113: Luz Olid and David Caballero | Education Evolution: Beyond Traditional Schooling

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Luz and David from Evolving Education left careers in biotechnology to explore and document alternative education models worldwide. Frustrated by rigid schooling systems, they traveled to over 170 learning centers to understand how children learn best outside the traditional classroom.

In this episode, we talk about  how compulsory schooling originated in 19th-century Prussia as a system designed to produce obedient soldiers and workers, a model later exported worldwide as a tool for colonization and cultural suppression. We discuss how education has been shaped by these historical forces and why so many modern schools still emphasize conformity over curiosity. Luz and David explain the “Expedition Methodology” they developed, which focuses on exploration, experimentation, and community as key components of meaningful learning. Rather than pushing a single solution, they emphasize the importance of cross-pollination between different educational approaches and the need for families, teachers, and learning communities to collaborate in rethinking how children grow and learn.

Instead of waiting for top-down reforms, they work directly with those already creating change—educators, parents, and pioneers looking for alternatives. Their mission is to make these models more accessible, providing tools and resources to help others implement child-led, passion-driven learning environments.

Visit evolvingeducation.org to access their free ebook, watch their documentary films, and join their community. They also host monthly “Voices of Change” webinars featuring educators working at the forefront of alternative learning.

🔗 Learn more about Evolving Education

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• https://evolvingeducation.org/en

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🗓️ Recorded March 18th, 2025. 📍 Barcelona, Spain

See Episode Transcript

AUTOGENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Jesper Conrad: 0:10

So today we're together with Luz and David, and it is because you have a project called Evolving Education and I got very, very curious. So first of all, welcome. It's great to see you.

Luz Olid: 0:24

Thank you, thank you.

David Caballero: 0:26

Thank you for the invitation.

Jesper Conrad: 0:28

Yeah, and for the people who are watching the podcast then it looks like you're somewhere that looks sunny and wonderful, so if you could start there. Where are you?

Luz Olid: 0:40

okay, we are in the coast, the pacific coast of mexico, in a place called puerto escondido. Um yeah, and the temperature is always summer, so that's tropical.

David Caballero: 0:51

We do have like heavier rains at some point. And then the place that we're living right now it's, uh, terrible for the rain, but we are adapting every season a little bit the way we live so cecilia and I are traveling the world without children.

Jesper Conrad: 1:10

We are focusing on unschooling and parenting, and when I saw your project, it looks like you are looking at what can work in education where, as I mentioned before, we started the recording. When I look at the current compulsory school system, I'm looking and thinking this looks terrible. It doesn't seem to work. It is too rigid, too strict and not a good place for children to be. But you're looking at some of all the can we say, evolved alternative educations. How did that happen and why did you start at this interest?

Luz Olid: 1:50

That's probably my fault. So I think we both studied biotechnology and we're working in the uk for in in science for five years or so. But I was always really passionate about education and every time I was leaving my job, went to to, uh, some place to do some volunteer program with children, and then at some point it was like, okay, this thing of success, no, I was following that path to be successful in life. But then I realized that that wasn't making me happy and then it was like, okay, it's time to listen to what my passions are. And it was working with kids.

Luz Olid: 2:31

So I decided to do my master's to become a teacher, but then the methodologies that they were teaching me was like this cannot be, because then I was gonna be preparing kids to be completely as lost as I got as I was when I finished university. So it was okay, there should be other ways of teaching and learning. I just don't know how to do it in a different way. So then I did my the the thesis of the master about alternative methodologies in education and found out that there were so many alternatives and so many schools doing things in a completely different way that were actually empowering kids to take responsibility of their lives and to follow their passions. So I was like, okay, I want to do that. And then I started.

Luz Olid: 3:15

I had to start the teaching and it was like, wait one second, this looks super beautiful in the theory, but I didn't know how to implement it in the practice. It was like the first intuition was like, okay, I'll put everything that is in the book in a PowerPoint presentation, and that's going to make it different. And then it was like, okay, this is put, everything that is in the book in a PowerPoint presentation, and that's going to make it different. And then we said, okay, this is not it either. This looks really beautiful, this looks really diverse, but I just don't know how to do it. Then I proposed to do a trip around the world visiting these alternative and innovative educational centers with the camera, interviewing the facilitators, the students, the, the parents, just to get to see how they were actually doing it in real life, so we can actually imitate it.

