[ Dedicated to those who created the conditions and for the others who convened at the Forest Creek Refuge at Oregon in Spring 2026. ]

A question from the gathering hit me early on:

“Are we just sprinkling calm on fundamentally chaotic and under-resourced school systems?”

I’ve been sitting with that question since Forest Creek Refuge in Oregon, where old and new friends carved out time to live in questions, and to trust that the seeds they tend may one day bloom for generations they will never meet.

The explorations were open-ended, like the mist that moved through the fir trees that held us.

What does it mean to be truly educated?

What does it mean to flourish in life?

And how do we tend to the conditions that allow those qualities to arise in schools?

Learning began in motion: following herds, reading seasons, tending fire. Children absorbed survival, story, and the wisdom of those who came before. Then came industrialization, and schools were shaped by the logic of the factory floor. Children sorted by age. Knowledge standardized. Content delivered at scale.

What emerged is what we recognize as education today: a grade-based conveyor belt designed to produce workers that would serve economies.

The Industrial Age gave way to the Information Age. Platforms like Meta were engineered to engage, optimizing relentlessly for attention in service of shareholders.

When people are conditioned to consume, they become easier to fragment into smaller and smaller groups. Each group interprets the world through the media it consumes, and the more isolated those interpretations become, the deeper polarization grows.

And now those systems have evolved.

Large language models complete our thoughts, reframe our questions, and nudge perception in ever more intimate ways.

John Culkin’s idea feels more relevant than ever:

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

So the question becomes:

What kind of human beings is this world shaping, and what kind of education might help us meet the future with deeper wisdom and compassion?

At Forest Creek, researchers who had spent decades building rigorous curricula circled around a simple yet profound insight:

The embodied teacher is the curriculum.

Wisdom, kindness, and care are transmitted through the quality of presence. And that quality of presence shapes learning profoundly.

So we asked a simpler question:

Who was a teacher that inspired you?

Stories began to surface.

In that room sat the proof: people whose lives had been changed by a single teacher, decades later, dedicating their own lives to learning and paying it forward.

The power of these ideas sat alongside the implementation challenge of it all.

These qualities resist standardization.

In my experience, those who embody them often arrive there through some combination of innate nature and having once been held by great teachers themselves. And yet, across the countries I have served in, virtually every school system has been built around incentive structures designed for visible, measurable outcomes.

This pattern extends beyond schools.

Well-meaning parents, formed by the same conveyor belt, reach instinctively for what they know. A friend in the Bay Area recently described a consulting service for parents of newborns, offering to map a child’s entire educational pathway toward an Ivy League school of their choosing.

A life charted from daycare to doctorate.

Every step accounted for before it is taken.

Academic performance becomes worth. Worth becomes a school’s acceptance letter. The Ivy League pathway, like the school chasing enrollment and test scores, has made the oldest mistake available to it:

It has confused the map for the terrain.

Intelligence can solve the problem in front of you. Wisdom asks whether it was the right problem to begin with. 

What resists measurement is often what shapes a life most deeply. Funders reasonably ask for proof. School leaders reasonably ask for clarity. Teachers reasonably ask for support.

And yet the work we explored in the forest, from the quality of a teacher’s presence to the structures that surround them, resists the kind of solution we are all trained to reach for.

You cannot make a plant grow by pulling on it.

What it asks is patient and unglamorous: that we tend the conditions in which a teacher can grow, carrying wisdom and compassion the way a tree carries its rings, invisibly, and through everything it has lived through.

So the question I am carrying is this:

How do we serve conditions that make it probable for one person’s quality of being to enter a room and inspire the future of another?

Perhaps that is the work. Not to sprinkle calm on chaos, but to understand the soil. To ask what teachers are carrying, what systems are rewarding, and what we are measuring, and why. To measure only what serves, and pair every number with the story it cannot tell alone. To know when to stop. To let what emerges from tending the conditions to be enough. 

Service rooted in anxiety becomes brittle. Rooted in curiosity and compassion, it grows supple enough to meet the world as it is and open enough to hold what it could become.

This work is born from friendship as much as urgency, and from the strange grace of people who gather around something larger than themselves and choose, together, to care for it.

The most sacred work in education has always been one person, fully present, lighting a flame that others will carry forward long after they are gone.

The world will keep accelerating.

The pressures will deepen before they ease.

Somewhere, a teacher is walking into a room not knowing that a child in it will spend their whole life giving away what they are about to receive. ❤️