Month: January 2026

International education exists, by necessity, in a space of partial context. Students, families, and educators come together from different national systems, cultural traditions, and educational expectations, often without the shared assumptions that give coherence to domestic schooling models. In this environment, schools must do more than offer curriculum. They must establish credibility, clarity, and trust, while still holding fast to the deeper purpose of education itself.

This tension is not a flaw to be resolved, but a condition to be navigated deliberately and honestly.

Our mission begins with a clear and grounded understanding of what education is for: to enable young people to use what they know to live well, contribute meaningfully, and continue learning beyond the structures of school. School is not life itself; it is a preparation space—a place where knowledge, judgment, and capability are intentionally developed so that participation in life becomes possible.

The measure of our success, therefore, is not limited to academic performance within school. It is reflected in the growing capacity of learners to act with understanding, purpose, and responsibility in the world beyond it.

The Role of IB: Anchor, Not Origin

Education should be grounded in this.

The IB provides a globally recognized Western philosophical framework for learning—one that emphasizes conceptual understanding, inquiry, reflection, international-mindedness, and purposeful action. In the contextual ambiguity that often surrounds international education, this framework performs an essential function: it establishes legitimacy. It communicates to families, regulators, and partners that the school operates within a serious, coherent, and accountable educational tradition.

The IB is not an ideological endpoint, nor the source of our educational convictions. It is the anchor that allows those convictions to operate with credibility and shared understanding. It offers a common language and a recognized standard through which our work can be interpreted and trusted.

This distinction is critical. the IB should not be championed as a replacement for professional judgment, or to outsource educational purpose. Rather, the IB should fill the role that I believe was intended all along: to provide a stable reference point within which thoughtful, principled educational design can occur.

The core principles of IB are strong and well aligned with our mission. Where intentionality is required is not in philosophy, but in how learning is designed, sequenced, and enacted.

Learning as Concurrent Modes, Not Stages

Contemporary discussions of pedagogy, andragogy, and heutagogy—hereafter referred to as PEH—are often misunderstood as age-bound or programmatic stages, implicitly mapped onto Primary, Junior Secondary, and Senior Secondary divisions. I reject this interpretation.

What has become apparent in my practise and experience is this: PEH does not describe school sections, developmental brackets, or linear progression through age-based phases. Instead, it describes modes of learning that operate concurrently across all levels, subjects, and learning moments.

At any age, and in any classroom, meaningful learning may require:

• Pedagogical moments, in which new knowledge, concepts, language, or skills are explicitly introduced, modelled, and practiced;

• Andragogical moments, in which learners apply understanding, make guided choices, and refine judgment with structured support;

• Heutagogical moments, in which learners use what they know to pursue purpose, solve authentic problems, or act meaningfully beyond the immediate instructional frame.

These modes are not sequential in time, but responsive to context, readiness, and purpose. A Primary student may demonstrate genuine independence in a domain of established competence, while a Senior Secondary student may require explicit instruction when encountering unfamiliar disciplinary tools or concepts. What matters is not age, but preparedness and intent.

This concurrent understanding avoids two common errors: assuming independence before capability exists, and withholding agency once capability has been demonstrated. Structure and autonomy are not opposites; they operate together dynamically in service of the same goal.

Knowledge as Foundation, Not Obstacle

With regards to Education, I hold a central conviction: meaningful agency cannot exist in the absence of knowledge. Inquiry cannot flourish without conceptual understanding. Choice without substance is not empowerment. It is confusion.

For this reason, the provision of knowledge, concepts, and skills is not seen as a constraint on inquiry, but as its enabling condition. Pedagogical moments are not relics of a traditional past; they are essential to intellectual freedom. Without shared language and disciplinary understanding, inquiry collapses into opinion, and reflection loses precision.

As understanding grows, responsibility can be meaningfully transferred. Learners begin to apply, test, and connect ideas, gradually assuming greater ownership of their learning. Over time, and when appropriate, this leads to genuine self-direction, learning that continues because life demands it, not because school requires it.

In this way, agency is not assumed; it is earned.

