If education simply mirrors the dominant values of society, it will reproduce them. If education is to help create a different future, schools must become places where young people experience and practise a different way of living together.
Three ‘isms’ shaping our society
I recently attended a seminar where a speaker referenced three ‘isms’ shaping our society – prevailing ways of thinking, being and doing that show up in how we do business, organise as a society, and educate our young people. Reflecting on this, I began thinking about how these isms manifest in our schooling systems – in curriculum design and pedagogical practice – and, more importantly, how we might view them differently: not as constraints to work within, but as a starting point for a more liberatory approach to education, one in service of a future where human flourishing is possible. I found this particularly useful in helping to understand the ideological and societal drivers influencing so much of the current debate about education in the lead-up to our general election.
All of this comes back, of course, to the essential question of ‘what is the purpose of education?’ which we’re seeing responded to in a variety of ways in the lead up to our next election here in NZ. This is mostly implicitly referenced in the policy statements being issued by the various political parties, an analysis of which reveals the extent to which these ‘isms’ are influencing the direction for education being advocated for.
So I thought I’d start by summarising what I see as the current state of each of these ‘isms’ and how they are being manifest in our education system – then suggest some things we could be doing as schools and as a system to take a more radical departure from these conventional ways of thinking:
The current state
Consumerism – education as something to acquire
We live in a society that treats almost everything as a product – something to buy, use and replace, always assumed to be in endless supply. Education is not immune. Schools themselves become products to be chosen and compared, qualifications become commodities promising access to income, and school choice or private tutoring reinforce the idea that a better education is something the well-resourced can purchase. Charter schools, school choice and the tutoring economy aren’t corruptions of the system – they are the system working exactly as a market is designed to work. The danger is that education becomes valued mainly for its exchange value – What will this get me? – rather than for its contribution to who we become and the society we build together. What’s being ‘consumed’ isn’t a good that depletes with use; it’s a shared capacity that a society either builds together, or doesn’t.
Individualism – education as personal fulfilment
Our culture places enormous emphasis on personal choice, fulfilment and identity, and this shows up in increasingly individualised curriculum, learning pathways and pedagogy. Language like ‘child-centred’ and ‘learner agency’ can quietly be redefined – from empowering learners to act with and for others into optimising outcomes for me. That’s not a small drift: agency stripped of its relational, common-good dimension isn’t agency at all, it’s individualism wearing a nicer word. A system built only to ask what this learner needs – with no companion question about what this learner owes or contributes to others – shouldn’t be surprised when its graduates are fluent in self-advocacy and illiterate in reciprocity.
A note on where ‘student-centred’ came from
Margaret Mead’s 1943 essay Our Educational Emphases in Primitive Perspective argued against a colonial ‘will to teach, convert, or assimilate’ – and student-centred pedagogy was a genuine answer to that history. But Mead valued curiosity over rote learning because a culture’s capacity to evolve depends on each generation thinking freshly – for social renewal, not individual fulfilment. What’s been lost in the drift toward individualism isn’t her emphasis on curiosity; it’s the collective purpose that curiosity was meant to serve.
Tribalism – education as belonging to ‘us’
Alongside consumerism and individualism sits a growing tendency to organise ourselves into tribes – groups defined by shared identity, culture, beliefs or status – amplified by social media echo chambers and political rhetoric that frames disagreement as defeating enemies. Education can mirror this through differentiated schools, ‘specialist’ provision and postcode competition for example, while communities – quite understandably, as Aotearoa becomes more multicultural – seek spaces where language, culture and identity are affirmed. That impulse is entirely legitimate; people are drawn to whānau, to belonging, to being seen. The risk is when it hardens into an expectation that institutions must reshape entirely around one group’s worldview, or that other groups must be persuaded, defeated or excluded. A school system built on postcode envy and identity enclaves isn’t fostering diversity – it’s fragmenting the very commons that diversity needs in order to mean anything.
What a radical departure might look like
Beyond consumerism – education as contribution
A school resisting consumerism stops treating education as a product to be delivered or consumed, and instead treats it as a shared resource – a contribution to the common good, the way a well-run marae treats manaakitanga: something that grows through circulation rather than depletes through use. Learning is justified not only by its usefulness to an individual’s career, but by what it enables that person to give back to whānau, community and society; success is measured by what learners create, restore, solve and contribute, not simply what they acquire. Practically, this might look like a school redistributing its best opportunities rather than auctioning them to the highest bidder or most anxious parent; treating senior students’ expertise as something owed back to younger learners and the wider community rather than banked as private credential; and refusing enrolment or funding models that let it cream the easiest students while pushing harder-to-teach ones elsewhere. The underlying principle is sufficiency, not scarcity: this is not another shop on the strip, and ‘choice’ will not become a euphemism for who gets left behind.
