Benjamin Freud:
The second day or third day, I was thrown, and I was taught the basics of Balinese mud wrestling, which is an experience. So it does so much actually because it’s more than just mud wrestling. It’s going out and getting out of your comfort zone and literally being thrown around in the mud and being caked in mud at a time when you’re just getting to know people. So there’s a lot of that bonding piece because you move beyond that. Of course, there’s the healing properties of the earth. There’s the healing properties of the mud. There’s caking yourself, which is wonderful for your skin.
There is this idea of connecting with something that I’d never done before Balinese mud wrestling. But afterwards, I mean you go through ceremony of asking the connection with the gods and then going through the water cleansing and eating rice and having that peace that gets you to understand a little bit more of the culture, but also go through a ritual. Now, whether or not we as Westerners buy into that, I don’t really actually think it matters because there’s still a moment of silence, of peace, of inward looking that can only be beneficial because we always need to heal no matter what.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Benjamin Freud, Head of Upper School at the Green School in Bali, talking about one of the very first things he did when he arrived there. This episode’s interview was conducted by Kelly Wilson, Dean of the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. Kelly got to visit the Green School last year, but she’s been excited about it since before it even opened. The founders, John and Cynthia Hardy came to High Tech High when they were designing it. It’s a pretty unusual place, so I asked Kelly to describe what it was like to arrive there for the first time.

Kelly Wilson:
Right away, it’s intriguing because you walk in, and it’s hard to tell where the classrooms are. You’re walking on dirt paths. You’re in the jungle. There are these beautiful bamboo structures where students meet in flexible ways, but there are no walls in the Green School. There’s different spaces for students to run their organic, locally sourced restaurant. There are spaces for the parents to co-op and work within the Green School. There are spaces for organic farming. There are chickens. There’s a river nearby, and the students built a bridge as one of their projects over that river. So you really see when educators talk about getting beyond the four walls of the classroom, there literally are no walls to the classroom.
So it’s very place-based, and it’s very much built within the community. There are a lot of expats and a lot of the international community that come there, but there are also a lot of Balinese students and a lot of teachers, faculty leaders that are Balinese that are bringing those traditions in as well. One of them is a spiritual cleansing water ceremony that the parents will do with their students in Hindu tradition. There’s a mud ceremony that they do. So there’s these different aspects of Balinese culture and traditions that are really honored and integral to the school and the way they think about just indigenous ways of knowing and learning and being that really build from the local culture.

Alec Patton:
That’s so awesome. All right. Let’s play your interview.

Kelly Wilson:
Benjamin, I’m so excited to talk to you today. As you know, I had the opportunity to visit the Green School in Bali this fall, and I was absolutely blown away by the shared sense of purpose and student agency that I saw across the community. We host thousands of visitors each year at High Tech High, so it was such a joy and honor to come learn from the incredible work you are all doing. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Benjamin Freud:
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Kelly Wilson:
Yeah, and tell us a little bit about where you are today and what’s happening in Bali.

Benjamin Freud:
Yeah, so I’m in Bali, Indonesia, which is an island unlike any other island in the world, it seems. Today’s a day off because it’s the Balinese New Year for Nyepi, which is a wonderful experience that I’ve gone through for the first time. The island completely shuts down, no lights. You don’t leave your house. And although that might sound quite post-traumatic and after COVID, it’s time of reflection and thinking about your values in the new year. And really, it was actually quite wonderful yesterday to hear nothing outside and have that be because it’s a reboot for the island in the new year.

Kelly Wilson:
Yeah. Well, beautiful. And the gift of silence and an opportunity for reflection is always so welcome. So thank you for taking time to reflect with me as well today. I’d love for you to start by sharing your own story. What was your experience in education and how has it shaped your thinking today?

