsa Scholes, we have a responsibility, you know— and they would all say, 'But we know this drug doesn't work, but parents and universities—' this is how the guy continues— 'We know grades don't work, but parents and universities keep asking us to do that. So what are we gonna do? My family is like, if it's not the 30, 40 people in this room who have PhDs, who have lifelong careers in education, who are gonna change this? Like, who are we expecting? Who's gonna change this?

Yes, that's an amazing story. It's not gonna come from the center, right? The change comes from— I believe it comes from the fringes, right? From the margins. And has to, because For me, one of the challenges is that none of these ideas are new. And this is one of the things I find so interesting about educational change is that there have been progressive educational experiments forever. Right? Exactly. You're right. Maybe not forever, but definitely, you know, almost as long as there has been public—

Plato and Socrates. Of course. Yeah, exactly.

Even particularly when there was this industrial model of education. On the fringes of that, there's always been progressive experiments and there will always continue to be progressive experiments, except the ones that are beginning, I think, to see some influence and change, they're creating influence and change, are the ones that are showing that it's possible to do both and, right? It's not, it's always been either or it's always been like, we prioritize the child and their wellbeing and their flourishing, or we prioritize their academic and instrumental path to career life success defined by profit. And you know, the first, first bottom line that you were talking about versus actually that's a, it's a false argument. It's a straw man. There is a way, as you've talked about, to do both by having, as you said, personal mastery based on rigor and academic standards, as well as creating balanced human beings that understand themselves and can self-lead and these things. So I think that's where the change is going to come from, is when the system, if you want to give it this disembodied title, begins to see examples of practice where it is achieving big outcomes on both sides. Exactly. As well as we begin to change our expectations about what what success means as well. That has to happen as well because we've had a very instrumental version of success, I think. And I think that's beginning to change because of the future of work and AI and all of these other influences that are coming in. So sorry, I'm taking over now.

No, no, no, please, I agree with you 100%. I was about to go about this incrementally as well. If we can, when we can, we'll do more with the teachers and the parents. We know so much about learning and development from within schools, but parents are not specialists in learning. And universities, unfortunately, are not specialists in learning. Honestly, I realized that. I had this insight, you know. Most people in universities are researchers. They're specialists in other things, except for psychologists and university professors.

In their discipline.

In their discipline. So the only literal, like, the units within the world, the many, the place where this can change is in school. We are the specialists of learning and development. And why do I keep adding this word development? It's because it was late in my own life that I found out about development theories for adults. I don't know if you looked into this, like Robert Kegan. For me it was just a few years ago when I realized they have— their formalized theories and they discovered that most adults, 65% of us, end up at lower stages of development than all our potential. So that's basically most of us remain, they're called, socialized, you know? Exactly, that's a mindset. When we said the system, what are the rules, we keep doing the same thing. Whereas some of us, 30-something, get to this self-authorship, you know? Self-authorship is where I'm trying to have it now. I'm gonna do what I see is right. But going back to what you said, being socialized, listening to the others, following the system was adaptively very good for a very long time. But the thing is, in the ages we live in today, and this is why I think it's gonna change very quickly from now on, in the age where we live in right now, with the level of innovation, with the lack of certainty for our children, if we don't develop them into self-authorship, we are actually— that's why I told them they should sue us with everything that we know because we cannot— we're setting them up for depression, for anxiety, for failure, for not thriving because we're telling them follow rules and you're gonna— but you're gonna end up in a world that doesn't have any rules or the rules keep changing every single time. So we are morally bound Because school principles before, like the typical girls' school where you were learning, you know, I thought it's so funny, how to walk in a certain way, adaptively in society it was good for you, you know, in the end.

Good, but yeah, it served a purpose at the time.

It served a purpose, you know, now it doesn't serve a purpose anymore. But the only way we can do this at schools now that we know this is to bring teachers and parents along in the theory of learning and development. So it's for me, I'm doing this like this not because I have a dream, idealistic, it's because honestly I don't know how this will ever work any other way around. If we don't bring parents and teachers don't learn at the same time, there's no way we can succeed for children. So I'm doing this out of necessity, not out of idealism. Amazing, I completely agree.

And I think I was having a similar conversation with, I don't know if you know Valerie Hannan, wonderful beautiful British educational, just, legend. But she was talking about the, just the hold on the psyche generally, you know, the public psyche, that the narrative of the instrumental— get the grades, get that equals the university place equals the good job, that's the route to happiness. And it's that unlearning that narrative that we've embedded so deeply and helping parents particularly to unlearn it. And I feel that very strongly in the cohort of parents in my daughter's school, you know, in the French collège. I hear the narratives that are being discussed and they are just instances of that meta-narrative of instrumental kind of progress towards successful life. And it's a really interesting problem to try and unlearn. Pick and help bring parents with us to do that. Amazing. Yeah, yeah.

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