The Reinvention Racket.

Education's Self-Styled Visionaries and the Hustle of "New" Ideas.

Let's talk about educational content.

We all know the type; every post is an excitable announcement of some "groundbreaking" concept that will fix or (oh no!) reimagine education. The latest irritant is "challenge-based learning", but let's leave that for another post.

I've been arguing for a while now (often into a void) about the need for a focus on the frame. Without careful catering to assessing what frame you are working within, what you frantically stuff inside will remain largely irrelevant.

A future frame should be flexible, messy, and connected, acting as a compass, not a script to recite.

In addition to carefully considering the purpose and values behind your educational approach, from my journey, it was always the portfolio approach that was the significant step we took in building a new curriculum.

The portfolio (inspired by a mix of the IB Art approach and the likes of the Stanford D-School) acted and will act as an antidote to AI's essay writing, which will essentially take over our system if it has not already. No, we don't need "Quantum Curiosity Pods" or equally buzzword-laden nonsense.

This new obsession of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks risks undermining the whole "future school" movement; it's like watching someone thrift a new persona every week and call it couture, constant jargon juggling.

“It’s like watching someone thrift a new persona every week and call it couture”

The random content, I've noticed, often is a remix of project-based Learning (PBL), student agency, and personalised learning, then remixed into something they declare is revolutionary.

As a former DJ, I admire some of this approach, but we must be careful.

For example, many of these mini-units tucked inside PBL risk blurring the bigger picture, a more significant curriculum overhaul backed by more profound macro case studies, not this scatter-gun micro approach. Clever, sure, to offer the micro-unit, but groundbreaking? It's more like a thrifted tweak on what frontier schools have been doing for years: bravely pushing boundaries and hoping the parents don't riot when they hear the word "project" instead of memorising times tables.

Then there's the recent move into AI and assessment.

The LinkedIn AI gurus have a point: when they say ChatGPT and DeepSeek can create an A-grade essay, maybe our old tests were never the gold standard we thought.

Portfolios. Portfolios are both messy and human. It's a solid move into an unknown and uncertain future. Of course, many are jumping on this bandwagon, echoing what we did back at THINK Global over a decade ago when a team of educators inspired by John Dewey and Kurt Hahn let kids show their work, stumble, and showcase their passions.

However, the wave of recent content makes it seem like these observers have just cracked the Da Vinci Code. However, this is less of a revelation and more like rebranding. The emperor has new clothes, and a new tag popped. Be warned, this was a decade-long process for our team, thousands of global projects, from "zero to infinity" in India to the "energy problem" in Japan. The process is long and hard.

Education has been thrifting ideas forever. We rummage through the racks of history, Montessori's hands-on ethos, Freire's critical pedagogy, and even the Socratic method and repurpose them for the moment. There's no shame in that.

But we don't need rehash upon rehash by the next wave of LinkedIn prophets to tell us how to bridge curriculum gaps or hack AI. The hustle isn't wrong; it's just loud and too much. And in a world drowning in content and desperately needing to synergise. This volume can force more ignorance of the frame. And that would be a terrible mistake.

On the optimistic side, AI's rise forces us to rethink what we measure. A machine can mimic prose, but it can't fake the jagged arc of a kid wrestling with an idea, failing, rethinking, and growing as they reflect. As I said in my CNN Brazil interview on Projeto Upload, portfolios capture raw humanity, like a thrifted coat with the previous owner's initials still stitched inside.

“A machine can mimic prose, but it can’t fake the jagged arc of a kid wrestling with an idea”

But let's not kid ourselves: portfolios aren't new. Art schools have lived by them forever, where we drew much of our inspiration. The innovation isn't the idea; as I said in my TEDx talk, it's the urgency of dusting it down now, in this time of need and as new tech rewrites the rules.

I suggest we rethink how educational content is used, not the ideas themselves. The relentless reinvention, the bold claims, the jargon takeover we are currently experiencing. Let us not be the industry that has outrun our last considerable thought. I get the reality of the grind, survive or being scrolled past.

It's not wrong to tinker. We operate in both a moment of opportunity and chaos; education's messiness is worth fixing; standardised tests still choke our creativity, and AI only widens the gaps. But let's not chase the wrong thread.

Let's also be careful about ignoring the schools leading the charge rather than those loud about catching up.

The real magic in education isn't a new hot take every Tuesday; it's the slow, unglamorous work of adapting, reflecting, and trusting to reach an authentic result that's purpose-laden and infused with values of good stewardship towards the future.

Our next "visionary" might keep popping new jargon, an alchemist of the obvious, but some schools already wear the threads that hold.