Benjamin Freud:
So my experience or my pathway to where I got is probably not typical of most people in leadership in education. I started off my career in the late ’90s in Silicon Valley. This was a time when people were building Web 1.0. This was a time when Yahoo had just gone public, when people were just really excited about setting up websites that allowed businesses to set up their own websites, those kinds of businesses. So it was a time when I was probably, I don’t know, 23, 22, something like that. And I was working with people who were 27, 28, and they were changing the world, and they didn’t know what the rules were. So that really had a big influence on me.
Later, I went to get an MBA because I thought everything would go really well in Silicon Valley, and then the market tanked. This was in 2000, showing a nice pattern of hard timing. But then I was in London where I did more consulting, then Tokyo, and I decided to give it all up. Went to Singapore to get a PhD in Southeast Asian history, and then ended up moving to New York. And it was one night, I really remember. It’s with my ex-wife, and I really remember saying, “You know what? I want to get into education.” I had two kids, and I got more energy out of kids than I did out of adults. So I really wanted to, and it just felt right. I felt it in my body.
Worked in a school in Connecticut, ended up moving to Hong Kong. And ever since, I’ve had really the pleasure and good fortune to work with some of the most innovative schools in the world. One of them was in Saudi Arabia where they sent me on a trip to go see you guys at High Tech High, so we can learn a lot from there. So that was super exciting. So my journey in education is really… I still keep that legacy of trying to break the rules and trying to do things actually for the right reasons, whatever that means, rather than because there’s a sense of compliance. And that drives me today at the Green School.

Kelly Wilson:
Can you tell us a little bit about the story of the Green School? How did it come to be, and what problem was it trying to solve?

Benjamin Freud:
So that’s really actually such a complex question for the Green School because it’s a school that it’s recognized in many circles across the world, and it was the idea of a John and Cynthia Hardy, who are not educators. They had a jewelry business, but they wanted to do things differently. And John Hardy is an amazing ideas man. Cynthia is the person who just makes everything happen, and they wanted to have a school in Bali in the jungle that was sustainable operationally. So in terms of the way the buildings are constructed, in terms of the way the energy is produced and so forth, but also pedagogy that really just does things, just lets life happen.
And I had the pleasure, I think a month ago, of going on a trash walk with John Hardy. And I thought it was going to be, sure, we got our little poles, and we go get trash along the road. No, it wasn’t like that. It was the adventure hike of a lifetime. And this man who’s in his 70s now just goes, and I could see how pedagogically that really resonates. We’re doing one thing, but actually we’re just going to go and do some wild things and enjoy. And he was diving in a pool of water, and he was climbing up this and that, and it’s that sense of wildness in life. So I think that the problem that it was trying to solve is actually a space where we can be more wild. And I mean that in the best way. Life is wild in the jungle. It’s not a garden, it’s wild. And to this day, it’s a school that continues on this path.

Kelly Wilson:
Beautiful. And you talked about sustainability as part of the focus. When I was there, I expected to see the beautiful architecture made out of bamboo and sustainable materials and the focus on environmental sustainability, but sustainability is really much bigger than that. Can you share more about what that means at the Green School?

Benjamin Freud:
Sure. So just to frame it, I’m the Head of Upper School there, so that means middle school and high school. And I’ve also got my eye on the teaching and learning piece as well as the day-to-day operations and things like that. And I work with a wonderful team that has been different from any other team that I’ve ever worked with because it’s a yes culture. We start off from yes, and then we try to make it work. And some things happen, and some things don’t. But it starts from yes rather than a place of no. So that in itself feels very alive. And I have quite a few conversations with people in the world of education for sustainability or whatever it might be, or sustainability, and there’s a lot of great work that’s done out there.
But this idea of moving beyond the operations of sustainability, yeah, it’s great to have your own solar panels and your bamboo. That’s sustainable materials, and it’s great to have all these things about conserving water and so forth. But I think that if I were to say those things, that could happen at a Walmart, that could happen at a Boeing, that could happen at a pharmaceutical company. Trying to have zero carbon footprint is absolutely wonderful, but it doesn’t make it about education. We need to think about sustainability in ways we interact with each other, the relationships that we have with humans and the more than human world, and really thinking about different ways that we, and I’ve brought this up with you before, we contribute to all life.
And that’s really what sustainability is. And actually that moves us more towards the realm of regeneration, which is doing a little bit more than just trying to keep the status quo. If we can, in schools, think about how we contribute to all life, then we will make decisions that lead to or that respond to the ecological breakdown that we face. And that’s the big difference, that it’s not just a curriculum that has bolt-ons of we have solar panels. It’s really thinking about how the curriculum and those solar panels can’t be distinguished, and everything that we do is for the contribution to all life.