David Caballero: 4:04

And then, um, yeah, start doing it in a different way yeah, yeah, and just to bring my my path along along loose. Um, yeah, I was also working as a scientist, and more kind of a scientist, uh, managing scientific projects and collaboration and so on. But I guess that the faster I move up in the in the corporate ladder, maybe I move up too so fast that he didn't get used to uh power dynamics, uh egos, fights and all these type of things which was like was like wait a minute, why, why are we wasting so much time just reformatting powerpoint presentations to show them to another manager and head and and all these little titles that mean that are meaningless but in a way kind of to to keep people there feeling important in a way or other? So start to think about what can I do with my skills that can be meaningful? Because I didn't follow kind of the academic path in science, because I wanted to do something that was connected with the real world and to do something that was meaningful for society. But now in industry I found that I was doing something that was meaningful to make money not necessarily for society, always. So I started being more interested into social innovation, reading books about systems change, about how to use our skills to make the world more sustainable, more just and equitable.

David Caballero: 5:22

And then when Luth suggested it was like a way to look at a specific area in education, also in social innovation.

David Caballero: 5:29

In each country that we went, we pretty much look for the hubs for social innovation, for impact investment, for social startups and the hubs for education innovation, and little by little these two paths merge into evolving education.

David Caballero: 5:45

And even though initially for me education was like a completely unknown, the more we went into these spaces, like democratic schools, self-directed learning centers, communities of families, I was so amazed by the possibilities because I found there are young people that were more able to solve conflicts, to peacefully, to express their challenges and weaknesses and talk about them in a dialogue that I have never seen adults doing this thing, and so that was inspiring in a dialogue that I have never seen adults doing this thing, and so that was inspiring.

David Caballero: 6:16

But at the same time it was very frustrating because it was like, wait a minute, I have just learned that this even exists, but most young people don't, even most families don't know that this is even a possibility, like when we went back once in a while to Spain, where our family is and had my nephews, and they were so frustrated with the classes and I saw how they were already put in a box of this is the key that is bad in math, this is the key that is within that, and I was like, wow, this is so limiting and I'm so sad that these models are not more widespread. So at that point, covid happened, left us stuck in Mexico, but for a really good reason, because we ended up loving it and still live here five years after and made our mission to democratize the access to this tool so that more young people could have access to them.

Luz Olid: 7:06

Yeah, and at the beginning the idea was like we have around 170 interviews. It was a crazy amount of information that we wanted to share and we didn't know really how. So, uh, first we did a movie, then kind of it was a long movie that ended up being two different ones, and then it was okay. But this, even if we shared this, uh, then this inspiration is not enough to actually for teachers or or for facilitators to start implementing them. So we created another training called the Learning Expedition, in which we put all the different interviews and so on, telling a story of an adventure that goes from getting to know who we are to accompanying children and youth to support them, to develop their autonomy and to figure out what are their passions. So that's more or less how Evolving Education started.

Cecilie Conrad: 8:03

It sounds like you've been collecting so much information that it's overwhelming and I kind of almost want to ask an annoying question. Can you sum it up?

David Caballero: 8:15

for the listener. So then, what to do yeah, this is a question that we get asked all the time and that we get completely puzzled because it's like, oh my god, there's too much.

Cecilie Conrad: 8:24

I know I know, I know but I'm just curious what's your answer?

David Caballero: 8:30

yeah, we spent like a full year just synthesizing information, just analyzing them, categorizing them in different bits here and there. But maybe the best way so far that I've got to explain this is that we have actually even framed it into a methodology that we call Expedition. That is based on explore, experience and express so with the explore. It's both inside and outside.

Luz Olid: 8:57

So explore, getting to know ourselves a lot better who you learn best.

David Caballero: 9:02

Yeah, self-regulation. There's a lot of that that needs to happen to really be able to support young people. And then the external part is to open up our eyes to all those other possibilities that are there and inspire us and show us how it is already possible. Like, summerhill has been around for more than 100 years, many other centers as well, for lots of years, so this already exists. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. We just need to see what's out there and get pieces here and there. We don't need to replicate. Also, we don't all need to have the same Waldorf stamp, even though it can be good to communicate with families, you know, but you can make your own things.

