education system

And equip the next generation to become changemakers.

As a teacher, I witnessed how most children lose their love for learning with every additional year of schooling.

Many schools still operate on a purpose from a century ago — mass education to produce a conforming workforce. So we batch students by age group, expect them to sit quietly for hours a day, follow the rules, and do context-switching between silo-based subjects.

But what if we reimagined schools? What would schools look like that build on a new purpose of education that supports children in keeping and fueling their innate love for learning?

In 2022, I visited classrooms in different countries, attended global education conferences, and read dozens of books on education and learning.

Below are some of the world’s most innovative schools that push the boundaries of what schools can look and feel like.

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1) NuVu Innovation School — Boston, MA

At NuVu innovation school, you won’t find traditional classrooms and grades. Everything at NuVu— including the curriculum, the pedagogy, the schedule, and the assessment system — is designed around a new education paradigm.

The full-time school for students in grades 8–12 enables young people to solve open-ended problems with creativity, collaboration, communication, interdisciplinary knowledge, and empathy.

Learners spend most of their time in so-called studios, immersing themselves in interdisciplinary projects. Around 12 students work closely with their two coaches on solving open-ended problems.

Problems are not framed around subjects but themes and can include, for example, “The City of the Future,” “Storytelling”, or “Global Warming.” A student focuses on one single theme for two weeks. There is no hour-to-hour schedule. Instead, students and coaches learn and work from 9 am to 3 pm with the option to stay until 5 pm.

Within each multidisciplinary studio, coaches mentor students to develop their projects through an iterative process.

Students develop multiple solutions to open-ended problems. They learn the relevance of moving from one solution to the next, combining, exploring and changing perspectives.

Moreover, studios are designed for a feedback-rich environment that provides learners with information and support for continuous self-evaluation, reflection, and improvement. Learners can also access resources outside the school. For example, they can ask leading thinkers and experts, present their framework and receive feedback.

NuVu doesn’t grade students but assesses through portfolios. These portfolios are meant to show the student’s growth over time.

Through real-world problems, iterative processes, and constant feedback, NuVu aims to empower the next generation of makers and inventors who will impact their communities and the world through their work and ideas.

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2) Learnlife — Barcelona, Spain

Learnlife is not just a school but a community that aims to empower children to thrive in the future. Personal learning programmes guide learners through a self-directed journey of learning and exploring their passions, skills, and needs.

Backed by science, research, and site visits to over 100 of the most innovative schools worldwide, Learnlife created a learning paradigm of 21 elements.

These elements support the design of learning experiences that involve body and mind. One of the elements, for example, is ensuring the emotional, physical, social, cognitive, and digital well-being of children.

Learnlife offers year-long full-time programmes for learners aged 11–18. Individual learning paths are supported through technology, coaches, and an inspiring environment.

Students say Learnlife unleashes their creativity, makes them feel welcomed and heard, and helps them get a clear idea of who they want to be and the steps they need to take to get there.

What I love about both Learnlife and NuVu is that learning is active, not passive. Science is clear that children learn best when learning is active or “mind-on.” — focused and engaged through questions, reflection, or discussions rather than passively listening to lectures or watching videos.

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3) Prisma — Remote, online

Prisma is a personalized, full-time online school for 9–14-year-olds and aims to create the world’s most effective and inclusive connected learning network.

Prisma follows a learning paradigm that is socially connected, interest-driven, and oriented towards educational, economic, and political opportunity.

Students at Prisma learn through peer cohorts — a group to collaborate, socialize and learn with —daily learning coaching, and live workshops focusing on communication, collaboration, and critical thinking.

Similar to Learnlife, Prisma created its own learning framework that is fit for time and context and consists of the following:

• Foundational knowledge (language literacy, numeracy, history, technology literacy, and science principles)
• Powers (creativity, critical thinking, communication)
• Perspectives (global perspective, empathy & compassion, mindfulness)
• Practices (collaboration, design thinking, reflection, discussions, self-care)
• Mindset (self-efficacy, emotional awareness, purpose, growth mindset, ownership & self-direction, love of learning).

While their site states they’re a global online school, admission is only open to anyone who can operate in US time zones. So unless parents want to mess up with their child’s sleep cycle, Prisma is instead a US online school.

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4) Riverside — Ahmedabad, India

Riverside school reshapes education through its student-centred learning approach, practical curriculum, and real-world opportunities.

The school emphasizes developing humane skills and helps children build a mindset rooted in compassion and purpose. For example, the school’s Design for Change program focuses on play and exploration, helping children develop 21st-century skills and become future changemakers.

Riverside’s practices have been recognized worldwide as committed to raising changemakers willing to tackle real-world problems, including climate change.

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5) Templestowe College — Melbourne, Australia

Recognized by the Australian Education Awards as a secondary school of the year and HundrED, Templestowe College offers high-quality learning experiences within an inclusive and supportive community.

