As I sit with my sprained ankle raised, unable to move much, I’ve been thinking about education — and more specifically, how we learn.
How to solve problems and adapt to new contexts is fundamental to learning. Even something as small as working out how to manage daily life with limited mobility has required fast adaptations — getting food, reaching the washing line, navigating stairs. These are small but real reminders that learning isn’t just about absorbing content; it’s about applying thinking in new contexts.
Having been involved in New Zealand’s education system for most of my life — as a student, educator, and leader — I keep returning to one question:
Are we really teaching people how to learn, or just instructing them to meet pre-determined standards based on our experience of education?
We talk a lot about innovation, but too often our systems reward compliance over curiosity. One consistent skill our education system teaches — intentionally or not — is how to follow institutional processes, meet metrics, and navigate bureaucracy rarely designed with learners in mind.
Yes, that prepares people for navigating institutions. But it also reduces learning to procedural compliance. It becomes something you acquire through qualification — tick the box, move on. But real growth doesn’t follow that trajectory.
Staying in your comfort zone isn’t learning. Fighting to preserve a status quo that no longer serves is also not learning. Education can become a trap. We grow confident in what we already know and stop questioning how we know. We become protectionist about the things we learned in the past, convinced that because it worked for us, today’s learners should simply 'take their medicine.'
A colleague recently reminded me: curiosity is too often missing in education. And it matters. Curiosity drives us to explore what we don’t know rather than defend what we do. It invites questions. It fosters exploration rather than just passing on information.
The ability to learn — to think critically, explore creatively, and adapt with agility — is a lifelong skill, not something confined to any classroom. Yet we still prioritise structure over imagination, and assessment over ambiguity.
So, I find myself asking:
Are we preparing learners for complexity, or just for benchmarks?
Are we protecting outdated models because they serve learners — or because they protect us?
Are we resisting change because it feels risky to what we already think we know?
These aren’t easy questions. But they matter. Because if education is to stay relevant, it needs the courage to evolve — and that starts with curiosity.
