WHEN EVERYTHING BECAME A LEARNING EXPERIENCE: THE THIRD PEG THEORY™. Serious history. Slightly relaxed. No pretending.
A brief history of how an ordinary Tuesday became transformational
There was a time when something happened at school and people simply described what had happened.
A child asked a question.
A teacher answered it.
Students played football.
A parent came to discuss admissions.
A school invited some visitors to dinner.
People went home.
It was not that education was less thoughtful in those days. Quite the opposite. Teachers, philosophers and educational reformers had been thinking seriously about learning for centuries.
Socrates asked questions. Plato thought about education. Rousseau challenged the assumptions of his time. Montessori changed the relationship between the child, the teacher and the environment. John Dewey spent a considerable portion of his life explaining why education should be connected to experience rather than merely memorising information.
They had theories.
They had arguments.
They had disagreements.
What they did not have was LinkedIn.
This turned out to be important.
Because LinkedIn eventually introduced humanity to a remarkable new principle:
Nothing is allowed to remain merely an event.
Everything must become an insight.
And every insight must eventually become a post.
This is where things begin to change.
A child drops a pencil.
The teacher asks the child to pick it up.
The child picks it up.
There was a time when this would have been considered a satisfactory conclusion.
Today, someone may reasonably wonder what the fallen pencil teaches us about agency.
By lunchtime, there is a photograph, a caption and six comments about empowering young minds.
THE AGE WHEN A DINNER WAS JUST A DINNER
Human beings have always tried to extract meaning from experience.
That is not new.
History is full of people asking why things happen and what they mean. Civilisations were built partly by people who refused to accept that events were simply events.
But there was usually a useful distinction between what happened and what we think it means.
The historian could tell you that a revolution happened.
The philosopher could tell you what the revolution said about human nature.
The political scientist could explain its institutional consequences.
The novelist could make you feel something about it.
Everybody had a job.
Then management arrived.
Management did wonderful things for civilisation.
It taught us how to organise large organisations, measure performance, allocate resources and occasionally find out why nobody knew where the budget had gone.
It also gave us words.
Vision.
Mission.
Values.
Stakeholders.
Transformation.
Innovation.
Leadership.
Framework.
Eventually these words crossed the border into education.
The school was no longer merely a school.
It became an ecosystem.
The principal became a leader.
Then a visionary leader.
Then a transformational leader.
Then a learning leader.
And eventually, in some places, the principal became a Chief Learner.
This was an impressive promotion.
Nobody had quite figured out what happened to the chief teaching.
But the learning was clearly going somewhere.
THE PROFESSIONALISATION OF ORDINARY LIFE
The modern education leader lives in a difficult world.
Parents want answers.
Teachers need support.
Students need attention.
Boards change.
Technology changes.
Universities change.
The job is genuinely complicated.
So it is understandable that educational leaders should develop ideas about the future.
The problem begins when everything becomes evidence for the idea.
A student asks a question.
It is no longer merely a question.
It becomes a reminder that children need agency.
A school changes its timetable.
It becomes a lesson in reimagining time.
Students play sport.
It becomes a reflection on leadership, resilience, national ambition and the future of India.
A parent asks whether CBSE or IB is better.
The principal pauses.
This is important.
Because the parent has apparently asked the wrong question.
The principal does not simply answer.
Instead, the parent is invited to consider what success should look like for the child at some distant age when the child has probably developed opinions about mortgages, taxation and whether their parents should still be giving career advice.
The child is seven.
The question remains profound.
THE DAY EXPERIENCE BECAME CONTENT
Then came social media.
Before LinkedIn, a person could have a thought and keep it.
This was inefficient.
LinkedIn solved the problem.
Now the thought could be shared with people who had never asked for it.
The modern LinkedIn post developed its own little weather system.
Something ordinary happens.
“Today, one of our students asked me something unexpected.”
The writer pauses.
“I stopped.”
Then comes the sentence that tells us the photocopier was not, in fact, the important thing that happened that morning.
“And that is when I realised…”
A child asks a question and education is reconsidered.
A teacher makes a mistake and leadership is reconsidered.
A parent complains and listening is reconsidered.
Someone arrives late and time is reconsidered.
Someone leaves early and boundaries are reconsidered.
A school dinner takes place and intercultural belonging is reconsidered.
The event remains the same.
Only the altitude changes.
THE DINNER
Consider the dinner.
An international group of students visits a teacher's home.
There is food.
People sit together.
They talk.
They laugh.
Somebody asks for another serving.
This is actually a lovely thing.
Human beings have been doing it for thousands of years.
The meal has a particularly useful quality: it makes formal relationships slightly less formal.
A teacher is still a teacher.
A student is still a student.
But everyone is also temporarily a person sitting at a table trying to work out whether there will be dessert.
There is something genuinely valuable in that.
Then LinkedIn arrives.
The dinner becomes an exploration of intercultural boundaries.