Templsetow college focuses on student empowerment and unlocks students’ agency — learners can follow their interests and choose 100% of their courses from more than 150 electives.

Templsetow college also rethinks assessments. Assessment is learner-centred and designed to support young people in their work and study habits, academic achievement, and academic progress.

As one of three parts of the assessment, students receive feedback on their work and study habits from each of their teachers three times per semester against the following criteria:

1. Readiness to learn: Do you come to class with the required materials, pre-learning completed and an open mind?
2. Behaviour: Does your behaviour help to build a focused and inclusive environment?
3. Participation and contribution: Do you actively engage with and contribute to classroom learning?
4. Academic effort: Do you complete all required tasks and actively seek to extend your skills?

For each criterion, students receive a scale statement, either ‘Exemplary, Consistent, Needs Improvement or Not Yet Demonstrated’ — demonstrating that learning outcomes are not fixed but depend on the learner’s decisions and choices.

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6) Agora School — Roermond, Netherlands

Agora School enables young people to lead learning. Classrooms feel like co-working spaces, kids aren’t badged by age groups but mixed through ages and backgrounds, and there’s no hour-to-hour subject change. Unlike fixed curriculums and learning objectives set by teachers, students at Agora set their learning objectives.

A student’s day starts with answering the question, “What do you want to learn today?” Other students will then help determine whether this learning goal is achievable in the set time span.

After this initial 30-minute start of the day, students follow their individual agenda. Personal coaches support and supervise the student’s learning process. The learning outcomes are assessed by coaches and presented to the student body, so everybody else can learn from them.

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7) Oerestad Gymnasium —Kopenhagen, Denmark

Orestad Gymnasium built a curriculum around real-world case studies, designed and taught in collaboration with the Danish Design School and the University of Copenhagen.

“We want to have teaching where the students do research and work together in solving real problems,” principal Allan Kjær Andersen told Tech Insider. “It’s not enough to give learners knowledge; you also have to give them a way of transforming knowledge into action.”

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8) School 21 — London, UK

School 21 is a state-funded 4 to 18 school set up to empower young people to take on the world. The school has developed a series of pedagogies and approaches that support students in finding their voice, developing deep understanding and knowledge, and creating value in the classroom and beyond.

Focused on teaching 21st-century skills, the school has three pedagogies in its curriculum: well-being, oracy, and project-based learning. School 21’s approach also includes targeted support for vulnerable students and reinforcing well-being provisions across the school.

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9) Think Global School — Four Countries a Year

Think Global School offers an unparalleled experience as students live and learn in four countries yearly. Education is place-based and project-based and organized around a changemaker curriculum.

Think Global students come from all over the world and represent various socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, gender identities, and belief systems. After graduating, learners apply their global outlook and changemaker mindset in diverse settings:

• Ayesha Kazim worked as a photographer and recently delved into NFTs and web3. She explored how blockchain technology could digitize photography collections and create a historical record for future generations.
• Yada Pruksachatkun became an engineer and data scientist, working on empathetic machine learning and making technology more considerate. She developed, for example, a tool which displays how well a company treats their female employees based on the pay gap, the percentage of women in the company, and reviews from women who have worked at the company.
• Kryštof Stupka had an impact right after entering university life. As a student representative at Sciences Po Paris, he pushed for a new health centre, making all bathrooms gender-neutral and free contraception and HIV testing.

When I spoke with Russell Cailey, former Think Global principal; I was impressed by how the school changed from a more traditional curriculum to student-led learning.

“Our shift to the new model was uncomfortable. We had to unlearn our teaching practice that we were trained for at university. I learned to deliver content, and all of a sudden, I got into a project-based learning world and was more of a facilitator and a guide through the odyssey of learning. It’s like teaching architects to swim — these are two different worlds.”

— Russell Cailey, former principal of Think Global

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Conclusion

Scientists agree learning works best when environments allow choice, exploration, and social interaction and where learners play an active role rather than being forced to attend and listen.

All the above schools prioritize active learning in feedback-rich environments that prioritize student agency — learners are in the driver’s seat and are supported with the tools needed to succeed on their chosen route — thereby demonstrating how schools can ignite and fuel children’s love for learning.

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Can this once-in-a-generation event transform education systems?

We’re in a global learning crisis that had worsened even before the pandemic.

In 2015, 53 per cent of all children in low- and middle-income countries suffered from learning poverty, unable to understand a simple written text by age 10.

In 2019, global learning poverty rose to 57 per cent.

For 2022, experts project 70 per cent of all 10-year-old children can’t understand a simple written text.

The reasons?

Manifold and often systemic — undertrained, undervalued, and underpaid teachers, access to education, an education financing gap, a lack of early childhood education, and poverty traps perpetuating existing disparities.