Kelly Wilson:
Beautiful. And it was so thoughtful, the many ways that you’re also thinking about sustainability of working in collaboration with the local community and embedding projects. Can you say more about what it means to, as an independent school in the jungle in Bali, what does it mean to engage in sustainable collaboration with indigenous people and with the culture and the community surrounding the school?

Benjamin Freud:
Yeah, this is absolutely critical because sustainability is also in terms of our communities and how we are at a school like Green School, Bali that has a certain socioeconomic demographic, that has a certain just identity that really is full of identities with 51 different nationalities there. The school has always placed an emphasis on Balinese culture. They don’t teach any language other than Bahasa Indonesia. There are so many ceremonies that are embedded within the school day. There’s so many visuals and senses and ways, even the openings. Having worked in international schools, I see how it could be in a bubble and sometimes it felt tokenistic. And I’m not saying that Green School, Bali has it absolutely right, but there’s certainly a dedication to the community.
So many times students go out during the week to go work with local schools. Now it’s very easy to do, and you’ve got all these white folks coming in and helping the Balinese, and aren’t we wonderful saviors? But it is a sense trying to move towards being shoulder to shoulder. So one of the initiatives, for instance, that we do is we go out, and we build projects of sustainability inside local schools. However, we also ask those local students to come to Green School to help us build projects of sustainability. And then we present shoulder to shoulder. And the dream would be to present shoulder to shoulder in each other’s languages or finding a way to really show that sense of as much as possible that we stand together on some of these things.

Kelly Wilson:
Yeah, beautiful. And I know that one of the keystone things that students do that I was really struck by is the Greenstone, the capstone, and that in that work, they are working with the community and in the community to advance a UN sustainability goal. Can you share more about the Greenstone and maybe even a project that stands out that really represents what you’re after?

Benjamin Freud:
This is a good timing because we are about to rethink our Greenstone to make it actually a lot more meaty, so to speak. And it’s wonderful now, but we’re always in this idea of how could we make things even better? And what we’re looking at for the Greenstone, it’s currently a one year, but it will end up being a two-year capstone experience. So the learners work really in terms of project management and thinking about what they might do, but they have completely free choice to do something that contributes to the world, whatever that might be. And in its next iteration, while they go through a lot of research and working with community, there’s going to be a little bit of just a process of defense and really making sure that there’s rigor there so that it’s not just doing, because one of the challenges that we face is this idea of people go out and they do things. But the learning also has to be there, so that learning and doing come together.
So one of the projects that really catches my eye, for instance, there’s a Greenstone where a student is learning about music and the healing properties of music. So if we think about sound being a vibration, how we are 70% water, and that any kind of vibration makes water move, there’s this idea of how can we work with sound and music as a healing mechanism? And that might sound really hippie chippy, but there’s so much science that’s involved in this and classical science about vibration and sound waves and so forth. There’s also that local tradition in Bali of also working with different vibrations and in Hinduism that there’s an exploration working with scientists as well as local knowledge to be able to think about how we can address some of the medical concerns that we have through sound.
And it’s not going to be like this is the way to go, but it’s certainly one more layer that adds so much learning and doing, and then that contribution, because if that project and that research goes about, that could really move the field in certain ways. So I’m really excited about that project. And again, it brings in what the learner’s really interested about, which is music, sound, recordings, and so forth. So it brings so many different elements. We have this three-legged idea that it needs to contribute to the student, to the school, and to the world. And every project, every Greenstone needs to do that.

Kelly Wilson:
Well, and I appreciate that you bring up a focus on healing because I think it’s connected to this idea of sustainability. How do we sustain ourselves in relation to each other and the communities we serve? And there has been so much trauma, especially through underserved communities, what we’ve all gone through through COVID, and so how do we better understand human-centered whole child learning through the power of healing, and what does that look like? I noticed when I came to the school, even in the Green Educators Immersion Week, there were healing ceremonies that we’re part of. There was a mud ceremony. Can you share more about that Balinese tradition and how you brought visitors into it?

