On Change, Understanding, Agency, and the True Purpose of Education

By Greg Culos

I have always believed that change is the only truly constant condition of existence. From one moment to the next, even from one millisecond to the next, nothing remains entirely as it was. Yet I have never found that realization unsettling. Quite the opposite. I believe that once we genuinely come to terms with the constant nature of change, we discover a profound sense of security.

Change itself becomes stability.

We no longer depend upon the environment remaining predictable or familiar to feel secure within it. This understanding has shaped much of my life, from physical pursuits to professional leadership, and ultimately to my philosophy of education.

One of the clearest expressions of this principle comes from snowboarding. When descending a mountain, the surrounding environment is moving past us at considerable speed. The terrain shifts, obstacles appear, and the conditions beneath us constantly change. For someone unfamiliar with the experience, this movement can be intimidating. Yet the experienced snowboarder understands that security does not come from slowing the mountain down or eliminating its uncertainties. Security comes from our relationship with the board, our positional stance, our balance, and our ability to respond to the terrain.

The same principle applies to mountain climbing. Standing on a sheer cliff, hundreds of metres above the ground, might appear terrifying. But if our position is secure, our holds are reliable, and we understand the conditions in which we find ourselves, the apparent enormity of the surrounding exposure need not determine our state of mind. The risks remain real, of course, and must be understood, but the existence of risk and the experience of fear are not necessarily the same thing.

What these experiences have taught me is that security is not the absence of uncertainty. It is the confidence that comes from understanding our relationship with it.

This is not merely a metaphor for how I approach life. It is also the foundation of how I approach leadership.

Over many years of building and leading educational institutions, I have found that much of effective leadership involves anticipating uncertainty, understanding the terrain ahead, and continuously improving our capacity to respond to what we cannot entirely predict. Strategic planning, in this sense, is not an exercise in controlling the future. It is a means of reducing unnecessary uncertainty while increasing our capacity to navigate whatever emerges.

Even relatively small operational decisions reflect this principle. When I am absent from school and formal responsibility rests elsewhere, I may still recognize an emerging difficulty that has not been adequately anticipated or communicated. Providing clarity before that difficulty materializes is not necessarily an attempt to retain control. It is an effort to secure the next hold on the cliff.

The more accurately we understand the terrain, the less energy we need to expend reacting to circumstances that could reasonably have been anticipated.

Experience matters enormously here. Over time, we develop the capacity to recognize patterns, generalize from earlier circumstances, understand relationships between apparently unrelated events, and distinguish genuine problems from variations of problems we already know how to solve. This is what strategic thinking ultimately provides: not certainty about what will happen, but an increasingly sophisticated understanding of what might happen and how we might respond.

I have often noticed, however, that when responsibilities are transferred to others, processes that were designed to be relatively simple can become unnecessarily complicated. Individual circumstances are treated as isolated problems rather than manifestations of broader principles. Solutions become increasingly procedural, exceptions accumulate, and the underlying coherence of the system begins to disappear.

I do not necessarily attribute this to a lack of intelligence or commitment. More often, I suspect that the strategic understanding necessary to interpret the system has not been sufficiently developed. The person has learned what to do without adequately understanding why it should be done, or how the principles behind an established approach might apply when circumstances change.

This distinction explains much of the detail I have insisted upon in developing institutional handbooks, policies, and operational frameworks. A policy is not simply a collection of instructions. Properly developed, it is an expression of institutional reasoning. It establishes the principles, relationships, responsibilities, and contingencies that allow individuals to exercise judgment in circumstances that may never have been explicitly anticipated.

Yet I have frequently encountered the desire to reduce these frameworks to a handful of bullet points.

I understand the attraction. Simplicity is valuable, and clear operational instructions are essential. But there is a fundamental difference between simplicity achieved through understanding and simplicity achieved by removing the understanding.

A checklist can preserve a procedure while losing the intelligence that gave rise to it.