And last but not least the relatively recent realization that schooling doesn’t equal learning.

Even though more and more children attend school worldwide, many go there day after day, not understanding anything. Education systems leave a lot of children behind in learning as they progress in schooling.

So, do we really need to solve another crisis?

Yes, because education is the key.

Education and learning underpin almost all individual, social, environmental, and economic goals. If we solve the education and learning crisis, we solve many other prevalent problems, such as climate change, poverty, equity, and mental health.

So how can we solve the learning crisis and create education systems that enable all children to thrive in life?

In 2022, I explored this question from different angles — I interviewed brilliant people for my work with Big Change and Teach For All, among others. I gave a TED talk on learning, visited schools in Estonia, and attended education conferences in Paris, Salzburg, and New York.

This article summarizes what I’ve learned about changing education systems. You first get a framework to think about system change and transformation, followed by three things I took away from the United Nations Transforming Education Summit.

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“If you are serious about creating a safe and sustainable future for children then be serious about education.”

— Malala Yousafzai, Education Activist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

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1) What is Education Transformation?

To set the scene, we need to clarify two things — the difference between transformation and reform (and why it’s no contradiction) and a tool for thinking about systems change.

The difference between education transformation and reform

“A candle does not become a light bulb through many small improvements,” Dr Teresa Torzicky, from the Innovation Foundation for Education, told me during a joint project in 2020.

At that point, I didn’t grasp the complexity of her words.

As a former teacher, I felt improving what and how we teach young people is the most valuable thing to focus on.

I conceptualized and co-authored a publication on what we can learn in and from the pandemic for the foundation for innovation in education.

I co-led the Youth Entrepreneurship Weeks, an Austrian government-funded program we ran in 55 schools with 1800 students to unlock young people’s agency.

I supported the formation of a foundation that supports schools, and teachers, to enable all young people to shape the economy and society.

And while all these initiatives improved education systems, they were, as Andreas Schleicher labels efforts that don’t change systems, just the tip of the iceberg. The much larger part, he says, lies beneath the surface and concerns the interests, beliefs, motivations and fears of those involved.

Education reform, tackling individual problems, such as teacher recruitment, or changing individual inputs, such as updating curricula, laws, and infrastructure, is often necessary and can improve education systems.

But education reform doesn’t turn a candle into a light bulb.

António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, said in New York: “We will not end this crisis by simply doing more of the same, faster or better. Now is the time to transform education systems.”

In contrast to reform, transformation shifts the dominant logic of a system by revisiting its current goals and co-defining a purpose that is fit for time and context. Transformation then redesigns all system parts to coherently contribute to this collectively owned purpose.

So what are those things we need to focus on to create lightbulbs, not just better candles? What is required for education transformation?

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“We will not end this crisis by simply doing more of the same, faster or better. Now is the time to transform education systems.”

— António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations

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Systems Thinking for Transforming Education

Systems thinking is a set of theories, tools, and mindsets to understand complex and interconnected systems. Applied systems thinking can bridge the gap between reality and our visions.

One widely accepted theory in system thinking for change is the Leverage Points Framework by Donella Meadows. She writes about which points to focus on when aiming for sustainable intervention and action for system-level change.

Meadows describes these power points in increasing order of effectiveness. She starts with the tip of the iceberg, parameters that are easier to implement with weak leverage (infrastructure, metrics, materials). She ends with points that are harder to implement but have stronger leverage (goals, mindsets, beliefs).

The takeaway?

Systems lead to the results they are designed to achieve. Our systems are not broken but just a result of our systems’ design. The most-effective point for change is the mental models that underpin our system.

Hence, a shared purpose, an alignment on what a system is for, is critical to system-level change that endures over time. It’s impossible to transform education unless you know where you are headed.

Hence, education transformation needs to question the purpose of a system. Such a purpose is anchored in identity, values, beliefs, interests, and fears.

But revealing, redefining, and changing the purpose of a system is easier said than done.

Different studies and research from RISE show leaders often fail to change education systems because they aim to change the visible, lower-leverage elements of a system (resource flows, regulations, metrics) without changing the invisible factors such as the purpose (mindsets, goals, beliefs, and values), and without considering the interrelations of system components.

For example, in a country, Sarah leaves school without foundational skills. To improve outcomes, people from the education ministry ask: “What needs to change in this classroom for Sarah to have foundational skills?”

If textbooks are missing, government officials might decide to provide more textbooks. If teachers are undertrained, they might introduce more teacher training.

Yet, this symptom-only thinking neglects that teachers and students are embedded in a larger system. A lack of system thinking often leads to false conclusions about the cause (something I’ve unknowingly done before).

Programmes that fix singular elements might improve some learning outcomes, but without considering the wider system, they are likely doomed to fail.