Luz Olid: 9:45

The second, the experience part. That's meaning that we need to make experiments.

David Caballero: 9:47

We need to make experiments. Yeah, I think experimenting.

Luz Olid: 9:49

Those things that move us. Then make an experiment, Try it, Figure out if you like it, if you don't like it, how does it go? And then that reiterative process of okay, this didn't work really well this time, but then also sometimes or most of the times it doesn't work, which is okay, because then we need to make peace with failure and get to understand that life is a process and not that result that we're trying to achieve.

David Caballero: 10:13

And this is something that is really hard to do, I think, in education and with children, because we care so much about them that we want to do something that is perfect and definitive. But life doesn't work like that and the world is changing all the time. So it's about changing the mindset from perfect solution to an experiment after another, and thinking about learning centers and even families as a kind of a community that is in a continuous process of reinvention. And how can we set up the mechanisms so we can keep on adapting and learning and changing along time?

David Caballero: 10:47

And the last one of Express is that all of this is hard, as you probably know, and having people to share the process, with the challenges, the insights, is super valuable. Most of the people that we connect with feel quite isolated, feel that they are the only ones that think this way. When I think there's a lot of people that think this way, there's a few that are actively driving action, there's a lot that want this, and there are many that, as soon as they know that this is a possibility, want to jump in. So it's about keeping the communication going, creating a space. It's like I think you've got some of these circles as well for parents, for instance, to share, so that we feel less alone and we can reflect on that process collectively.

Luz Olid: 11:32

And it's also about creating relationships based on trust and that community that keeps building and then we keep growing and and evolving all together. So, yeah, those parts of getting to know who you are, then getting to understand the world you're living in and then having an impact and deciding what you want to do. So it's just, I feel at the end it's kind of taking small experiments and then reframing it and seeing, okay, this way will work, this not. Okay, how do I want to think this time? What do I want to do the next? So that that reflection is always there and and help us to get to know ourselves better and to to know who we want to be.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:13

I feel so that is all the things that is impossible to do in a traditional school system.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:19

Pretty, much well, no, but it is because someone else is telling you what to do, how to do it, whether you did it good or bad, and how to adjust to do it better next time, and why it was wrong, and no one cares what you really. No one cares what's important to you. No one cares why you did it in a different way. We even took that out. Now the exceptionally good, creative, innovative way of solving a problem is out of the equation at this point. That was part of the equation when I was educated. You could get gold star for that, for trying new ways. But that's out now. So getting to know who you are and exploring and and and experimenting and and failing and then trying again it's off the table. So now I'm just curious exactly who are you working with?

David Caballero: 13:10

because inside you know it's not an option so we started being very idealistic and wanted to change the education system and and how to reach teachers and principals and so on. But we found exactly what you're mentioning, that this massive resistance, uh, even a funny story.

Luz Olid: 13:28

we even went to uh, we were to a nun's school and what a shock.

Jesper Conrad: 13:37

I thought we were going to get burned like witches.

David Caballero: 13:41

And we put there one of our films which is called Killing Curiosity and it's talking about all the problems in the educational system in 15 minutes.

David Caballero: 13:48

So we started with that and then we could see like the fire on the ice, like get these people away from here. No, but for real, we work with lots of teachers. Actually there's a lot of motivation. I mean, teaching is a very vocational profession. Lots of people get in it because they really care about children and they want to do things differently. So when you open up the possibility for instance Mexico we got last year a partnership with one of the government states to train a few of their teachers and we could see that massive transition because there wasn't an awareness even of the problems of the educational assistance. They were just trying to fix really tiny things within that monolithic system. When we open up hey, why don't we do student assemblies? When they select how they want to develop the projects there's actually a lot of flexibility within established structures. That is not leveraged out of conformity, fear, wanting to do the minimum or just lack of awareness, like in Spain, for instance.

David Caballero: 14:56

Recently they opened some hours within the school calendar that are open for experimentation, and then teachers complained that they weren't given a curriculum. So they designed a curriculum for it, which is insane, but it was just out of lack of awareness of what could be done with that hour.