Agency as Responsibility, Not Performance

Educators should take agency seriously, not to reduce it to choice alone. Agency exists only when decisions matter, when learners experience real consequence, navigate uncertainty, and accept responsibility for outcomes.

If the result is the same regardless of what a learner chooses, then agency is being rehearsed, not developed.

This places a corresponding responsibility on educators. Our role is not to entertain learners or to remove all difficulty in the name of support. Nor is it to withdraw guidance prematurely. Our responsibility is to design learning that is coherent, challenging, and honest, learning that respects students enough to ask something real of them.

Structure, in this view, is not the enemy. Dependency is. The purpose of structure is always to reduce reliance on it over time.

Schools as Practice Spaces

Essentially, school is a practice space: an environment where learners can encounter challenge, make mistakes, revise their thinking, and develop judgment before the stakes become irrevocably real. Not all meaningful learning will look neat. Not all valuable growth will be immediately legible to rubrics or data points.

Assessment, reflection, and evidence matter. They provide feedback, coherence, and accountability. But they remain means, not ends. Across all levels of the school, a guiding question remains central:

What can this student now do that they could not do before?

When that question can be answered clearly and honestly, learning is occurring.

Stewardship in an International Context

As teachers, I believe our mission ahead is not to eliminate the inherent tensions between philosophy and institution. Such tensions are unavoidable. Our responsibility is to hold them consciously and responsibly.

The IB funcitons to anchor our work in a respected and globally legible framework. Its principles can be upheld with integrity. At the same time, the pursuit of pathways in education should remain clear about the purpose of schooling itself: to develop knowledgeable, capable, and increasingly independent human beings.

We should commit to knowledge as the foundation of inquiry, to agency as responsibility rather than performance, and to learning designs that gradually make the school less central as learners become more capable.

This is not a rejection of structure, nor a retreat into abstraction. It is a form of educational stewardship—of learners, of teachers, of trust, and of the future lives our students will lead.

Education must be anchored.

Effective Educators will be deliberate about where that anchor holds, and where learners are expected, in time, to sail beyond.

The Magazine Jockeys

’Twas finished! And the tired group
Perspired and rambled in their daze;
All flimsy were their hollow gourds
And their swollen brains deranged!

Oh bear these Jockeys’ work, dear school!
Their minds now mush, their nerves now shot;
Oh bear the blubbering of these fools,
Their delirious states of shock!

Paul worked the keys to melted pulp,
Long time the machine’s soul he sought;
No rest for he, no Tumtum tree,
He wrestled with his lot!

So too an agonized Argir sat,
A jockey with eyes of flame;
She grappled like a possessed hack
To conquer the ’puter’s brain!

Tik Tak! Tik Tak! And through and through,
The smoking keys were hit and whacked.
Joan’s eyes were red, and fingers dead,
But galumphing she attacked!

And didst they do the Jockey’s work,
These heroes sore and drained?
Of course! Oh Joy! Callooh! Callay!
They worked till break of day!

’Twas finished! And the tired group
Perspired and rambled in their daze;
All flimsy were their hollow gourds
And their swollen brains deranged!

— with thanks to Lewis Carroll

(1996)

A personal narrative on lawfulness, openness, and the mistake of mistaking mystery for magic

I’ve never been especially comfortable with the word creativity. Not because I don’t value what it gestures toward, but because it’s too often treated like a substance, something you either have or don’t, something that arrives unannounced, like weather or grace. That framing always felt lazy to me. Convenient. Romantic. And, ultimately, evasive.

What I’ve come to believe, slowly, stubbornly, is that creativity doesn’t exist in the way we usually mean it. What exists is something far more demanding: the ability to perceive, to notice, to categorize, to hold many variables in mind at once, and to bring them into some kind of coherence that means something. The magic is not in the arrival. It’s in the management.

That instinct, to demystify without diminishing, shows up everywhere for me. It’s probably why I distrust appeals to “the unknown” when they’re used as a stopping point rather than an invitation to think harder.

Take something simple. A raindrop.