It may tell someone what to do in familiar circumstances, but it cannot necessarily equip them to interpret unfamiliar ones. And therein lies a problem that extends well beyond institutional leadership.

We are increasingly living within a culture of immediacy, accelerated in extraordinary ways by technology. We have become accustomed to moving almost instantaneously from A to Z, often without engaging meaningfully with anything in between. We can obtain answers, generate products, complete tasks, and access information with unprecedented ease.

These capabilities are remarkable, and I would not wish to diminish their value. But they also carry an educational and intellectual danger.

The journey between a question and its answer is not merely an inconvenience to be eliminated. It is frequently the very process through which understanding develops. It is where we encounter contradictions, test assumptions, discover relationships, experience difficulty, and develop the judgment necessary to apply what we have learned in circumstances we have not previously encountered.

I have always believed that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This is particularly important in education and institutional development, where understanding does not emerge simply from accumulating isolated pieces of information or mastering a collection of discrete competencies. It emerges from recognizing the relationships between them. Remove those relationships, and something essential is lost. We may retain the information while losing the capacity to make meaningful sense of it.

In the same way that a collection of individually sound policies does not necessarily constitute a coherent institutional framework, a collection of acquired skills does not necessarily produce an educated person. What matters is the integration of knowledge, experience, perspective, and judgment into an understanding that can be applied beyond the circumstances in which it was originally acquired.

Artificial intelligence makes this distinction increasingly urgent.

AI is an extraordinary tool, one that can help us examine ideas, articulate complex arguments, challenge assumptions, and explore possibilities far beyond what might otherwise be immediately accessible. I use it extensively, but I do not surrender my understanding of the world to it. I read, question, assess, and evaluate what it produces against my own experience and judgment.

That does not mean I am uninfluenced by it. We are influenced constantly by people, experiences, information, and the environments through which we move. Influence, however, is not the same as the surrender of intellectual agency.

The value of a tool lies in what it enables us to understand and accomplish, not simply in the sophistication of the outcome it produces. Used thoughtfully, technology can extend our intellectual reach. Used uncritically, it can allow us to bypass the very processes through which intellectual independence is developed.

An instrument I find particularly useful in illustrating this distinction is the astrolabe.

However remarkable its design, an astrolabe is of little consequence without a reason to use it. We do not begin with the instrument and discover the need to navigate as an incidental outcome of learning to operate it.

We begin with the need to find our way.

That need gives rise to questions. Questions create the demand for understanding. Understanding gives meaning to the instrument, and the instrument extends our capacity to achieve our purpose.

Learning to operate the astrolabe is a procedural skill. Understanding navigation, celestial relationships, direction, and the principles through which we locate ourselves in the world is something considerably deeper. Recognizing the need to go somewhere is what gives the entire undertaking its purpose.

This distinction may seem obvious, yet it has profound implications for how we conceive of learning. The instrument serves the inquiry, the inquiry develops understanding, and understanding enables purposeful action. The relationship can also work in reverse: as our understanding grows, we discover new possibilities, develop new questions, and sometimes find purposes that had not previously occurred to us.

Learning is therefore not simply the acquisition of means to accomplish predetermined ends. It is an expanding capacity to recognize what might be possible, determine what is worthwhile, and develop the understanding necessary to pursue it.

This, to me, is the essence of education.

It is also where I believe some contemporary educational movements, including interpretations of the International Baccalaureate, have encountered a significant difficulty.

Let me be clear: I fundamentally agree with the philosophical foundations of inquiry-based, experiential, and student-centred learning. These approaches are neither particularly new nor inherently revolutionary. Their intellectual foundations have existed for generations, and I have advocated their essential principles throughout my career.

My concern is not with the philosophy itself.

My concern is with its interpretation.

More particularly, it is with what happens when the language of an educational philosophy begins to displace the intellectual discipline necessary to realize its intentions.