Education transformation that leads to sustainable system change (not a better candle, but a lightbulb) needs to understand, address, and be coherent with the system’s structures.

So how to work on high-leverage points that can transform education?

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“All too often, programmes are designed to address one of these symptoms (e.g.: students drop out, teacher motivation), are implemented faithfully, and yet fail to improve learning outcomes. When a programme fails to have the desired impact, it is tempting to look for a devil in the details, some aspect of programme design or execution that could be tweaked to produce better performance. But often the devil is in the system, not in the details. The programme failed not because of a design flaw, but because of its overall incoherence with the rest of the education system.”

— Marla Spivack, Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) Directorate

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3 Lessons from the Transforming Education Summit

In September, world leaders, young people, and other civil society members met at the first-time-in-history United Nations General Assembly Transforming Education Summit in New York.

The Summit’s goal? Creating a global movement for education transformation that pushes policymakers to achieve sustainable development goal four (SDG4) — to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

#1 A Collective Commitment and Movement

While we’re not even close to SDG4, there’s a consensus on what’s needed to progress. Education transformation requires a collective commitment and action from leaders at all levels, students, parents, teachers, policymakers and the public at large.

But how do you build a movement, a collaboration between all stakeholders, driven by the public?

In an attempt, the United Nations asked governments to host national consultations to revisit education’s purposes and develop a shared vision, commitment, and alignment of action.

The result was a statement of commitment from each country (full list of all statements here and an interactive map here).

But what’s in these statements that resulted from national consultations?

The centre for global development analysed 106 country submissions and found teaching, learning, and teachers mentioned in almost every statement; Technology (or ICT or digital) was the third most popular term.

Is creating commitments a reason enough for bringing delegations from all over the world to New York (and justifying the climate and human resource cost attached to it)? How do abstract commitments and shared intentions reach the classroom level?

Critics have long been arguing the UN is an inefficient talking shop with insufficient mechanisms to keep countries accountable for their commitments.

Whether these commitments translate to impactful action at the classroom level has yet to be shown, but I can see three benefits through the Summit itself.

First, an international organization prioritises and recognizes localisation and grassroots efforts as mandatory partners in transforming education systems.

Second, the design of the consultations acknowledges intersectionalities. Transforming education requires cross-sectoral involvement, for example, embracing public-private partnerships or learning from evidence-driven system change in health.

Third, the global convening opened the stage for countries already successfully mobilizing and including the broader public in their transformation efforts.

#2 Learning from Countries Walking the Talk

At the Transforming Education Summit, many countries such as Belize, Niger, and Malawi demonstrated transformation efforts, but one country stood out particularly — Sierra Leone.

In Sierra Leone, 80% of the population is under 35. The country faces various challenges — teacher management with significant reliance on non-government paid and unqualified teachers, narrowing persistent gender and geographic disparities, a lack of resources at organizational units, and capacity building at the staff level. And as of 2022, 64 per cent of students in grade four cannot answer a single comprehension question on a basic text.

Yet, Sierra Leone envisions becoming a nation with educated, empowered, healthy citizens capable of realizing their fullest potential by 2035.

How? By making education a top national priority, supported through financial commitment and evidence-informed interventions and innovations.

In addition to this top-down commitment to education transformation, Sierra Leone follows a bottom-up approach and includes all members of society.

Sierra Leone was among the only countries to overcome visa and travel barriers and brought students, teachers, partners and civil society members. They all shared key insights from four years of transforming their education system at more than 19 formal events.

David Sengeh, Sierra Leone’s Minister of Education and Chief Innovation Officer, is a role model for unlocking young people’s agency, one of the key drivers for transforming education.

Sengeh shared how lucky he feels to serve the children of Sierra Leone. He even wrote a letter to all pupils in his country.

A letter is not enough to transform education systems. But a genuine interest in listening and learning from young people can shift mindsets from resentment to hope, which can translate to action and co-creation.

Sierra Leone also led consultations with every single district and many stakeholders, including parent organizations, teachers’ associations, disabled person organizations, development and donor partners, and government personnel outside of education.

Based on these consultations, Sierra Leone’s President Bio launched the 5-Year Education Sector Plan with clear goals and broad support to improve learning outcomes for all children and youth.

The Centre for Universal Education at Brookings which works with the Sierra Leone Ministry of Education, argued that the government’s vision was well placed given it treats the essential component of foundational literacy and numeracy as a floor, from which to grow from, rather than a ceiling that limits the aspiration for children’s learning

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“What do you wish for in your community, and how might you contribute to that development? What do you want your politicians to know and do?”

— David Sengeh, in a letter to all pupils of Sierra Leone

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#3 The Need for Intergenerational Partnership

We live in an era of youth-directed age discrimination.