The home becomes a space of belonging.
The food becomes a vehicle for relational learning.
The evening becomes a reminder that classrooms have no walls.
At some point, the samosa stops being a samosa.
It becomes pedagogy.
The evening becomes an exploration of intercultural boundaries.
The home becomes a space of belonging.
The food becomes a vehicle for relational learning.
The evening becomes a reminder that classrooms have no walls.
At some point, the samosa stops being a samosa.
It becomes pedagogy.
And suddenly dinner has acquired a curriculum.
THE FOOTBALL
Sport suffers from the same problem.
Children play football.
They run.
They fall.
They argue about whether the ball crossed the line.
Someone scores.
Someone loses.
Someone insists that the referee was blind.
This is childhood.
It is also sport.
But modern educational language is reluctant to leave it there.
The match becomes a lesson in resilience.
Then leadership.
Then teamwork.
Then inclusion.
Then national sporting development.
Then the Olympics of 2036.
A child kicks a football and somewhere a thought leader quietly writes:
“By 2036, many of the athletes we cheer for will have spent the next decade being shaped somewhere.”
Technically, this is true.
Children who become athletes in 2036 will, in fact, have spent the preceding years existing.
The deeper question is whether the school can identify talent and provide sustained training.
That is a serious question.
Good coaching matters.
Competition matters.
Facilities matter.
Talent identification matters.
School systems can absolutely contribute to sporting development.
But there is a strange tendency to take a sensible observation and polish it until it sounds like a revelation handed down from Mount Olympus.
The child still has to kick the ball.
Somewhere, an administrator still has to book the ground.
Someone has to repair the goalpost.
And someone has to tell the parents that practice starts at 6:30.
History is cruel to grand language.
Eventually someone needs to bring the cones.
THE FIELD VISIT
Then there is field practice.
This is where educational language reaches its natural habitat.
Students visit a community.
They observe.
They interact.
They ask questions.
The experience may genuinely challenge their assumptions.
Excellent.
This is exactly what education should sometimes do.
But then the vocabulary begins multiplying.
The students must examine their lens.
Their privilege.
Their worldview.
Their assumptions.
The social construction of the problem.
The meaning of development.
The power relationship between observer and observed.
The encounter becomes the site of learning.
The community is not the object.
The learner becomes the observed observer.
By the end, everyone has become both subject and object and somebody is probably looking for a whiteboard.
None of this is necessarily wrong.
That is what makes it funny.
The underlying thought can be perfectly sensible.
It is the ceremonial inflation that becomes extraordinary.
A field visit cannot simply be useful.
It must be transformative.
A dinner cannot simply be warm.
It must reveal belonging.
A sports programme cannot simply be well organised.
It must prepare the nation for 2036.
A school cannot simply be good.
It must be reimagining education.
Apparently, ordinary competence is no longer sufficient.
Everything must be transformational.
WHEN NOTHING IS ALLOWED TO BE ORDINARY
Once the habit takes hold, the supply is infinite.
A broken school bus becomes a lesson in systems thinking.
A teacher taking leave becomes a lesson in trust.
A student changing subjects becomes a lesson in identity.
A parent refusing homework becomes a lesson in autonomy.
A school canteen changing its menu becomes a lesson in inclusion.
A principal forgetting his password becomes a lesson in resilience.
The password itself becomes a metaphor.
Eventually someone will write:
“I forgot my password today. It reminded me that leaders, too, must sometimes let go of what they think they know.”
The comments will say:
“Absolutely.”
Someone will write:
“This.”
Someone else will write:
“So powerful.”
The post will receive 1,842 impressions.
Nobody will recover the password.
WHEN REFLECTION BECAME PERFORMANCE
There is a serious question underneath the joke.
Reflection matters.
Education without reflection becomes routine.
Leadership without self-questioning becomes bureaucracy.
Experience without examination can remain experience and nothing more.
The great educational thinkers understood this.
The problem is not that we reflect.
The problem is that reflection has become performative.
There is a difference between saying:
“This experience made me think.”
and saying:
“This experience fundamentally changed the way I understand the architecture of human learning.”
The first is modest.
The second is excellent LinkedIn material.
Social media rewards the second.
It rewards the unexpected lesson.
The dramatic reversal.
The personal revelation.
The universal conclusion.
The photograph.
The hashtags.
And, preferably, a question at the end.
“What do you think?”
This is particularly useful because it allows the author to appear humble immediately after explaining the nature of education to everyone.
THE GREAT AGE OF FRAMEWORKS
The twentieth century gave us management frameworks.
The twenty-first century gave us frameworks about frameworks.
Everything now has a model.
There are models for leadership.
Models for learning.
Models for innovation.
Models for creativity.
Models for student agency.
Models for resilience.
Models for transformation.
Sometimes the model is simply a circle with four arrows.
This is usually described as a journey.
Nobody knows where the journey ends.
That is because the arrows are circular.
The framework has achieved immortality.