Benjamin Freud:
Yeah, so that was actually my induction week as well. So I think the second day or third day, I was thrown, and I was taught the basics of Balinese mud wrestling, which is an experience. So it does so much actually because it’s more than just mud wrestling. It’s getting out of your comfort zone and literally being thrown around in the mud and being caked in mud at a time when you’re just getting to know people. So there’s a lot of that bonding piece because you move beyond that. Of course, there’s the healing properties of the earth. There’s the healing properties of the mud. There’s caking yourself, which is wonderful for your skin.
There is this idea of connecting with something that I’d never done before Balinese mud wrestling. But afterwards, there’s also a cleansing ceremony where a priest… I mean you go through ceremony of asking the connection with the gods and then going through the water cleansing and eating rice and having that peace that gets you to understand a little bit more of the culture, but also go through a ritual. Now, whether or not we as Westerners buy into that, I don’t really actually think it matters because there’s still a moment of silence, of peace, of inward looking that can only be beneficial because we always need to heal no matter what.

Kelly Wilson:
When we connected a few weeks ago, we walked upon a shared deep interest that we have in student projects having a positive impact on transforming themself, their communities, and also the broader world. And you just spoke to that a little bit in the way that you shaped the Greenstone. What does this look like, and how do you know it’s happening? How do we know that our intentions of designing learning to have that positive impact, how do you think about gathering evidence of that or knowing if that’s truly the impact that it’s having on the community and the world around us?

Benjamin Freud:
That’s a fantastically complex question, and I don’t think we will ever know. I think this is really where it becomes a process, and I think a lot about this. I don’t even like the word impact. I’ll tell you why. Because it has a very cause and effect linearity to it. It makes me think of Newtonian billiard balls. I like the idea of contribution because we don’t always know where the contribution is at the end of the day. There’s a little bit of, we just don’t know where it’s going to go. Now, I have to say I really like this word contribution in the work of Joanne McEachen in New Zealand. It does a lot on contribution. So I want to honor her. It’s really challenging, and I think that one of the ways that we’re getting lost in schools is this obsession with outcome, and we can fool ourselves by thinking that process matters and it’s not outcome. But I think it’s actually well bigger than that because process in itself is more than just process to get to outcome.
I like to think of it as circularly as possible. I hope it’s possible to think about it this way, but we start off with wonder. We start off with this idea of curiosity and questions. We start off with this idea of how might I respond to the world and as the world, and then we work through the process, and we have these milestones that aren’t really outcomes. They’re actually just milestones that might be a product or performance. But really none of that matters unless it contributes to the world as the world, again. I mean, for us, it doesn’t matter if it’s students, school, and the world. It could be anything, especially the more than human world. But the outcome, whatever, is just the milestone because it doesn’t matter unless it does something. It has to be infused with certain values. I’ll give you an example.
I could write a wonderful piece, a wonderful poem, or let’s take my dissertation for instance. I mean, I really liked my dissertation, but nobody read it. So it had zero contribution to the world other than the three or four people who were interested in my topic. No matter what the quality of the work was, it might’ve gotten me that piece of paper, but actually I’ve had more influence with a LinkedIn post than I have with that dissertation. So how do we know is quite challenging. So we think about different ways, the quantitative ways. Sure, maybe there’s certain measures that we might have with the baseline. There’s the qualitative ways, but there’s also the post qualitative ways. I’m really interested in this idea of grasping. I’m not using the word capturing on purpose, but grasping the voices of those who have benefited from a project, from an experience, those who have benefited or towards whom we have contributed.
So for instance, if I do something that helps waterways be cleaned up, then I would love to grasp the voices of those people who have benefited from the water, maybe even the voices of the more than human world, the non-human world. And it’s by getting that they were able to really look at the quality of work, of the value of what it is. And most importantly, how can we make it even better? How could we take the feedback, input, voices of those who have benefited from a project and really go back and go through the process of reiteration? This as opposed to having a rubric where it has to be A, B, C, D, and that’s your project and so forth. And then we do some little thing, and then we move on with the world. It’s the voices of those who have benefited that matter.

