10 Things We Love About Education

There are a few things about the

education revolution that we discuss
repeatedly at R&D, committed as we
are to Albert Einstein's noble cause
nurturing the holy curiosity of inquiry
and the enjoyment of seeing and
searching by promoting intellectual
freedom and creative stimulation.
Although we do, on occasion, turn a
critical eye toward the nefarious forms
of coercion and conformism that
plague our schools and our societies,
we strive mostly to celebrate the good
in education, and to support its growth
everywhere, as old Albert would have
wanted. In this hopeful Einsteinian
spirit of liberation and empowerment,
here are ten topics that most inspire us:

Shel Silverstein, on radical experimentation and the

importance of challenging conventional wisdom:
You've really got to check these things out.

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1. Youth Power
We are confident that the
learning revolution will flourish
in the coming years, knowing
as we do the limitless nature
of the movement's ultimate
weapon: the power of youth.
Many education reformers
talk a lot about teacher
accountability and the urgent
need for great public school
teachers while failing to see
that there are many great
teachers sitting silent in schools

As children, our favorite superheroes were teenagers,

trained and advised by an inspirational
teacher and mentor, Splinter.

today, marginalized and disempowered simply because they are under the age
of eighteen and are labeled students. If administrators started re-imagining
the troubling 30:1 student-to-teacher ratios as opportunities for 31 potential
student-teachers to collaborate, labor and resource concerns could be turned
on their heads. Then, for instance, a 5:0 student-to-teacher ratio would not be
undefined in the math, but could be identified and celebrated as five students
helping teach each other. The truth is that students and teachers necessarily
create their learning environments togetherwhether or not teachers and
administrators embrace this factand we shouldn't underestimate the
awesome potential that students have to transform these environments.
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Despite calls for higher standards and high expectations for students, most
education reformers don't seem to expect much from even those high
performing students they championacademic success in most schools
largely boils down to memorizing content, passing standardized tests, writing
grammatically correct essays that nobody really wants to read, and politely
obeying the rules. Young people know this well, which is why their most
common characterization of schools is that they are boring. Students who say
this are only half right, of course, overlooking their own power (and thus, their
responsibility) to invest meaning into the experience of school, or to envision
and embark on a more fulfilling experience beyond the classroom confines.
School, like the rest of life, is largely what we make of it.
So, young people: now is the time to be the masters of your fates and the
captains of your souls! Engage with your schools on your own terms! Now is
always the time! Professional educators and other former young people:
inspire, encourage, support and collaborate with young people to build a more
participatory culture of learning!

Child prodigy Adora Svitak: Now, the world needs opportunities for new leaders and new ideas.
Kids need opportunities to lead and succeed. Are you ready to make the match?
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Here are just a few activities we will explore that young people are doing every
day to change the world:

Youth Research: All across the country,

students in groups like the Youth
Researchers for a New Education
System in New York City and the Council
of Youth Research at the UCLA Institute
for Democracy, Education, and Access
are leading participatory action research
projects to study school environments
and student attitudes and to design
solutions to complex school problems.

Youth Teaching: Thankfully, not all young

teachers are sitting silent in their
schools! Many are engaging in exciting programs designed to leverage
and support the unique power of young teachers. The nationwide
Breakthrough Collaborative (formerly Summerbridge) empowers high
school and college students to serve as inspirational teachers to younger
students, while receiving guidance and mentorship from professional
teachers. The nonprofit Let's Get Ready relies on college student
directors to manage its network of programs bringing college volunteers
into low-income high schools to teach and advise students, supporting
them through the daunting process of testing and admissions required to
attend college. U.K-based group We Are What We Do has developed the
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Young Speakers Programme to train teenage students to design and lead
interactive presentations at schools to inspire their peers and younger
children to use simple everyday actions to address social and
environmental problems. And students hardly need national
organizations to get out there and teach each other. The venerable teachin, popularized by Students For a Democratic Society in the movement
against the Vietnam War, has returned with a new importance in the
current movement against financial corruption and
inequity, as the impenetrable complexity of modern
financial systems proved to be an important cause of
our helplessness in guarding against the tsunami of
financial fraudulence that has flattened the economy
and left millions of victims financially devastated.
Youth Activism: Students have led massive protests
worldwide against educational inequity, budget cuts,
privatization, and the various other symptoms of our
generally antidemocratic educational systems and
societies. From Santiago to Rome, Glasgow to Oakland,
students have been mobilizing by the thousands to liberate learning from
the clutches of business and bureaucracy and save it from the ravages of
austerity measures. In the United States, education activism has
aligned with the Occupy movement, leading to the emergence of Occupy
Education and Occupy Colleges. In Chile, many schools have been
literally occupied (en toma, they call it), in protest against the inequities

