What happens when 44 years of hard-won educational wisdom collides with the current moment? You get one of the most provocative, refreshing, and urgently necessary conversations I’ve had in a long time.
A number of years ago now I first met Gary Stager when he was a keynote speaker at one of our annual ULearn conferences. Gary is based in the US, and is an educator, author, maker, provocateur, and one of the longest-standing advocates for learner-centred, project-based education in the world. He joined me earlier this week to record another podcast interview in my ‘Conversations about the future of education series”. Knowing a bit about Gary’s work and his views on education I wasn’t expecting a quiet conversation. I wasn’t disappointed.
Gary has been working in education for 44 years. He co-authored Invent to Learn, worked alongside the late Seymour Papert (one of the founding fathers of both AI and educational computing), taught everyone from preschoolers to doctoral students, and built a project-based learning environment inside a prison for teenagers. He’s also currently using AI tools to preserve Papert’s legacy for scholars and practitioners – and the stories he tells about what’s possible are nothing short of extraordinary.
But what struck me most in our conversation wasn’t the future-gazing. It was the clarity of his diagnosis about right now.
“Evidence Is No Match for Ideology”
If there’s a through-line in our conversation, it’s this sentence: “evidence is no match for ideology”. Gary offered it almost in passing, but it really grabbed my attention and has been playing on my mind ever since.
In New Zealand, as in the United States and many parts of the world, we are witnessing what Gary describes as a rise of pedagogical authoritarianism – a doubling down on explicit direct instruction, scripted curricula, phonics sequences, and a deficit model of children that treats them as empty vessels requiring filling. In our conversation he was characteristically blunt, saying; “Explicit direct instruction is a delusionary form of cruelty that fails at first contact with an actual child.”
This maps directly onto something I’ve been tracking in the Education Environment Scan 2026: the tension between evidence-based, relational, future-focused pedagogy and the ideologically-driven policy settings that are currently dominating the conversation in Aotearoa. It’s not a pedagogical debate, it’s a political one. The structured literacy push, the direct instruction drift, the narrowing of the curriculum – Gary’s critique names what many teachers and school leaders are experiencing but struggling to articulate in the face of policy pressure.
His point isn’t that literacy doesn’t matter. It’s that the policy recommendations never seem to start with “get kids books, love them, and surround them with people who love reading.” Instead, we get mandated sequences, scripted lessons, and a level of distrust toward both children and teachers that is, as Gary claims, “mean-spirited.”
The Amnesia Problem
One of Gary’s most compelling observations is what he calls the cure for amnesia problem. He explained how Papert predicted – in much detail – exactly how educational systems would reject innovation, no matter how beneficial it may be to children. And yet, decade after decade, we keep rediscovering the same things, losing the same insights, and repeating the same policy mistakes.
Gary has spent years maintaining The Daily Papert, an archive of Papert’s written, audio, and video work, precisely because he believes powerful ideas are alarmingly temporal. “If you want to improve education,” he says, “the first thing you can do is find a cure for amnesia.”
This resonates deeply with what I’ve been arguing in the scan’s closing section about the need for long-term, cross-party commitment to education – something more like the NZ Superannuation Fund model than the current short-cycle policy environment. We keep starting over. We keep losing the thread. And in the meantime, as Jonathan Kozol (whom Gary quotes with great affection) reminds us: you’re only seven once.
Technology, Phones, and the Equity Blindspot
Gary’s position on technology is more nuanced than his reputation as a tech advocate might suggest. He acknowledges freely that 99.6% of what’s done with computers in schools is “garbage.” But he’s emphatic that the other 0.4% is “absolutely vital.”
His critique of phone bans cuts to something I’ve also been circling in the scan’s equity thread. When we ban devices from schools – particularly in lower-decile communities – we’re not levelling the playing field. We’re taxing the children who have nothing else. As Gary puts it: “This phone, this thing, might be the only thing of value society has granted them, has trusted them with. How dare you yank it out of their hands.”
Rich independent schools, he notes wryly, can afford to market phone bans as an educational philosophy precisely because their students already have laptops, tablets, and home environments saturated with knowledge resources. The ban becomes branding. For everyone else, Gary maintains, it’s deprivation.
The answer to problematic phone use in classrooms isn’t a ban, he argues – it’s the same social sanction we apply in concert halls and aeroplanes. Ask them to put it away. Then give them something worth being present for.
AI: Not for Instruction. For Making.
Gary’s take on AI in education is one of the more refreshing I’ve heard – not because it’s optimistic, but because it’s specific.
He is not interested in AI as a content delivery system, a tutor, or an administrative chore-eliminator. He’s interested in AI as a making tool – something that allows learners and teachers to create things that would have been impossible without it.
He tells the story of his friend Brett Moller, a teacher who used AI to build a custom app for a school excursion to Melbourne – one that tracked students, managed dietary restrictions, ran a scavenger hunt, created parent newsletters, and drew geofenced boundaries on the fly. “This was billions of dollars of programming that no one needs – no one needs but him.”
This (and other anecdotes he uses in the podcast) connects directly to the AI and assessment thread in my environment scan – the growing recognition that the question isn’t whether students use AI, but what kind of learning we’re actually trying to make visible and why.
The Monday/Someday Conundrum
At the end of our conversation I asked Gary for his advice to educators in New Zealand (and elsewhere) as they look to cope with the present but with an eye on the future. He responded by quoting something that Seymour Papert used to say, and it’s the piece of advice I’d most want every school leader in New Zealand to sit with:
“It’s okay to worry about what you’re going to do Monday, as long as it points in the direction of what you hope to do someday.”
That requires, he says, an informed, consistent, coherent vision of what kind of world you want to live in. Not a strategic plan. A vision. Something that orients every small decision toward a larger possibility.
Why You Should Listen
This is a conversation about the current moment in education – but it’s also a conversation about 44 years of pattern recognition, and what happens when someone who’s seen it all before refuses to pretend the emperor has clothes.
Gary Stager is funny, fierce, fiercely kind toward children, and entirely without patience for what he calls “scientific cosplay” dressed up as policy. He is also one of the most serious thinkers I know about what learning is actually for.
If you’re a school leader trying to hold the line between what you know works and what the system is currently demanding, this conversation will feel like oxygen.
For more, read:
- About Gary – https://professorgarystager.
com/collaborate - Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom – https://amzn.to/2CRw4AY
- Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50: Future Visions of Education Inspired by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon’s Seminal Work – https://amzn.to/3DawajE
- The Learner’s Apprentice: AI and the Amplification of Human Creativity – https://amzn.to/3XaeSiT
- Papert Archives – https://dailypapert.com
- 2026 Education Environment Scan – https://futuremakers.nz/thought-pieces/environment-scan-2026/
- Conversations on the Future of Education Podcast series – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR0qV31usqmVzWfOHk_MSkyLXm9hAitY8
View the podcast:
One reply on “Evidence is no match for ideology”
Great piece. Project-based learning in teams-making/creating something in collaboration-has purpose and meaning now and is better education and training for the future. We mustn’t forget about education policy amnesia in these (over) testing times…