Kelly Wilson:
Yeah. Some of the richest, deepest forms of learning happen not because of an intended outcome or impact or by design, but they really emerge out of conditions that really create curiosity and wonder and an intention to contribute and to be part of something bigger than yourself. And when I was there, I got to hear a beautiful talk that you did on emergent learning. Does this connect in any way? And tell me more about that idea and how you’re thinking about it for the Green School.

Benjamin Freud:
Yeah, no. I had a real pleasure of speaking to you guys, and it’s something that I’m just absolutely fascinated with. And I get ahead of myself because it’s so incredibly complex, this idea of emergence. And so I try to simplify it as much as possible in my own head so that I can make sense of it. But it’s actually very, very simple. Emergence is something that’s been going on for 3.8 billion years because emergence is what life does, and this idea of emergent learning is really nothing new. But at the same time, we’ve had this darkness put over us for the last 300 years of what that might look like, specifically when you look at humanist traditions. It’s just this idea that life emerges, and we don’t know where it’s going.
And we’ve heard before that no two trees look alike. No two cats look alike and so forth, because as they grow and develop, they emerge. They emerge in ways that are wild, but it’s not the wild west. There are boundaries of possibilities to which life evolves. So you’re not all of a sudden going to grow a third arm, but you might have different color eyes, you might have a different height. You grow in such a way within a certain sense of possibilities, and life creates those possibilities by the way that you are, the food that you eat, the water that you have, the sunshine, all of those things. And it’s the same thing for a tree. A tree grows based on where the light is, what the foliage around it is. Clearly there’s connection with the mycelium and the fungi networks with other animals and other plants around it.
So this idea of emergence is this concept that we can only create certain conditions for the thriving of learning. We create those conditions, and then we see where it goes. We see where things might happen. Most of the learning that we do is subconscious. And even more to the point, we’re stuck since for the last 300 years this idea that learning happens in your head, but learning is also a somatic experience. Each individual cell that we have learns based on its interaction with other things, and that’s called structured coupling. So there’s a structure, and it’s coupled, and it learns, and it’s not separate from those. Trees don’t have brains, but they learn to shift based on where the sunlight is. Their roots go in different directions based on where the water is.
So this idea of emergent learning is actually a resistance against planning. It’s a resistance against this mechanical way of thinking, this algorithmic way of thinking of if I teach this, then they will learn that. And then I will measure them on that learning, and they might succeed, or they might not succeed, but then we’re going to move it back and grade them on that. Now, I’m not against algorithmic learning. That’s super important. There’s only a certain way that you can tie your shoe, or there’s certain things that you need to do algorithmically. But we can’t be stuck to that because that has to exist with this emergence, and there has to be a dynamic between the two.
It’s this idea, and it goes much further as well in terms of there’s this concept of we only value what we measure. But I’m going to flip that around actually, and I’m going to say that we measure what we value, and we only break out the tools of measurement based on what our values are inside. So that might be, oh, we need to have kids who know math and know how to read and so forth. So we create measurements for that. But if we stopped valuing those things and start valuing maybe contribution or start valuing connections between us, we can do different measures, whatever that might be. I love the idea of eco literacies, for instance. Why don’t we measure that? Well, because we don’t value it. That’s the issue.

Kelly Wilson:
Thank you for naming what you’re pushing against. I think when you’re an innovator in education, you’re not only looking at what are we trying to build towards, but what are we trying to intentionally not replicate that has not done well by students. When I was at the Green School, I was also trying to better understand what essential elements make up the secret sauce of the magic of what you and your colleagues have created there with the community. So for example, I learned about Jalan Jalan, where the high school students spend half a day every week out in the community advancing causes they care about through service and social impact projects, social contribution projects. I learned about Spirit Friday, a community event that I believe happens every two weeks, where students and families get together, and there’s music and movement and students sharing different things that they’ve made and built and created through their projects at different stands. What would you say are some essential elements when you think of school design that really have the biggest effect on this secret sauce of what you’ve created at the Green School?