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perpetuated by Chile's privatized voucher education system, which was

designed by the exiting Pinochet dictatorship.

Youth Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurs build teams to explore the

shifting sea of social needs and discover innovative opportunities to
create value (though notions of social needs and value may not
always be so high-minded). In many ways, young people are ideally suited
to this sort of challenge, and through programs like Ashoka's Youth
Venture and BUILD, they are indeed rising to the challenge.
Entrepreneurship training can provide students of all ages with powerful
skills and experiences to thrive in the demanding and dynamic societies
of the twenty-first century, whether or not they choose to become
professional entrepreneurs. Thats why the Kauffman Foundation and
Three Chicks Media developed a multimedia program to introduce
entrepreneurial concepts to children ages eight to twelve, which they call
All Terrain Brain.

From the Activity Guide for the Kauffman Foundation's All Terrain Brain, a multimedia project
designed to encourage kids to take their brains 'off road' and tap into their entrepreneurial spirit.

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2. Democratic Education
When we call for democracy in education, we're talking about participatory
democracycultivated daily through direct and unmediated activity by ordinary
people in collaboration with each othernot the watered-down, electoral form
of democracy which has given us in our national politics such an obviously
unrepresentative collection of mostly white, mostly male, largely millionaire,
entirely out-of-touch politicians who are only occasionally accountable to the
public during elections, the outcomes of which are undeniably
unrepresentative of the desires of the majority of the population. (This was,
indeed, the goal of the white, male, aristocratic founders who drafted a
Constitution exclusively for citizens who were white, male landowners. As
James Madison wrote with a great deal of satisfaction in Federalist #63, the
principal distinction between
American democracy and its
Athenian predecessors liesin the
total exclusion of the people, in
their collective capacity, from any
share in actual political decisionmaking. [emphasis in original])
So, what does participatory

Join the new movement for democratic education in

America. Read the IDEA strategy document.

democracy mean for education? Inclusion, rather than exclusion, of all

stakeholders in decision-making, with the aim of continually increasing our
collective capacity. The democratization of learning will empower students to
decide what, where, when, and how their learning happens. The democratization
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of teaching will empower everyone everywhere to share what they know with
others, and to continually develop their abilities to do so effectively. Students
should have an especially empowered role in teaching each other, as peers are
uniquely disposed to understand the challenges they face at their common
level of comprehension. The democratization of cultural and intellectual
production is exploding the traditional barriers to freedom of the press and
enabling a massive outpouring of valuable intellectual insight and artistic
expression from nonprofessionals and amateurs. And the rapid proliferation of
open source educational materials is enabling anyone with access to an
internet connection (which is, importantly, not everyone) to acquire the tools
necessary to learn just about anything.

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In the new culture of education we see emerging, learning will be commonly

considered to be central to one's entire lifenot just one's childhood and young
adulthoodand will be accorded the highest value and respect in society. Fulltime educators will be highly professionalized and highly respected, like
doctors, lawyers, designers, and consultants, but there will also be an even
greater wealth of part-time and casual volunteer teaching provided by millions
of people with skills and knowledges to share and the desire to share them.
The concept of the Education City, pioneered in Israel by democratic educator
Yaacov Hecht, shows a way forward. City by city, town by town, the citizens of
the world can take up the banner of the Education City to invest the spirit of
teaching and learning into every aspect of civic life, and to identify, and enrich
the processes of education already in action in their communities.