Luz Olid: 15:13

That could be a conflict resolution circle or something way more meaningful I feel that what is missing is the inspiration and, like the mindset, because, as we, we have never seen or experiences, experience, other ways of teaching and learning. So we keep repeating what we saw, but then when we, when you have a space with other teachers, that they are telling you that we kind of find. What do we have in common? Everyone wants the best for children, everyone wants to support and to develop their passions, but then all that happens in the traditional system is not working. Then, when they see different possibilities, they are like wait one second and then they, I see the creativity, I'm going to try this thing and I'm going to try this thing and I'm gonna try this other thing.

Luz Olid: 15:56

But there is so much uh, self, uh, I don't know self-awareness and so like being really, really brave to try things, I think that that's one of the hardest things to do to just break that barrier of this is how always have been done. Now I have the possibility to do it in a different way, but then when they have a community where they can share that, I feel that there is a little bit more space to start trying. And then kids and youth they surprise you because once that you gave them the possibility, things happen and then you see the potential and then they start doing other small experiments. So I feel it comes a lot from fear, but then having a community which is aligned really helps to Coming back to your question, cecile.

David Caballero: 16:45

So we do work with teachers. Maybe it's a fourth of the people that we work with. Another fourth are families who see what we're doing Like, ah, what tools can I integrate in my homeschooling or unschooling practice? Some of another fourth will be people from those families that decide to run their own community or they want to open a school, and then they leverage many of these methodologies. And the other fourth are people that already have alternative schools and want to train their facilitators and then we provide the training. So at the end it's a really diverse mix which is not so common, I think, because we kind of host conversations and training sessions where there's people in conventional schools and schooling families and facilitators in Montessori school. So you know, it's very diverse perspective, but then through questions and conversations everyone can learn from one another.

Jesper Conrad: 17:39

Yeah, but the work you're doing reminds me of some of the work and organization I worked for. They are called Gaia Education and what they do is that they had collected the knowledge created in ecovillages over the last 40, 50 years, because ecovillages are kind of like small. They call them living laboratories because they often create a project document. It figure out what's going on, and it sounds like this is what you have been doing and are doing for alternative education saying who are out there, which kind of different styles are out there and what have they tried. Yeah, I, standing on the side of an unschooling parent. Our kids haven't been to school. Our oldest were in a school, which is like a reformist, were in a Frenet school, which is like a reformist.

Jesper Conrad: 18:38

You probably know, I kind of look at the whole standard school system and, as I said in the start, I have just given up on it. So I'm happy that someone is trying to show that there are options, because I don't believe everyone will unschool, that it fits for all families and that people will do it. Everyone will unschool, that it fits for all families and that people will do it, but I would love to see some of the knowledge that come from the montessori, from the waldorf, from the way on schooling, from all these different schools, way of trying education to get out there and be tried and hopefully get into the system. But maybe I have given up on the system. Do you think there will come a slow evolution in it?

David Caballero: 20:05

Well, I think it has already changed a lot right A long time and it will keep changing, like now. If you look at the global recommendations of UNESCO, the European Union, they all talk about lifelong learning, agency critical thinking as being top one and two skills and competencies for young people that need to be developed. The problem is how to cascade that down to the real learning spaces where the huge majority of children are, and for that there are things happening like project-based learning. Now is quite common in many schools, for instance, as a term. There might be different ways of actually how to implement it, and many of them are still quite narrow. Others are a little bit more open. But yeah, I mean, our goal is how to make this possible for more children. More young people have access to it.

David Caballero: 20:58

One of the ways is trying to change established schools, which, for us, is the hardest thing. So there we're mostly focused on building awareness through our documentary films and online contents and so on, which are communicated in a way that takes you through a journey of awareness, rather than confrontation straight away and then rejection, while most of our support systems, trainings and so on are aiming are the pioneers and early adopters, so people that are already, their values are already aligned with this shift and what they're looking at for the tools and the ecosystem to create new learning spaces or to grow the ones they have. So that, yeah, we can make. If you know about the change, I don't know if it's a change curve or how it is, but there's like pioneers, early adopters, then early followers, late followers and laggards. So we're mostly focused on the beginning of that curve learning from the pioneers, sharing that with the early adopters, creating awareness for the early followers so that we can move that bell curve forward.

Luz Olid: 22:04

But also I guess that when at the beginning that we tried to go to the schools and it was such a confrontation, I guess that is because if we go the same way of the things that you are doing is bad and then imposing a different way that is exactly the same that the traditional system is doing, so we cannot do that. Then how can we have conversations in which there is a little bit more space to to think about new things? So like, at the end it's people that is curious to have something inside them that tells them this is not right, I want to do it in a different way. Um, I feel that those are the ones that are happy to to give it a try, the ones that are completely focused on not. This is like this. Then there is not much we can do with them.