Processes in society and education ensure that people of different ages differ in their access to society’s rewards, power, and privileges. Young people are often seen as minor to older people, their ideas under-supported, and their opinions not included.

For a long time, youth have only tokenistically been included in the policy and decision-making processes. They’ve been used to demonstrate inclusiveness as a “youth voice” without really giving them a seat at the decision-making table.

But as Rebecca Winthrop said at the launch of the Big Education Conversation: “Adults do not need to give young people a voice. They already have one. Adults just need to listen to it.”

More and more power holders recognize that education transformation needs to happen with young people and for young people, and the Summit was stated to be designed around Youth Mobilization.

The United Nations even launched a new instrument, the Youth Declaration, for all stakeholders to shift power to young people and lead us to an age of intergenerational responsibility, co-creation and co-ownership in the process.

More than half a million young people from over 170 countries contributed to the Youth Declaration; through in-person and online, global, regional, national, and grassroots-level dialogues.

The first of its type, the Youth Declaration requests 25 actions by governments for fully accessible and inclusive education systems — centring on the needs of girls and young women, refugees, persons with disabilities, LGBTIQ+ persons, people of colour, indigenous peoples, and other vulnerable and marginalized groups, also emphasizing the intersectionality of these.

And while the declaration is a great sign of the UN’s efforts to include young people in the debate, it’s barely sufficient.

As Restless Development argues, Youth engagement at the Summit was not reflective of young people.

I’m 29 years old. At the Summit, I mainly met young people my age, 25–30. But where were the truly young people? The pupils?

Moreover, young people’s involvement felt gate-kept from the discussions and events attended by current power-holders. The Summit launched seven initiatives, the last being empowering young people to be influential leaders to shape education.

Alex Kent from Restless Development argued that young people don’t need further commitment from older people to be ‘empowered’. Instead, global summits such as the one in New York should acknowledge youth power and then work with young leaders to draw youth power into its core.

Intergenerational collaboration goes beyond youth voice and sees young people as collaborators, or ‘co-agents’, rather than beneficiaries.

Big Change, The Center for Universal Education at Brookings, and the Lego Foundation worked together to launch a tool for intergenerational collaboration — the Big Education Conversation.

The Big Education Conversation, available in seven languages so far, is supporting people and communities worldwide to come together to talk about what education is really for so that it can change for the future.

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„We need a movement in the world that puts education front and center! That needs mobilization and voices amplified to help governments that are trying and move those that are not.“

— Amina Mohammed, Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations

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In Conclusion

If I had to break down everything I learned into four statements, they would be the following.

• Do we need to build back better or new systems? Reform and transformation are no dichotomy. We need both. But we can’t misuse reform to delay transformation. Instead, we must collectively co-define and build upon new purpose(s) for education while improving the existing system.
• Which purpose(s) to focus on? Different purposes of education don’t compete against each other. It’s not post-pandemic recovery or tackling the poor learning outcome, mental health, or girls’ education. Transformation agendas are not a contradiction but can go hand in hand and can cross-amplify progress.
• Who is deciding the why? And which voices are not heard? Young people aged 10 to 29 need to co-lead the change. Their ideas must be included through intergenerational partnerships and alliances, supported by organizations that know how to involve young people meaningfully.
• What’s the education equivalent to getting to net zero? We need a global metric for education transformation to hold countries and decision-makers accountable and learn along the way. A metric should be rooted in learning outcomes, as well as the health and well-being of all people involved.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us to radically transform education,” U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed told reporters ahead of the education summit at U.N. headquarters in New York. “We owe it to the coming generation if we don’t want to witness the emergence of a generation of misfits.”

With the Transforming Education Summit over, real work starts to happen. Whether the Summit will lead to global action to recover learning losses and transform education systems has yet to be shown. But we owe it to all young people on this planet.

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More Resources

• The Education Changemaker’s Guidebook to Systems Thinking and RISE’s Edsyclopedia
• The World Bank Education Statistics, The World Development Report 2018 on Education, and the Global Education Monitoring Report
• How Education Can Unlock Big Change
• Transforming Education Summit Knowledge Hub, the Youth Declaration, and UNESCO’s report on Futures of Education
• Big Change’s A New Education Story, and Brooking’s Transforming Education Systems: Why, What, and How

Kate Robinson and Co-Author of Imagine if — Creating a Future for us All

“As we face an increasingly febrile future, the answer is not to do better what we’ve done before. We have to do something else . . . We must urgently re-imagine education and schools.”

— Ken & Kate Robinson in “Imagine if…”

You might know Sir Ken Robinson from his TED Talk Do Schools Kill Creativity, which has been viewed 72 million times and is the most-watched talk of all time.

He dedicated his entire life to transforming education systems and remains the education role model I most look up to.

In this interview, his daughter Kate shares more about their new book “Imagine If… Creating a Future for Us All.”