The idea of the Education City holds revolutionary potential as an approach to transforming education.

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3. Design Thinking
When we think of design, we often think of beautifully crafted objectsan
iPhone, a Ferrari, a Coach bagwithout considering the process that goes into
bringing such beautiful things into reality. Behind every intuitively designed
thing lies a deeply human approach which gives central importance to
experimentation and playactivities we believe are essential to great learning.
The Stanford d.school, which
offers courses in design thinking,
elaborates five stages in the
design process: Empathize,
Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test.
Note that before any attempt to
create an actual thing is made,
there are three courses that
designers embark upon to

Award-winning designers Constantin and Laurene Boym

develop the great ideas that make

great things possible. And even
when designers begin making
things, they only use the first
creations as models for testing
and refining their ideas. Note,

note that the character of Curious George is distinctly

one of a design thinker: He is driven by curiosity to play
and experiment with elements of his daily environment.
He finds new uses for familiar objects, invents different
ways of doing things, and tests the limits of materials
and objects. Many of his experiments do not work, and
he routinely gets in trouble, but occasionally he reaps
praise or a medal. This sounds a lot like a designer's

also, that the first process is empathizing with the people that the designers
are designing for: discovering how they think, feel, and live their lives to create
solutions that work for them. This is clearly an important lesson for schools.

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IDEO, a highly innovative design firm, has been leading the movement to bring
the creative principles behind brilliant design to the arena of education, where
they are ideally suited and desperately needed. Design Thinking is the
confidence that everyone can be part of creating a more desirable future, the
IDEO designers explain, and a process to take action when faced with a
difficult challenge. That kind of optimism is well needed in education.
Classrooms and schools across the world are facing design challenges every
single day, from teacher feedback systems to daily schedules. Wherever they
fall on the spectrum of scalethe challenges educators are confronted with are
real, complex, and varied. And as such, they require new perspectives, new
tools, and new approaches. Design Thinking is one of them.
From IDEO, Design Thinking For Educators:

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4. Serious Play
Let my playing be my learning, and my learning be my playing, declared Johan
Huizinga, a Dutch social theorist, in his pioneering 1938 book, Homo Ludens
(Playing Man). Exploring the central characteristics of play, Huizinga observed
that all aspects of society are defined by play structures. We have to conclude
that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played, he wrote. It does not come
from play like a baby detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play,
and never leaves it. What is life, after all, but a sort of role-playing game? What
are codes of laws and social norms but game rules with serious consequences
attached to their violation? What is school but a game structured around
academic performance, with game points awarded as letter grades, scholastic
honors, and so on? Surely, if we took this idea to heart, we could make the
experience of schools less boring, more playful.

The ever-evolving game of Calvinball. The only permanent rule of Calvinball is that you can't play it the same way twice!

And if games can be seen to constitute the foundation of all aspects of human
society, then surely training students in the art of gameplay and game design
could prove a powerful way to develop thriving citizens of the world, who could
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build the new game systems of twenty-first century education. The recent
ideas of gamification, alternate reality games, serious games, and so on
provide exciting opportunities for us to fully realize our human potential and
transition into our next stage of evolution, as Homo Ludens.
Bill Watterson's Calvin is
an intellectual hero of
ours, a true six-year-old
super-genius with an
imaginative playfulness
and radical nonconformity.
His brilliant game
invention, Calvinball, is a
postmodern milestone in
game design theory: while
sincerely acknowledging
the conventions of game
rules and play space, the
game radically subverts
them by incorporating into
the ruleset the first rule of
improv: always say, Yes,
and to any new play,
including the spontaneous
creation of new rules.

Calvinball freely combines elements from many games, and experiments with
everything from physical boundaries to point systems. As Hobbes reminds us,
The score is still Q to 12!