Beyond individualism – education as interdependence
A school resisting individualism still values every learner as a unique person, but refuses the idea that personal fulfilment is education’s ultimate purpose. Learner agency is deliberately designed as agency with and for others: learners make meaningful choices and experience the consequences of those choices for others, with collaboration, reciprocity and shared responsibility valued as highly as individual achievement. (See the section at the beginning of my book Agency By Design pp 18-20 for an expansion of this thinking.) This has real curriculum consequences – assessment and reporting that credits contribution to others alongside personal achievement; project and inquiry structures where success includes ‘who benefited beyond me’; and interdependence taught as a skill, not hoped for as a value. The guiding principle is empowerment for, not just from – personal capability as the means to contribute beyond the self, not the end point of self-interest – said out loud, in how a school grades, groups and celebrates its learners.
Beyond tribalism – education as belonging together
A school resisting tribalism becomes a place where difference is neither erased nor allowed to become division – one that honours culture, language and identity while deliberately creating encounters between people who are different from one another, and teaches how to live well together. This takes courage: not a neutral, flavourless institution avoiding identity to keep the peace, but one that structures its culture explicitly around whakawhanaungatanga – the ongoing work of building relationship across difference – treats cultural and philosophical difference as curriculum content to be examined rather than merely tolerated, and refuses postcode logic through shared campuses, cross-school projects and mixed-catchment programmes that force encounter rather than avoidance. The guiding principle is belonging without enclosure: every group gets to be fully itself, but no group gets to redraw the school’s boundaries around itself alone.
Bringing these ideas together
Consumerism, individualism and tribalism each promise something education genuinely needs – access, empowerment, belonging – but each collapses that promise into its narrowest, most self-referential form. A school that wants to operate differently doesn’t reject access, empowerment or belonging; it re-grounds each one in relationship rather than self-interest. Three principles hold that shift together:
- Sufficiency, not scarcity – treating knowledge and opportunity as a shared resource that grows through circulation, not a product to be bought, hoarded or rationed by ability to pay.
- Empowerment for, not just from – agency and personal capability as the means to contribute beyond the self, not the end point of self-interest.
- Belonging without enclosure – every identity fully present, but none redrawing the school’s boundaries around itself alone.
Together they describe a school acting as steward of a commons rather than supplier to a market.
At a glance
In the table below I’ve attempted to summarise this thinking so that the key ideas and comparisons can be recognised at a glance:
| The current state | The narrow promise | The radical alternative | Guiding principle | |
| Consumerism | Education as a product; charter schools, tuition and “learn to earn to buy” treat opportunity as infinite supply, purchased by those who can pay. | Access – everyone should be able to get a good education. | The school as steward of a shared resource: opportunity redistributed, expertise circulated back into the community, no creaming of easy students. | Sufficiency, not scarcity |
| Individualism | A reductionist model built on isolated learners, where peer interaction is managed as disturbance; “child-centred” and “agency” language now dressed over the same architecture as personal optimisation. | Empowerment – learners should have voice and self-direction. | The school rebuilt around networked, emergent learning: diverse skills and perspectives deliberately brought into synergy, group intelligence recognised as greater than any individual output. | Empowerment for, not just from |
| Tribalism | Schools of type, postcode envy, cultural enclaves amplified by echo chambers into culture-war rhetoric. | Belonging – people deserve to be seen in their identity and culture. | The school as plural commons: whakawhanaungatanga built deliberately, difference taught as curriculum, structures that force encounter rather than avoidance. | Belonging without enclosure |
Final thought
If education simply mirrors the dominant values of society, it will reproduce them. If education is to help create a different future, schools must become places where young people experience and practise a different way of living together.
A call to action
To help you make sense of this in your own context I’ve created the following prompts as a start point for the conversations and thinking you might do in your school or community. This isn’t a checklist to implement – it’s a lens to think with, and it’s worth turning into a conversation – in the staffroom, at board level, and with your wider community.
- Revisit your vision, mission and values against these three isms – where does the language you already use assume a consumerist, individualist or tribal frame, even accidentally?
- Ask your board, staff and community which of the three principles – sufficiency not scarcity, empowerment for not just from, belonging without enclosure – is most alive in your kura, and which is most absent.
- Examine your pedagogical structures – timetabling, assessment, reporting, enrolment, grouping – and ask what they assume about the purpose of learning: an individual acquisition, or a shared contribution?
- Bring your community into the conversation deliberately – not to seek instant agreement, but to practise the kind of belonging-across-difference this piece describes.
The point isn’t to arrive at a single answer, but to keep asking the question – publicly and often enough that it starts to reshape what a school assumes about itself.