A particularly successful framework may even acquire an acronym.
This is the final stage of professional seriousness.
If an idea has an acronym, it has become real.
The educational leader does not merely have an opinion.
The educational leader has a framework.
And the framework has three pillars.
Or four.
Or five.
Five is particularly powerful because four sounds operational while five sounds strategic.
FROM PHILOSOPHERS TO PERSONAL BRANDS
Perhaps this is not entirely new.
Human beings have always decorated ordinary reality with meaning.
Kings commissioned monuments.
Courts commissioned historians.
Governments commissioned speeches.
Corporations commissioned mission statements.
The difference today is that the printing press has been replaced by a rectangle in everyone's pocket.
The audience is permanent.
The archive is endless.
Every experience can become public.
And public experience creates incentives.
A person who says:
“We had a productive meeting today”
will probably be ignored.
A person who says:
“Today reminded me why everything we believe about leadership may be wrong”
has discovered the algorithm.
The event is still the same.
Only the language around it has changed.
THE PRINCIPAL TRIES AN EXPERIMENT
One Monday morning, our fictional principal decided to stop.
Not stop working.
That would have been difficult.
He simply decided to stop interpreting everything.
A student dropped a pencil.
He said:
“Please pick it up.”
No lesson about agency.
A teacher asked for leave.
He said:
“Of course.”
No lesson about trust.
The students played football.
He watched them.
They played football.
No metaphor.
A parent asked whether CBSE or another board was better.
He explained the differences.
The parent thanked him.
Nobody questioned the meaning of success at age thirty-seven.
An international student came to dinner.
They ate.
They talked.
Someone asked for more food.
Someone laughed.
Nobody described it as a transformational intercultural learning encounter.
It was simply a pleasant evening.
Something unexpected happened.
Nothing went wrong.
The school continued.
The children continued learning.
The teachers continued teaching.
The parents continued asking questions.
The football continued rolling.
The world did not collapse for lack of a framework.
The principal began to wonder whether perhaps there was something liberating about allowing an experience to remain exactly what it was.
THE RADICAL IDEA OF LEAVING THINGS ALONE
None of this is an argument against reflection, leadership or serious thinking. Good schools need people who question assumptions and look beyond routine. But there is a quieter skill that may be just as useful: knowing when an experience has already said enough. Not every dinner needs to become intercultural pedagogy. Not every football match needs to carry the future of Indian sport. Not every parent asking about a school board needs to be taken on a philosophical journey before getting an answer.
Sometimes a student asks a question because the student wants an answer. Sometimes children play football because they enjoy football. Sometimes people have dinner because someone invited them. And sometimes the most sophisticated thing a leader can say is, “I don't know. Let's find out.”
THE MORNING AFTER THE POST
The next morning, our fictional principal opened LinkedIn and found a post beginning, “Yesterday, I learned something unexpected from a broken stapler.” He read on. The stapler had apparently revealed five principles of leadership: resilience, patience, distributed responsibility, adaptive thinking and the importance of knowing when to replace the stapler. The post had 4,700 reactions.
He looked at his own desk. His stapler was broken too. For a moment, he considered writing about it. He could already see the photograph: the stapler in his hand, slightly out of focus, with a thoughtful expression suggesting that stationery had changed his understanding of leadership. He put it in the drawer instead and got on with his work. It may have been the most transformational decision he had made all year. Or perhaps it was simply Tuesday. History will decide. LinkedIn probably won't.
HISTORY'S LAST WORD
History has always needed interpretation. Without it, events become dates and names. But perhaps our age has developed a small problem of its own: we have become so determined to extract meaning from everything that we sometimes forget that meaning does not improve simply because it is announced in capital letters.
There is nothing wrong with asking what an experience means. The trouble begins when the experience is no longer allowed to stand on its own. A child asks a question and we rush to explain what it tells us about education. Children play and we search for the leadership lesson. People share a meal and we discover a new theory of belonging. Eventually the ordinary becomes so heavily interpreted that it starts to look less like life and more like a presentation about life.
Perhaps there is another kind of wisdom in leaving some things alone. A child asks a question and you answer. People sit around a table and eat. Children play and laugh. A school does its job well. No grand conclusion arrives. Nothing needs to be transformed before it can be valuable.
And perhaps that is enough.
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Sometimes a dinner is dinner.
Sometimes a football match is football.
And sometimes Tuesday is simply Tuesday.
Very well articulated and worth reading such a wonderful article. It has touched upon all the age specific issues. This also highlights the expectations and perceptions of Student- teacher relationship along with other stakeholders.
ReplyDeleteThe article made me engrossed in reading and assimilating the thought process interwoven with old and new that quickly and quietly slipped into the system.
Earlier also we had Mission, Vision and Goals but how this has been slowly transmitted and inducted into the system that is the beauty.
Manish, a big Congratulations for handling such transformational changes very aptly and efficiently.
God Bless you