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The shifting of rules and blending of game elements opens up another space
for creative exploration that allows Calvin and his Hobbes to make their play
however they want it at every moment. This sort of high-level innovative
creativitystructured yet extremely flexibleis exactly what societies will need
to discover solutions to the Gordian knot of problems we face globally and
locally. We must face the challenges of the twenty-first century as Calvin does:
with an improv state of mind.
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Here are a few directions in the field of play that we'll continue to explore:

Children's Museums: Nothing brings us more joy than a visit to the

Exploratorium in San Francisco, or the New York Hall of Science. They
spark our wonder, shift our thinking, and let us relax into learning. In
Huizinga's words, inside of them we can let our learning be our playing.
Concepts like the Museum of Mathematicsa much needed celebration
of the infinite fun and beauty in mathand the traveling Museum of
Interesting Things offer a playful twist on tradition notions of a museum.

Adult Playgrounds: Some questions have been with us ever since became
adults (when was that, exactly?). For instance: Why are public play
spaces (as distinct from sport facilities) created exclusively for young
people? Why don't we create spaces for adults that encourage the same
sorts of playfulness as playgrounds do for children? Why is this not a
thriving field of design? We'll be following up on this, in search of some
good answers (or better questions).
Games For Change: There is a growing community of practitioners in the
serious games movement dedicated to developing games with the goal
of generating social awareness and influencing social change. Naturally,
people were quick to recognize the enormous potential of such an
approach for education, and have begun exploring the frontiers of
serious games for student learning and training. Games For Change has
developed an interactive toolkit to teach how to design social issue
games for activist movements and causes.

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Alternate Reality Games: Wikipedia currently defines the Alternate Reality

Game (ARG) as an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a
platform and uses transmedia to deliver a story that may be altered by
participants' ideas or actions. ARGs are a form of role-playing game,
where players typically play themselves as protagonists in a drama
unfolding in the real world, the characters in which maintain a firm
insistence that This Is Not A Game. As one guide to ARGs explains,
one of the main goals of the ARG is to deny and disguise the fact that it
is even a game at all. By defining the world as the game-space and real
world actions as gameplay activities, ARGs offer a compelling context for
the activities of learning, training, or evaluation.

Gamestorming: When creative professionals are called upon to design

solutions to problems, they often start by playing games. A few visual
designers from the design and consulting firm XPLANE gathered the best
of the professional world's knowledge games into a manual, described as
a playbook for people who want to design the future, to change the
world, to make, break and innovatea rough-and-ready toolkit for
inventors, explorers and change agents who want to use design thinking
to navigate successfully in complex and uncertain knowledge and
information spaces, to engage others, and to start, grow and sustain
movements for change. The creators of Gamestorming set up a games
wiki to collect and share an ever growing archive of gamestorm designs.
We love the similarly playful approaches to ideation in Thinkertoys, IDEO's
Method Cards, and, for entrepreneurial types, Business Model
Generation. This is the future of education.
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5. Learnology
We've always thought it more than a
little strange that schoolswhich depend
for their success upon the capability of
their students to learnspend little to no
time addressing the art and science of
learning with their students. Judging
from the standard school curriculum,
one would suppose that both students
and teachers are expected to intuit
automatically the best practices and
conditions for learning, although
neuroscientists and cognitive and
developmental psychologists have found
it necessary to devote an enormous
amount of research in the past decades
to understand just this. While these
scientists have still only scratched the
surface of this enormously interesting
field of study, they have discovered many
valuable insights about learning that we
believe will provide enormous benefit to
students, teachers, and all of society, as
we learn better how to learn better.

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Moreover, we think the processes of thinking about thinking and learning about
learning activate an important self-reflective impulse in students and teachers
that can amplify awareness and expand mental flexibility. As learning happens
everywhere, throughout our entire livesespecially after students finish their
sentence of compulsory schoolingdeveloping a clearer, more informed
approach to learning can have an incalculable impact on one's expanding
capabilities over the course of a lifetime.
And learning isn't just for individuals, of course. Groups, social movements,
businesses, cities, and entire societies learnand surely, with insight into the
process, they can learn better. Peter Senge brought popular awareness to the
idea of systemic learning and adaptation with his 1990 book, The Fifth
Discipline, outlining five key disciplines for organizational learning: systems
thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning.
Learning organizations, he explained, are organizations where people
continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where
new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective
aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the
whole together. Senge owes much of his theoretical insight to the pioneering
work of Donald Schn (himself greatly influenced by John Dewey), who saw in
1971 that the nature of constant, rapid, radical change in modern society
required a better understanding of the processes of learning, not just for the
individual, but also for groups and for entire societies.