Imagine a single drop forming high above the earth, ten thousand meters up. Forget how it got there. Forget condensation, humidity, nucleation. Just take the drop as given. Now ask a question that sounds innocent but isn’t: Where will it land?

Most people, even thoughtful people, will say: You can’t know. Too many variables. Winds, turbulence, pressure gradients, temperature differentials. Chaos. Uncertainty. Mystery.

But that answer always struck me as a confession masquerading as a truth claim.

The drop will land somewhere. It will not hover in metaphysical indecision. Measured or not, Galileo had this right, it happens. The fact that we cannot compute the outcome does not mean the outcome is unreal, magical, or exempt from law. It means only that our perceptual and computational tools are inadequate to the task.

And this is where we make our first serious mistake: we confuse epistemic limitation with ontological indeterminacy. We mistake the limits of our awareness for properties of reality itself.

That mistake is everywhere.

Religion does it when it says, “This is beyond human understanding,” and then closes the book. Science does it when it quietly treats what it can’t currently model as if it doesn’t meaningfully exist. Art does it when it pretends insight arrives from nowhere.

The irony is that all of these domains are responding to the same pressure: the overwhelming scale of lawful complexity.

For a long time, I resisted the word determinism because it comes with too much baggage. It implies a script, a determiner, a prewritten future. I don’t believe that. I never did. Lawful does not mean already fixed. That assumption sneaks in quietly, but it doesn’t belong there.

Lawfulness is not a sentence. It’s a grammar.

And once you see that, a lot of things rearrange themselves.

The universe, as I experience it, looks less like a machine replaying a stored sequence and more like a vast constraint structure, rules about what can happen, not instructions about what must. Outcomes are not retrieved. They are instantiated through interaction.

That distinction matters.

It matters when we talk about weather, because it shifts us away from blame and toward structure. It matters in education, because it dismantles the idea that “ability” is a hidden object inside a child waiting to be revealed, rather than something that emerges under particular constraints. And it matters profoundly when we talk about creativity, because it reframes novelty as traversal, not miracle.

At some point in this thinking, the analogy became unavoidable.

We’ve built machines, large language models, that don’t store sentences or meanings. They encode constraints learned from massive structure. When prompted, they don’t recall an answer; they navigate a possibility space and instantiate a path through it.

That’s when the phrase landed for me:

Large Law Model.

The universe as a Large Law Model.

Not a storehouse of futures. Not a script. But a vast, latent constraint structure that governs what is possible, what is forbidden, and what is coherent. Within that, actual events are the realized history, the path that has been taken so far.

So I started to distinguish the two:

• LLMₗ —the latent Large Law Model: the full, non-instantiated structure of lawful possibility.
• LLMₐ —the actualized Large Law Model: the realized sequence of interactions, the history that has come into being.

And here’s the crucial part:
The divide between them is not a split in reality. It’s a split in human awareness.

The unknown is not a hidden fact waiting behind a curtain. It is the uninstantiated. The future is not secret. It does not yet exist.

That single shift collapses a surprising number of false debates.

Quantum mechanics stops being a philosophical embarrassment and becomes a warning label: stop assuming states must be fully specified prior to interaction. Creativity stops being mystical and becomes a skill, hard, learnable, exhausting. Knowledge stops being possession of truth and becomes stabilization: patterns that persist across repeated instantiations.

And responsibility intensifies.

Because if outcomes are not fixed, but constrained, then what we do, the environments we design, the feedback loops we normalize, the stories we tell ourselves, matters enormously. We are always shaping the constraint landscape. We are always participating in what becomes actual.

That’s where this stops being abstract for me.

In schools. In leadership. In culture. In raising children. In building institutions. We behave as if futures are either predetermined or random. They are neither. They are lawfully open.

And that means the most important work is not prediction. It’s constraint design.

If this way of thinking leads anywhere new, I suspect it leads here: away from asking “What is the world really like?” and toward asking “What kinds of worlds are made possible under these constraints?”

That’s not mysticism.
It’s not reductionism.
It’s responsibility.

And if there’s something like creativity after all, it lives right there, at the edge where lawful possibility becomes lived reality.

Ashcroft,
12/31/2025