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You co-wrote Imagine if… with your father, Sir Ken Robinson. What do you think he wanted to accomplish with this book?

Imagine if… is designed to be a short manifesto of my father’s core messages and beliefs, as well as a rallying cry for the education revolution he advocated for. In his own words, it is a “distilled view of the challenges we face, the changes that are needed and the practical steps we can take.”

In your Foreword, you say you made a promise to continue your dad’s work. What made you want to do this?

There were a number of reasons.

Dad and I had worked closely together for several years before he passed away. My background is also in the creative revolution in education, and I have written and spoken about it for a long time. I was founding Editor in Chief of HundrED, a Finnish initiative that shares global innovations that are already changing the face of education, and my company Nevergrey operated as Dad’s global head office for the past several years.

I had worked with Dad on many of his previous books, as well as several campaigns such as the “Dirt is Good” campaign for real play led by Edelman and Unilever, and The World’s Largest Lesson, which is part of Richard Curtis’ initiative “Project Everyone” for the SDGs. So, in many ways continuing his work is continuing the work I have been doing and that we were doing together for all these years.

Another reason is that he had such an impact on the world. He changed the lives of millions of people, and in doing, so created a legacy that deserves to be honored and to be continued. His message is too important on a societal level to just let go.

Millions of people have been touched by his work, and there are millions more who will be. There are still so many people who need the support and the confidence that he gave: that they are not broken but that the system is.

And a more personal reason is that it was important to him- his work was a fundamental part of who he was. He lived and breathed it, and the best way to honor his memory is to continue it.

In keeping his work alive, I can keep a part of him alive. We sat together and talked about it a lot in his final days, particularly about his manifesto…, and that brought him comfort. It brings me comfort when all I want in the world is for him to still be here.

Dad once wrote that “What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world, what you do for others lives on forever.” He dedicated his life to helping others, and the ripples of that will live on forever. He was a shining light for so many people, and it is my privilege to be able to keep that light shining.

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Dad once wrote that “What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world, what you do for others lives on forever.”

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Your dad devoted his life’s work to education and fixing broken education systems. He became the Pied Piper, leading millions of followers along the way. In fact, his TED talk is still the most viewed in TED history, still watched on average over 17,000 times per day. To what do you attribute his enormous impact and popularity?

This is a question that I have thought about a lot in mapping out Dad’s legacy, and I think there are three reasons for his enormous impact and popularity.

The first is that his message resonates. As he says in his first TED Talk (he did three full TED Talks and several smaller TED Events), if you tell someone you work in education you can see the blood run from their face, but if you get them talking about their own education they pin you to the wall.

Education runs deep with people — most people spend at least 22,000 hours in formal education, and so naturally it has a big impact on each of us. For far too many people, the impact isn’t as positive as it should be.

When people first saw that TED Talk, it gave voice to something they knew deep down but perhaps couldn’t name — that it wasn’t them or their children or their loved ones who were broken, it was the system.

It lit a fire because the issue is so universal and yet so deeply personal.

One of the first activities Nevergrey did was a campaign called “10 years on” to mark the 10th anniversary of that first TED Talk. We asked people to send in what the talk had meant to them, and we received thousands of messages. One of my favorite quotes was from a woman in Germany who said, “I felt heard even though I hadn’t spoken.”

The second reason is that he was so wonderful, and I say that with as little bias as humanly possible! Dad was funny, he was kind, and he was affable. He had a unique style of public speaking that wasn’t overly polished or rehearsed, that didn’t rely on visual support or excessive moving across the stage.

When he spoke, he connected with people on a human level. It shouldn’t stand out as being a unique approach, but these days it does. He also made people laugh — someone once said that listening to him felt like listening to a friend tell funny stories, and it was only when you walked away at the end that you realized you’d actually been told something deeply profound.

While I was finishing Imagine if… I read a number of books that had been influential to Dad, and while they are brilliant books, they’re also dense and difficult to get through. I found myself re-reading paragraphs multiple times to make sure I understood what they were saying.

Dad had an incredible gift for being succinct, he took big concepts and translated them in ways that were understandable to anyone. He took the very complicated topics of the education system, of the human brain, of intelligence and creativity, and made them digestible.

And the final reason is that he was authentic. He didn’t have a stage persona or an act. The man people saw on stage was the same man I saw at the breakfast table. In the “10 Years On” campaign many people referred to the first time they watched the TED talk as being the first time they “met” Dad.

They may never have met him in person, and yet they felt they had through the video. In being authentic, he connected with people around the world in a way that made them feel as though they knew him, and they were right to feel that way.

According to Imagine if…, the future will be grim unless we take action to change the course where we’re heading. What actions need to be taken and what needs to be done and how? Where do we start?