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As Schn wrote in Beyond the Stable State:

The loss of the stable state means that our society and all of its institutions
are in continuous processes of transformation. We cannot expect new stable
states that will endure for our own lifetimes. We must learn to understand,
guide, influence and manage these transformations. We must make the
capacity for undertaking them integral to ourselves and to our institutions. We
must, in other words, become adept at learning. We must become able not
only to transform our institutions, in response to changing situations and
requirements; we must invent and develop institutions which are 'learning
systems', that is to say, systems capable of bringing about their own continuing
transformation. The task which the loss of the stable state makes imperative,
for the person, for our institutions, for our society as a whole, is to learn about
learning.
What is the nature of the process by which organizations, institutions and
societies transform themselves?
What are the characteristics of effective learning systems?
What are the forms and limits of knowledge that can operate within
processes of social learning?
What demands are made on a person who engages in this kind of learning?
Over forty years later, Schn's questions remain essential, even vital.

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6. Vitalogy
Mind, body, and spirit form a holy trinity of real learning. Healthy, active bodies
make healthy, active minds. To transform the next generation of learners and
teachers, we must explore the frontiers of what it truly means to be healthy, to
be vitalthat is, to be full of life! Future generations may look back and
conclude, as Russian scientist Israel I. Brekhman argued, that our modern
medicine, with its intense focus on pathology, has made great progress down
the wrong path. Throughout his career, Dr. Brekhman championed the study of
healthinesswhich he termed valeology, from the Latin valeos, to be strong, to
be healthyfocusing his efforts on exploring a range of health-promoting
herbal compounds, known as adaptogens. As our interest will be primarily in
the education and training of vitality-promoting activities and habits of
awareness, not in organic compounds, we prefer to use a different neologism,
vitalogy, which suggests the active vital force that generates life and the
process of revitalizationand is also the title of a great Pearl Jam album.
Rather than a binary approach to health care which regards health simply as
the absence of illness or injury, we find it important to view health as a
continuum or field, potentially infinite, inseparably intertwined with the ideas of
strength, energy, clarity, harmony, balance, fluidity, lightness, rhythm. There is
much to be done to bring our systems of education into harmony with the vital
processes of the mind, body, and spirit. We must revolutionize the approach to
food in our modern school systems, not just by replacing the terribly unhealthy
school lunches with more nutritional food, but also by investing in a real
education in nutrition, food preparation, and organic food cultivation. We must
revolutionize the approach to physical education in
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schools by bringing the insights of the health sciences to every aspect of our
learning environments, not just to the one period students endure every day,
unaffectionately known as P.E. We must take cognizance of the enormous
impact on physical and mental health that sleep has, and reschedule our
schools accordingly. Other important and largely disregarded influences on
health must be reconsidered with a new level of concern: the quality of light
matters greatly for learning, for instance, as does regular movement,
stretching, breathing, posture, and so on.
Finally, we must devote more attention to the social, psychological, mental, and
emotional health of our students and teachers, and to the burdens on health
imposed by current education systems, so that we can design new
environments that promote an integrated health of the spirit. It is a mistake to
wait for problems of dispiritedness to manifest in obvious behavior or
performance issues, as the level of spiritual health is always a powerful
determinant of the capacity for learning or teaching, and of physical health as
well. Even minor emotional or psychological issues can profoundly impair
education, while a strong, healthy spirit can make almost any learning
challenge attainable. Along with physical health, we must train as students in
emotional and psychological health and the behaviors and activitiespersonal
and collectivethat support this vitality of the spirit. Students deserve real
training in counseling, communication, collaboration, introspection, spiritual
practice, sensuality and sexual health, and so onif not simply for their sake,
then for the sake of society as a whole. We cannot even imagine what might
come from a generation whose vitality were unshackled by the training of truly
healthy ways of living.
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7. DIY Education
Once upon a time, it was not uncommon for society's leading thinkers to be
polymaths, accomplished in many fields. Today it would be exceedingly
remarkable for a leading scientist to be an important poet, philosopher, or
politician as well. Examples like Benjamin Franklin (political theorist, politician,
statesman, printer, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, writer) or Francis
Bacon (philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, writer) or Leonardo da
Vinci (painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor,
anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, writer) were hardly even atypical in
their eraindeed, there's even a typical term for them: Renaissance Men.
However, it is almost inconceivable that one could achieve something of
significance in as many different fields today.
A major reason for this, we believe, is that modern society strongly promotes a
long and costly process of intellectual specialization inside of highly structured
academic institutions, while the polymathy of the past was largely driven by
individual curiosity and pluck, by which bright thinkers learned for themselves
how to achieve great things in many fields. Even inside of the academic
institutions of the day, it was tutorsnot lecturing professorswho were the
primary agents of instruction, offering a highly personalized approach to
learning. Great thinkers of the past were not boxed in by rigid conceptions of
who they were or what they could do, and thus were free to experiment and
explore as their passions dictated. We need a renaissance of this Renaissance
Man, and so we will need to free intellectual inquiry from its current state of
over-institutionalization.
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The internet, of course, has heralded a new intellectual renaissancedifferent