Benjamin Freud:
Well, that’s actually this idea, and I know I said that it wasn’t about process, but there’s so many nuances. And I’m happy to play with these different nuances. That actually is a process. I think that one of the things that we appreciate is that we’re never going to get it completely right and that we always need to improve. But I want to highlight that this isn’t from a starting point of scarcity of, oh, it’s not good enough. We need to improve. It’s rather from the point of view of abundance of this is awesome. How could we even continue to make it better? And I think that that’s just a way of thinking of we are always excited to make things better. So one of the things that we really allow space for is student choice and voice in creating these experiences.
So we have, in the upper school, the possibility of any student can say, “Hey, I would like to create this class or this course, this module, this experience. Can we please do it?” And if it makes sense operationally, so if we could get enough kids to do it, say 10, 15 kids, then we run the course. And then if a learner, an adult learner, I’ll call them that, a teacher, whatever, an educator doesn’t know anything about it, then they’re going to have to learn about it together with a younger learner. So that’s quite exciting. If nobody wants to take that, then we allow for space for independent study courses where they can go off and do it themselves. And then we have some ways of evidencing the learning, and then that counts in terms of their story.
But what’s amazing is there is a lot of this idea of emergence, and we’re certainly not obsessed with grades. We’re certainly not obsessed with all these measurements, but we are obsessed with the evidencing of learning, and what can we do to show that there’s learning? How has that contributed? So the Jalan Jalan, Jalan means trip. So Jalan Jalan means trips, and that means that they go off, and they go do a whole bunch of different things. They go off, and they work with organizations that help disenfranchises and women or women in utter poverty, and they go volunteer and help build things. Or we have some that are about doing mangroves and trying to really revitalize some of the mangroves and those ecosystems. We also have some where they go out, and they go do coral reef restoration. So they go diving and work with coral reefs and try to rebuild some of the reefs around Bali.
So those are wonderful experiences, but so are the Spirit Fridays where if you have a side project, you can go off, and you can demonstrate what that might be. So we have one student, for instance, who has her own sustainable, really what it’s like skincare. So it’s all made with local ingredients, and she makes it on campus, and then she sells it at the Spirit Friday. We’ve got other organizations where they write books, and they make books, and they try to sell them. I mean, I bought one about the history of Nyepi, the Balinese New Year that I was just mentioning. So that’s something that they make, and then they sell it. And that sense of entrepreneurialism is quite cool, but it’s not about necessarily making money, it’s just about being able to showcase that and really giving it a reason to be, because there’s no point in making a skin product if it’s not going out in the market. It’s not about making money, but it’s about distributing that and sharing that with other folks.

Kelly Wilson:
Yeah. I was so impressed with how much voice and choice there is, and you just named another element that seems really essential in not being bound within current projects, current course structures. But if there’s something of interest to a group of students, and you can run with it, this spirit of experimentation and trying and see what you can learn. I was struck also that eighth graders, they shared a little bit about the cafe that they do every year. And that each year that new group of eighth graders runs a cafe, but they have a chance to name the cafe, come up with the menu, better understand how to locally source ingredients and do things that are environmentally sustainable and locally grown. Can you share more about… It’s just such a beautiful example of another very student-driven learning experience.

Benjamin Freud:
That is probably my favorite on campus, I have to say. So I’m really glad you brought it up. It is an eighth grade project, but it starts in the sixth grade because in the sixth grade they learn about seeds and plants and growing. So they take care of a garden, grow the food for what’s called the [inaudible 00:29:32]. They grow the food for that eighth grade project. So it starts in sixth grade with plants and seeds. In seventh grade, it’s about animals and how we care for animals. So they do a lot with chickens and build chicken… Actually, I think they break down the chicken coop because of the materials, and then every year they rebuild it with the same materials in different configurations. So there’s also ways of understanding what chickens need and other animals. And in the eighth grade, they end up working on again, what’s called the Greenwang, which is teams of four.
So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, they create their own menu with locally sourced ingredients. I believe they can’t get ingredients that are further than one bike ride away radius from the school. So that also is a way to work with local people, but also think about the environmental conditions. And what’s wonderful here, and this is a great example of how we’re always trying to improve, is that they create resumes. They apply for jobs, they get interviewed, and they get different jobs like general manager and head chef and finance person, and then they have those jobs throughout. Sometimes people are waiters because we need waiters, or sometimes there are people who are sous chefs or whatever. And what we’ve done this year to try to improve it, and again, going from this idea of abundance of how can we make it better, is we create a new role for human resource manager. So that’s different from a general manager, which is different from operations.
So how do they work in this environment? How do they work to really try to think about how to run a sustainable business? And they make the food and they sell the food. And this is where the learning emerges because I’m not entirely sure what the success criteria would be in a traditional system for this, because what I notice is in the second term, what it started after first term of preparation is it was chaos. There was yelling, there was screaming. The food was never on order. You can never get your account. It was such a disaster that you would never go back to that restaurant, but now I’ve noticed that everything’s so smooth. The food has a menu that has received feedback. The cashiers work well, the chef is organized, it’s calm, it’s organized.
That’s where the learning is. You don’t need to quantify that. You could feel it in terms of the quality of the experience, and they learn how to work with one another because they’re in charge. They are in charge of negotiating their conflicts. They’re in charge of negotiating with vendors. They’re in charge of all that stuff. Now, that’s the real experience that I see that goes well beyond some of the other things that might be about being behind a table and learning about business. This is really learning about business by doing it. And then you’re supplementing all that finance as and when you need it. I really see that as a great example of emergence. And it’s not that you’re not learning any skills that aren’t planned because you still need to know how to do the accounting, but you do it as and when you need it. And not everybody at that point needs to know the same amount of accounting. So we just move on with the different roles that we have.