Too often, educational philosophy becomes institutional ideology. Principles that were intended to encourage deeper understanding become simplified into prescribed behaviours and assumptions that are no longer sufficiently questioned. We begin to confuse the appearance of progressive educational practice with the achievement of meaningful educational outcomes.

Particular methods become markers of philosophical commitment, while other equally legitimate approaches are dismissed because they appear inconsistent with an institutional identity. The danger is not that educators subscribe to a shared philosophy; coherence of purpose is important. The danger emerges when adherence to that philosophy becomes a substitute for evaluating whether its interpretation is actually producing the learning it was intended to support.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in certain interpretations of student agency.

The principle that students should have agency in their learning is entirely sound. But agency is not simply the opportunity to express preferences, exercise choice, or pursue existing interests. A young learner’s preferences are necessarily limited by the boundaries of their experience. Children do not know what they do not yet know, and they cannot reasonably be expected to recognize the value of every experience, challenge, discipline, or intellectual pursuit before encountering it.

If we allow their existing preferences to determine the limits of their education, we risk confining them to the very boundaries education should help them transcend.

The educational responsibility is not merely to accommodate what students already believe they want, but to expand their understanding of what they might become capable of wanting, knowing, and doing.

Agency must be cultivated, not merely granted.

This does not mean that children should be denied meaningful choices or that their voices should be disregarded. Appropriate autonomy is itself an important part of development, and even very young children possess the beginnings of genuine agency. But meaningful agency requires knowledge, judgment, experience, perspective, and an expanding understanding of possibilities and consequences. It is both a capacity we nurture throughout the educational journey and one of the most important outcomes of that journey.

When agency is reduced to the exercise of preference, we risk confusing the appearance of independence with its substance. A student who chooses the easiest available task may have exercised choice, but that choice does not necessarily demonstrate the developed judgment or independence that education should seek to cultivate.

I am equally concerned about the growing tendency to interpret discomfort as something that education should necessarily mitigate.

There is an essential difference between protecting children from harm and protecting them from the difficulty inherent in learning. Frustration, uncertainty, mistakes, sustained effort, and the discomfort of confronting our own limitations are not necessarily indicators that something has gone wrong.

Frequently, they are precisely the experiences through which learning takes place.

The challenge for educators is not to eliminate these experiences, but to understand when they are productive, when they are not, and how to support learners in developing the capacity to respond constructively.

Returning to the mountain, we cannot teach someone to snowboard by ensuring they never experience imbalance. Nor can we develop a capable climber by removing every challenging hold. We create appropriate conditions, provide instruction, establish safeguards, and gradually develop the knowledge and competence through which learners become capable of navigating increasingly demanding situations.

The objective is not to eliminate discomfort. It is to develop the understanding and resilience necessary to move through it productively.

Naturally, appropriate support, differentiation, and sensitivity to genuine individual needs remain essential. Not all discomfort is productive, and not every challenge is appropriate for every learner. But these distinctions require informed professional judgment, not an ideological assumption that difficulty itself represents an educational failure. Indeed, the very capacity to distinguish productive challenge from inappropriate distress is one of the important responsibilities of a skilled educator.

My concern is that, in some settings, progressive educational language has become a convenient justification for avoiding the difficult parts of education. Necessary knowledge is treated as secondary, foundational skills are insufficiently developed, expectations are softened, and independent exploration is encouraged before students possess the conceptual tools necessary to make it productive.

Because these decisions are expressed through the language of agency, well-being, and student-centred learning, they can become unusually difficult to challenge. What may begin as a legitimate commitment to respecting the learner can gradually become a reluctance to insist upon the effort, discipline, and challenge that meaningful learning requires.

The result can be a diminishing educational return, even while the outward appearance of philosophical consistency remains intact.

And the irony is considerable.

An educational philosophy committed to developing independent, critical thinkers must itself remain subject to independent, critical thought.

Otherwise, the philosophy has become the very thing it was intended to overcome.