in scope and scale from anything to ever come beforeand has done much to
transcend the relatively rigid intellectual boundaries reinforced and defended
by the old guard of academia. With the democratization of learning and the
proliferation of open source educational materials, individuals no longer need
to feel the dependence upon institutions to develop new capabilities and
explore new fields. The unfortunate monopoly on the modern mind that schools
have held over education
is now being disrupted by
the infinitely available
internet and the
collaborative connections
it fosters among curious
seekers of knowledge.
DIY education has always
been as common as its
academic counterpart
more sobut it is only
now becoming as
organized and as visible.

Learn how to make an Urban Guerrilla Movie House at Make:Projects

We love DIY learning for the way it fosters so many of the values we celebrate: it
engages the processes of design thinking, experimentation, and participatory
democracy, it inherently involves learning about learning, it empowers students
to be teachers (of themselves), and so on. Most of all, it liberates learning from
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a dependence on experts and instructors (as valuable as they can be). Nor
does DIY education have to be a solo affair. Group classes can be organized
with no teacher at allperhaps only a lead learner, responsible for facilitating
the overall course of learning undertaken by the group, but in no way an expert
on the subject under study.
And its especially great to double down on the DIYteaching yourself how to do
and make things yourself is greatly empowering. The more we know how to
make the things we want and need ourselves, the closer we will come to true
independence and sustainability. Knowing how to make things also entails
knowing how things work, an important systems-level awareness which will
remain especially important for the societal learning we need to evolve in this
era of rapid flux. Not to mention that making things yourself is just plain fun.

Gon Kirin, and his fire-breathing dragon, featured at the World Maker Faire New York
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8. The New Socratic

I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone
whom I meet after my manner, and convincing him, saying: O my friend, why do you
who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much
about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little
about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never
regard or heed at all? Are you not ashamed of this? And if the person with whom I an
arguing says: Yes, but I do care: I do not depart or let him go at once; I interrogate
and examine and cross-examine him, and if I think that he has no virtue, but only
says that he has, I reproach him with overvaluing the greater, and undervaluing the
less. For this is the command of God, as I would have you know...