The first and most important step is to embrace a richer conception of human intelligence. Like any ecosystem, our cultural ecosystems depend on a wide variety of talents, interests, and capabilities to thrive. Therefore, we must actively encourage each person to connect with and make the most of their own abilities and passions.

Imagine if… is Sir Ken Robinson’s manifesto, summarizing his key points and passions. What are some of the bigger ones and why were they important to Sir Ken?

At its core, Dad’s work was a love letter to human potential. It was a celebration of what we as a species are capable of achieving in the right conditions. In writing the book, we highlighted ten “Manifesto Statements” that really summarize the key points the book is making.

The main themes of them are:

• we are all born with immense creative capacities
• our incredible powers of imagination are what separates us from the rest of life on Earth
• Education systems are based on conformity
• real life thrives on diversity
• we are in the midst of two climate crises: the crisis of the Earth’s natural resources, and the crisis of our human resources
• and no matter who you are, you are the system — if you change your behavior, you have changed the system, and when enough people commit to changing the system, we have a revolution that will change the world.

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No matter who you are, you are the system — if you change your behavior, you have changed the system, and when enough people commit to changing the system, we have a revolution that will change the world.

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The relationship between intelligence and creativity is raised a few times. What is this relationship and how is it applied? What are some of the myths surrounding both intelligence and creativity?

Dad said that creativity and intelligence are blood relatives: you can’t be creative without using your intelligence, and the highest form of intelligence is creativity. We have perpetrated several myths around both.

We confuse “intelligence” with academics and IQ. Academic work is one way to use our intelligence, which primarily focuses on facts, critical analysis, and desk studies. We can experience anything from mathematics to theater in a purely academic way, it just describes one way of looking at something.

The idea of an IQ assumes that we are each born with a certain amount of intelligence that there is not much we can do about it. We know much more about how the brain works than we did in the early 1900s, when the IQ test was developed, especially about the plasticity of the brain and how it strengthens and adapts depending on how we use it.

Intelligence is far richer than the concept of IQ can begin to grasp.

There are certain myths surrounding creativity, including: only certain people are creative; only certain subjects are creative; and you’re either creative or you’re not.

In reality: we all have immense capacities for creativity; you can be creative in absolutely anything, and many subjects that are traditionally thought of as being not creative, like mathematics, actually require huge amounts of creative thinking; and like intelligence, we aren’t each born with a set amount of creativity — if we neglect our creative capacities, they lie dormant, but we can grow and develop them through proper use.

What would Ken say is the core purpose of education and what would he include under this umbrella?

We each live in two worlds: the world around us — the physical world that we were born into, which was there before you were born and will be here (we hope) after you die; and the world within us — the world of our inner thoughts and emotions, our beliefs, and values, that came into being only because you were born and that will end or change when you die (depending on your beliefs).

These two worlds are intimately connected — how we relate to the world around us is constantly affected by our inner world, and who we are on the inside is shaped by our experience of the world around us.

Dad’s contention was that the core purpose of education is to help children and young people understand each of these worlds and the relationship between the two.

To do that, education should expand their consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities and cultural understanding. He also strongly felt that there is a new and urgent challenge to provide forms of education that engage young people with the global economic issues of environmental well-being.

Your dad compares traditional methods of formal education to an industrial factory/industrial farm. What did he mean by this?

Comparing traditional methods of education to industrial factories is a common analogy and one that makes sense. Education systems as we recognize them today were born out of the industrial revolution, to suit the requirements of that time.

Both industrial factories and formal education systems focus on yield and depend on standardized processes to develop standardized output. There is a fundamental difference between the two, however, which is that factories produce inanimate objects, whereas schools do not. Screws and bolts do not have opinions on what is happening to them during production, children and young people do.

Dad made the case that the more accurate metaphor is an industrial farm. Industrial farms also focus on yield and create unnatural conditions to create their products, but unlike factories, they are concerned with the production of living things.

Both industrial farms and industrial methods of education have success in their pursuit of uniform outcomes, but with hazardous repercussions. As Industrial farms are stripping the Earth of its diversity of natural resources, our education systems are stripping our children of their diversity of human resources.

What does he mean by rewilding education? What does this entail?

The process of rewilding focuses on creating the conditions for natural ecosystems to thrive and then stepping back as they do. The promise of rewilding offers hope in the battle for the Earth’s natural resources.

To rewild education we must create the circumstances for our human ecosystems to thrive. As the natural world depends upon diversity to flourish, so do our cultures, including our education systems.

Dad often said that great gardeners know they do not make flowers grow, they create the conditions for flowers to grow themselves. In the same way, great educators know they don’t make children learn, they create the conditions for learning to happen.

Rewilding education means focusing on creating these conditions. To do that we must reinvigorate the living culture of schools themselves. Imagine if… explores how best to achieve that in detail.