Kelly Wilson:
And I appreciate there’s an authentic audience for the work, the purpose for the work, and that they have opportunities to try, fail, make mistakes, learn, and then iterate because it’s something that they’re continuing. It’s not a create something for your teacher for a grade that into the trash can when you’re done, but there’s continuing live ecosystem that builds on their learning and helps them learn from mistakes and then fail forward.

Benjamin Freud:
That’s right. Absolutely. And that’s so important. And what you bring up about going in the trash happens unfortunately so often. They do a great documentary about, I don’t know, the water system at your local school. You make the documentary, you get graded on a rubric, and then it ends up being on your Google Drive not going anywhere. You guys do such a wonderful job of having every term, this idea of public showcasing. That is so important. And more so than that, having that stay alive afterwards, how do we stay alive afterwards? And that’s the idea of sustainability, not just going out of the trash, not just performing, but then it’s keep it going. And I think that’s also one of the biggest challenges is how is it if I start a project and if I go to a different school, a different grade, I graduate, whatever, how do those projects continue to live? How do we continue to build on those and sustain those projects? That’s one of the things that we’re grappling with, but I think is tremendously important in terms of legacy, tradition, and again, sustainability.

Kelly Wilson:
Yeah, yeah. How do you make that learning public through exhibition and also show not only the final product, but the learning process? The product is often the tip of the iceberg, and all of the learning is the iceberg that emerged underwater, and how do you make that visible? And then also how do you curate the work so that it lives on, and it’s visible and tells the story of the values of the school? I think we talked about that as being a challenge and the jungle and Bali and indoor/outdoor, and how do you preserve materials over time, but something we’re thinking about a lot too. I wondered, similar to visitors that come to High Tech High, imagine that many visitors that come to the Green School feel that there are barriers within their own system that make it challenging to innovate. Maybe that mindset of scarcity that you talked about. What encouragement would you give them, and how should they get started?