Socrates, Apology

The legendary tutor Socrates accepted the penalty of death for the cause of free intellectual inquiry.
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Perhaps the most famous teacher of all time, Socrates literally gave his life to
the teaching of a philosophy of virtue by the method of elenchus: a questiondriven dialectical interrogation of ideas now known as the Socratic method.
Socrates put the art of questioning at the heart of teaching and learning,
insisting that he was no wiser than any other Athenian, except insofar as he
knew that he was not wise. Although the Socratic method is a popular and wellrespected instructional approach in educationfamously used in law school
courses along with the casebook method of studying legal precedents
Socrates was clear that his means of inquiry was not his greatest contribution
to society. Most important, he insisted, was his revolutionary effort to persuade
people to value wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul
over wealth and power and petty superficiality. As a philosopher, Socrates was
foremost an ethicist.
So, in honor of this great teacher, we call for a New Socratic movement that not
only puts inquiry at the center of learningfocusing on asking questions rather
than answering them, and valuing the open question that has no answerbut
also puts the committed ethics of Socrates back into the method that bears his
name. After all, Socrates was sentenced to death not simply for discussing any
old philosophical ideas, but for radically challenging the pretensions of those in
power in Athens. As Socrates said of the motivations of his accusers, They do
not like to confess that their pretense of knowledge has been detected. We
need to train young minds to think critically about the most critical issues of our
timeand to really rock the boatif we are to make the rapid progress we need
to solve the overwhelming complex global problems we face. Merely academic
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philosophizing is not good enough: we need to engage in critical inquiry to

make new things, and make new things happen.
As proponents of the design thinking approach, we advocate for a bias toward
action. Open inquiry and cross-examination are great tools for refining ideas,
but alone can lead to analysis paralysis in making decisions and
implementing solutions. Notions like project-based learning, problem-based
learning, and mission-based learning provide examples of approaches that
inherently demand critical inquiry as an integral part of hands-on action.
Participatory action research leverages the power of student study to make
meaningful active research that both examines and influences the social
environment. Deeply enriching learning evolves out of this kind of praxis
defined by Paulo Freire as reflection and action upon the world in order to
transform it.

9. Global Exchange
Some of the world's greatest cultural and intellectual developments have
emerged from the threads of several cultures interwoven together. Algebra and
the decimal numerical system, for instance, appeared in the Western world in
the twelfth century thanks to Latin translations of the work of Persian
mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, who based his work on
Indian numeral systems and Greek mathematical treatises like Ptolemy's
Geography. Transformative modern art made by Pablo Picasso and Henri
Matisse was heavily influenced by the exhibition of African art in the museums
of Paris at the time. The varied American musical traditions of jazz, blues, rock,
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soul, hip hop, and rapwhich have since become global musical traditions
emerged from the forced African migration to the American colonies carried out
by European and colonial slave traders. The list of such intercultural origin
stories is endless.
We believe in the enduring power of these global intercultural exchanges. On a
daily, lived basis, one can feel the transformative power of immersion in a
culture different from one's own. An individual spending time in a foreign
country can be a natural ambassador and teacher of her culture, as well as a
natural student of the cultural environment in which she finds herself, and can
even be a natural inventor of new cultural blends woven together organically
and idiosyncratically. In a foreign country, everything is different, everything is
new, and thus, everything is a learning opportunity. If this is naturally true for
every stranger in a strange land, then it follows that the more people travel
outside their native cultures, the more intercultural teaching and learning is
possible. And in the translation between cultures and ideas, new insights and
creative breakthroughs will continue to emerge.

10. Teaching To Change The World

What most of us must be involved in--whether we teach or write, make films, write
films, direct films, play music, act, whatever we do--has to not only make people feel
good and inspired and at one with other people around them, but also has to
educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world.