An institution cannot credibly claim to cultivate inquiry among its students while discouraging critical examination of its own practices among its educators. Nor can it claim to promote agency while interpreting that principle in ways that may ultimately undermine the acquisition of the knowledge and judgment upon which meaningful agency depends.

We must be willing to distinguish philosophical intention from educational consequence and to examine the quality of our outcomes rather than relying upon the virtue of our stated aspirations.

I believe education must return to fundamentals.

Not through nostalgia for rigid instruction or the uncritical restoration of traditional practice, but through a renewed understanding of what learning is actually intended to achieve.

Knowledge matters. Foundational skills matter. Direct instruction has its place, just as inquiry, experimentation, discovery, and student choice have theirs. None should become an end in itself, and none should be dismissed simply because it appears associated with a competing educational tradition.

The central responsibility of the educator is to develop the learner’s capacity to understand the world, recognize relationships, exercise informed judgment, and act purposefully within circumstances that cannot always be anticipated. This demands both intellectual rigour and professional flexibility, along with the willingness to select methods according to their educational value rather than their philosophical appearance.

This is where my longstanding commitment to Agency & Purpose finds its deepest expression.

Purpose gives learning direction, understanding gives it substance, and agency enables us to act upon that understanding and, through experience, extend it further. These are not isolated educational objectives but interdependent dimensions of a developmental process.

Purpose without understanding can become aspiration without substance. Understanding without the capacity to act may remain unfulfilled potential. Agency without sufficient understanding risks becoming little more than the freedom to make poorly informed choices.

Meaningful education brings these dimensions into a relationship in which each strengthens and extends the others.

But even purpose must be understood in relation to something more fundamental.

There must be a reason to go somewhere.

That reason may emerge from necessity, curiosity, aspiration, dissatisfaction, or a possibility that an educator helps a student discover for the first time.

It is not the responsibility of education simply to ask children where they would like to go, particularly when they have not yet encountered enough of the world to imagine the possibilities. It is our responsibility to expand those possibilities, awaken the desire to pursue them, and develop the capabilities through which students can ultimately determine their own direction.

The educator does not need to prescribe the learner’s ultimate destination, but neither should the educator abandon the responsibility to introduce landscapes the learner has not yet imagined.

That is how meaningful agency develops, and it is also how we reconcile freedom with responsibility, independence with guidance, and challenge with care.

The essential question is not whether a student can successfully use the tools we place before them. It is what remains when those tools are removed, the circumstances change, and the answers are no longer readily available.

Can they recognize the terrain? Can they identify what matters? Can they generalize from what they know, tolerate uncertainty, adapt their understanding, and establish their footing in unfamiliar circumstances? Can they make thoughtful decisions when no prescribed procedure adequately addresses the situation?

Most importantly, can they find their way?

I return, finally, to the snowboard and the cliff.

Life does not offer permanence. The environment will continue to change, sometimes gradually and sometimes with extraordinary speed. No education, strategy, policy, or technology can eliminate that reality, nor should we wish to eliminate it.

What we can develop is the capacity to understand our circumstances, establish meaningful relationships with the world around us, and move forward with confidence even when the destination is not entirely clear. The security we seek does not come from knowing every circumstance we may encounter. It comes from developing sufficient understanding, competence, and judgment to navigate those circumstances as they arise.

The highest achievement of education is not to make the world less uncertain for the learner. It is to develop learners who are increasingly capable of finding their own security, direction, and purpose within an uncertain world.

The astrolabe is not the destination, and the objective is not merely to learn how to use it. The objective is to understand why we need to navigate, develop the capacity to read the world around us, and ultimately possess the judgment and confidence to chart a course of our own.

The instrument may change. The terrain will change. Even the destination itself may evolve as our understanding expands. What matters is that we continue to develop the capacity to recognize where we stand, consider where we might go, and determine how best to proceed.

Because in the end, learning has never been simply about acquiring the means to get somewhere.

It is about becoming capable of knowing where to go, understanding why it matters, and finding our way there.