Benjamin Freud:
That is so difficult, isn’t it? When you’re in a system where there’s a certain amount of accountability that’s often a weight on your shoulders where you have to get kids ready for state tests. You guys do state tests as well, so clearly it’s possible. It’s really difficult when you feel all alone. It’s really difficult when you don’t know necessarily where to go and that you’ve been doing things a certain way, not just you, but because of the history that you’ve had in your own schooling experience. And I always think it’s about starting where you are, not starting where somebody else is. And this notion that I’m okay with saying, “Let’s just resist. Let’s just resist against some of these systems. Let’s just think about different ways to conceptualize matters. Let’s just think about different ways of moving towards different ways.”
I’m a historian, and one of the things that bothers me the most is the way history is taught in schools. It’s world history. You go, this happened in this country, then this happened in this country. Nobody learns history that way anymore. Nobody has learned history in terms of going from the French Revolution to the Industrial Revolution to World War I in 25, 30, 40 years, but they still do in schools. If we could think about it in terms of themes and thematics and really connecting that way, then when we look about the French Revolution, Industrial Revolution to World War I or whatever it might be, we could think about in terms of… We could call it the thematics of change, political change. We think about and the thematics of how does hunger drive change?
I don’t know. I’m just coming up with things off the top of my head, and certainly that could be done more thoughtfully than this, but if there’s a way that we can start to think about the interconnections of everything rather than just the content and being driven by content, that’s a huge piece. And those interconnections also lead to this idea of contribution. I just wonder if the final outcomes rather than tests could be things that actually apply the learning. Yes, but make sure that it’s towards these contributions, and you could still learn the content that you need that way and probably actually even better.
So it’s an unclear answer that remains vague, but it just has to be, some things have to be for purpose and have to be towards applying the knowledge that you’re gaining towards some kind of action. Because if nothing could come out of it, if there could be no action, then what’s the point of learning it? And I’ll just end this by just thinking about it in terms of potential energy and kinetic energy. You can know all this stuff in your head that stays at potential energy, but until it transforms into something that actually becomes that kinetic energy for contribution, then there’s absolutely no point. I have done pretty well academically in my life. I’ve raised two fantastic kids. I couldn’t tell you what the parts of a cell are, and I just don’t. And this idea that, well, yeah, but you just look it up. There’s no point. That’s true.
But actually I think there’s a bit of a danger in having to learn what the parts of the cell are because it keeps us in this reductionist framework that it really matters what the parts are when what we should be focusing on is how does a cell interact with all other things? How does one individual cell interact with other cells, with the air, with the food, with everything like that, this eco-systemic way of thinking about things. And from there, you learn the parts of the cell. So I would encourage teachers to think about contribution, to think about projects, and to think about the connections between things and learning the content that way rather than be fettered to the content. And I know that’s really easy to say from here because there’s a lot of pressures on teachers that are just incredibly debilitating in terms of their ability to do things.

Kelly Wilson:
Thank you for that, and this idea that content is not something that we consume and regurgitate back, but it’s really about understanding in a deep way that interconnectedness of different ideas so we understand ourselves and the world and that we can have an impact or make a contribution, as you would say, to something bigger than ourselves. This has been such a wonderful conversation. Is there anything else that you would like to share? Final thoughts for our audience?

Benjamin Freud:
So Green School is a school in the jungle. I think that the dream is to have a Green School in an urban area, and this idea that connecting as nature, I don’t want to say connecting with nature because we’re not separate from nature, is really easy in the jungle where you’ve got birds, and you’ve got insects, and you’ve got all that wonderful environment. But in a city, this should be also able to do of really appreciating that as nature, that we have a different kind of purpose that we need to move towards, that the systems that we have right now that keep us disconnected from nature or this idea that we are disconnected from it and that we need to be out in the jungle. Actually, the city’s probably where it’s most important, given that more of the world’s population live in urban areas than in non-urban areas.
So the question I ask is what would it take for educators, learners, schools in urban areas to appreciate that we are nature, appreciate that the decisions that we make every day reverberate throughout the world? And how can we think about, what would it take to think about our different values so that we measure different things and contribute in different ways, rather than being stuck and fettered to this linear process of learn your math, go to university, get a job, make money, and do that whole cycle again? Because that’s not taking us anywhere near where we want to be given the fact that we’re 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the fact that there’s so much tension in the world, that I’m not afraid to just say that we have to question those values every day, and that’s where the resistance comes in. And resistance doesn’t have to be necessarily aggressive. It could just be asking questions.

Kelly Wilson:
Well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for the important work that you’re doing and for inspiring me as an educator and the many, many people that look up to the work that you’re doing. Thank you for being so vulnerable and sharing what you’re also working on in the spirit of abundance and the things that you want to continue to think more deeply about and improve on. We’re all engaged in that work, and so appreciate your time today. Thank you so much, Benjamin.

Benjamin Freud:
Thank you so much, Kelly. I really appreciated the time to be with you and your questions, and I’m so excited for Green School and High Tech High to continue to collaborate.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Kelly Wilson and Benjamin Freud for this conversation. Check out the show notes for a TED Talk that Green School co-founder John Hardy gave about the school. Thanks for listening.