Imagine if… asks, so what does a thriving school ecosystem look like? What is the answer? What would his ideal education system and school look like?

It would be counter-intuitive to be overly prescriptive in what an ideal school looks like — as a school is made up of unique individuals and circumstances, each school as a whole is naturally unique.

That said, there are certain attributes that they may have in common. An education system is not successful because of tests and output-driven hurdles, it is successful when individuals are recognised, and diversity of talent is celebrated.

It is successful when students are fulfilled. To do that it must encourage a mixed culture within schools — of disciplines, of individual passions and the unique pathways they each determine, of the circumstances, each school is situated within. At its core, a successful education system celebrates and values the interconnectedness of our human ecosystems.

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At its core, a successful education system celebrates and values the interconnectedness of our human ecosystems.

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In Imagine if… you argue that it is possible to personalize education for every student, much like we do with cars, diets, and phones. Can you expand on this idea?

The first thing to say is that education IS personal for every person involved in it, in particular for students. Arguing against personalized learning is to argue against the very essence of education and learning.

Any educator knows that you cannot force a person to learn, they must learn for themselves. One of the primary arguments against personalized learning is that it is too expensive. In Imagine if… we make the case that it is an investment rather than a cost. T

he price of rehabilitation programs, re-engagement programs, and alternative education programs is sky high, and most of them rely on personalised approaches to re-engage young people with their education. If education was personalised to begin with, far fewer students would dis-engage in the first place.

There are many programs (such as Big Picture Learning, amongst others) that have been creating the conditions for personalised learning for a very long time. They are easily incorporated into school models and are highly effective.

Advanced technologies have made it even easier and have created more options and pathways. This isn’t a pipe dream — there are brilliant schools all around the world implementing techniques to personalise learning every single day — even within rigidly traditional models. It just takes the drive to do things differently.

Your dad was an environmentalist and naturalist. He had a deep respect for the planet and its delicate balance. Can you speak to this passion of his?

Dad often said that when we talk about saving the planet, what we mean is that we have to save our own existence on it. The Earth still has a long time to go before it crashes into the sun, but in the meantime, it might decide to shake the human race off like a rash. He had great faith in humanity and what we are capable of as a species.

I think a big part of his love for the planet stemmed from his love of people, but he also recognised the damage we are causing with our self-centeredness. He was a believer in Holism — that we are all interconnected and while we each exist independently, we depend upon the health of the whole. In order for life to thrive on Earth we have to take care of it.

In 2016 he contributed to a book by the Genius 100 Foundation celebrating 100 years of Einstein’s theory of relativity. It features 100 living geniuses, of which he was one (he is now a “Genius Inspiratus,” which I think is beautiful).

He wrote: “The lesson we most need to learn is that there is more to life on Earth than human beings, and more to being human than self-interest. Our futures all depend on learning this lesson by heart.”

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The lesson we most need to learn is that there is more to life on Earth than human beings, and more to being human than self-interest. Our futures all depend on learning this lesson by heart.

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Imagine if… is a call to arms for a revolution for a global reset of our social systems. How can this be accomplished?

The systems we often take for granted: political systems, education systems, healthcare systems, how we structure our companies, the way our cities are designed, etc. — are all human made systems.

Over centuries we have created them to suit our purposes, to solve our problems or facilitate advancements. The problem is that as a species we have progressed to the point that many of our systems are now outdated or obsolete entirely.

The good news about human systems is that because we created them, we can re-create them, and at this point in our evolution we urgently need to. To do this we have to harness our creativity to a more compassionate and sustainable vision of the world we want to live in, and the lives we hope to lead.

The beauty of the phrase “imagine if…” is that it is open ended. It is provocative rather than prescriptive, and endlessly adaptable. A primary goal of the book is to empower people to re-imagine our world for the better, so that we can begin to create a future for us all.

Imagine if… says that education must be revolutionized from the ground up and there is a natural ecosystem of responsibilities in creating change and identifies teachers, principals, policy makers, children and young people, and parents as the frontline. Is there a way for these sometimes-divergent groups with different goals to work together?

Absolutely, and they must work together. Education is a complex, adaptive system — there are multiple systems within the system, which constantly interact with each other. Without this communication, the system breaks down.

A big step in creating a healthy dynamic between groups is to align, so that they all share a common goal– and ultimately the primary goal of an education system must be to enable its students to understand the world around them and the talents within them, so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens.

Real power is with the people. By recognising that and by nurturing compassionate collaboration, we can redesign and rebuild our ‘normal’ in a way that is fit for purpose — for both our wellbeing as a species, and the wellbeing of the planet we call home.

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Get the book, Imagine If . . .: Creating a Future for Us All by Sir Ken Robinson PhD and Kate Robinson. Published by Penguin Books, March 1, 2022.