Howard Zinn, Artists In Times of War and Other Essays

If the youth are going to take the lead in solving the major problems that the
world faces, as we believe must happen, then their teachers must be
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committed to helping them do so. Young people should know that we expect
them to change the world, and that we support them in their mission.
Educators must teach with the clear goal in mind of developing a generation of
world-changers. This will require a conscious training of certain habits of mind,
ways of seeing, ethical commitments,
intellectual and physical skills, and so on.
It will also demand from professional
teachers a demonstrated respect for the
power of youth and their role in worldchanging, enacted daily in the ways in
which we teach and the type of intellectual
projects in which we engage our students.
In 2010, the Texas school board rewrote
the state social studies curriculum to
propagandize for a neo-conservative
system of values and view of history, and
the Arizona legislature outlawed the
Mexican-American studies program and
any others that advocate ethnic
solidarity. Those students should be
taught that this is the land of opportunity,
and that if they work hard they can achieve
their goals, Arizona Superintendent Tom
Horne wrote to the citizens of Tucson.
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They should not be taught that they are oppressed. In 2011, Wisconsin
Governor Scott Walker signed legislation stripping public teacher unions of
collective bargaining rights and cutting $1.85 billion from education spending,
striking fear in the hearts of embattled public school teachers everywhere. But
students and teachers are fighting back.
Education has always been a contested front in the war for the hearts and
minds of our young citizens. The only war that matters is the war against
imagination, writes poet Diane Di Prima, all other wars are subsumed in it.
The struggle over education is critical because, as Ivan Illich wrote in
Deschooling Society, schools reproduce society, and so they are extremely
important engines for the maintenance of the dominant social order:
All over the world schools are organized enterprises designed to reproduce the
established order, whether this order is called revolutionary, conservative, or
evolutionary. Everywhere the loss of pedagogical credibility and the resistance to
schools provide a fundamental option: shall this crisis be dealt with as a problem
that can, and must, be solved by substituting new devices for school and readjusting
the existing power structure to fit these devices? Or shall this crisis force a society to
face the structural contradictions inherent in the politics and economics of any
society that reproduces itself through the industrial process?

There is no cause more important for the survival and liberation of the human
race than that of education, because it holds the key to the development of the
new minds that will determine the fate of the future. We must move forward as
educators with this firm conviction in mind, guiding us on our way through the
darkness toward the light.
Amen.
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Howard Zinn, Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest:

Equally important for social control as the military scientists are those professionals who
are connected with the dissemination of knowledge in society: the teachers, the historians,
the political scientists, the journalists, and yes, the archivists.We have all heard the cries
of don't politicize our profession [but] this neat separation, keeping your nose to the
professional grindstone, and leaving politics to your left-over moments, assumes that your
profession is not inherently political. It is neutral. Teachers are objective and unbiased.
Textbooks are eclectic and fair. The historian is even-handed and factual.

Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973,
with the covert support of the CIA and other U.S. federal agencies and foreign governments,
inaugurating a brutal 17-year reign of terror. If the CIA had its way, nobody would know about its
involvement. Thus, history itself is a battleground.

However, knowledge has a social origin and a social use. It comes out of a divided,
embattled world, and is poured into such a world. It is not neutral either in origin or effect. It

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reflects the bias of a particular social order; more accurately, it reflects the diverse biases of
a diverse social order, but with one important qualification: that those with the most power
and wealth in society will dominate the field of knowledge, so that it serves their interests.
The scholar may swear to his neutrality on the job, but whether he be physicist, historian, or
archivist, his work will tend, in this theory, to maintain the existing social order by
perpetuating its values, by legitimizing its priorities, by justifying its wars, perpetuating its
prejudices, contributing to its xenophobia, and apologizing for its class order.
The problems of the United States are not peripheral and have not been met by our genius
at reform. They are not the problems of excess, but of normalcy. If all this is so, then the
normal functioning of the scholar, the intellectual, the researcher, helps maintain those
corrupt norms in the United States, just as the intellectual in Germany, Soviet Russia, or
South Africa, by simply doing his small job, maintains what is normal in those societies. And
if so, then what we always asked of scholars in those terrible places is required of us in the
United States today: rebellion against the norm. Scholarship in society is inescapably
political. Our choice is not between being political or not. Our choice is to follow the politics
of the going order, that is, to do our job within the priorities and directions set by the
dominant forces of society, or else to promote those human values of peace, equality, and
justice, which our present society denies.

Howard Zinn, activist and historian, a true American hero (1922-2010)

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