David Caballero: 22:53

It also happens the other way. By the way, like in our communities, we have got unschooling families that completely refuse the use of any books or learning materials. Everything needs to be 100% driven by young people and in these conversations and dynamics sometimes they learn from a teacher in a conventional school. There are some cool resources that are interested to trigger conversations or just to present options to children. So there's also a thing that cross-pollinization, because one of the things I have perceived in this environment of alternative education is polarization. Well, it's happening everywhere in the world, polarization and kind of coming into these information bubbles where we just get things that reinforce our existing views and we're trying to break that a little bit so we can have conversation from one another, still having different opinions and decisions in our life, but being open to learn from other people as well.

Cecilie Conrad: 23:53

But I still think I mean I spray what you're doing. I just still think that there's something about the school system and most cultures that it's ancient. We came up with the idea long, long time ago and it's government run. There is politics behind it. Some version of democracy puts some people in power to decide a curriculum, and most of these school systems these days they're measuring stick as the piece of test, so they have the whole. You know, how do we perform relative to the piece of test?

Cecilie Conrad: 24:39

So I'm just thinking I have a lot of respect for school teachers. I know that they work with passion because they want to be around children, young people and and make their lives better, but they work inside a system that makes it very, very hard to wiggle at all. And I'm just wondering if there is a way, if there even is a way where we can approach the top of the problem, you know, or the root, you could call it. We need to get rid of their curriculum, we need to get rid of the pizza test, otherwise we're not really, you know, going this is really deep, like the, the.

Luz Olid: 25:26

The root of the problem is not only the curriculum. It's like the the structure of the system is based on a hierarchy, like society is based on a hierarchy. The competition is the base of capitalism, progress and results. It's like um, we have to keep more and more so once that you start questioning the educational system, that's.

David Caballero: 25:46

That's when you end up questioning the whole, the whole system, and you're running away we tend to say that once you question how you learn, you end up questioning how you live and you start making different, different decisions. No, like I don't know, just sharing from our own personal experience. We started questioning why do we shit into clean water, so now we have a dry toilet? Or why do we eat things that are associated with cancer, so we stop eating processed meats and red meats, things like that.

Cecilie Conrad: 26:16

Which is also actually, if you think about it for just one second, I had cancer. I beat cancer 14 years ago. I cannot recommend it. I'd say avoid it.

David Caballero: 26:37

That was not fun years ago. I cannot recommend it. I'd say avoid it. Once you start questioning the established structures of society, of learning, you go to to living and instead changing a lot of things in in your life. Like you're questioning as well why do we have to live always in the same place, why your family cannot get experiences from around the world? Um, and you start making decisions in that direction. But that's a massive change, like at the moment.

David Caballero: 26:54

We know that there are organizations trying to influence policies and turning schools into more democratic spaces. There are advancements in that area. We are trying to work at the human level. We think that even if you change the curriculum I mentioned before some of the change, political changes in spain, for instance, or in mexico, um, even changing those things with the same people with the same mindset, nothing changes at the end. Even if you say, oh, let's all use the circle, let's all use a sociocratic decision making, and if you got a hierarchical, conventional teacher in front of that room, it's not going to be a horizontal decision-making tool, it's just no one is going to speak. So we're trying to work from the inside.

Luz Olid: 27:37

Yeah, it's like, for example, mindfulness. Now a lot of people are trying to introduce mindfulness in the classroom and then some kids share with us what mindfulness was like. Oh my God, we have mindfulness like something horrible, because they are like, no, you have to sit down and not move, and then maybe that's not the best way to train mindfulness with kids. Maybe we can do a movement meditation, maybe there are other things that we can do that are more suitable. So, yeah, the mindset I find is the most challenging, because we need people to question things and start taking their own decisions and things that they feel aligned with, but then not that many people have even the possibility to explore what they think or what they want to believe.

David Caballero: 28:59

And building trust. I think that's the other core thing. Like many of these decisions are driven out of fear being alone in the world and wanting government to supply all the structures, and being afraid of what is going to happen with my children in the future. They need all the titles and a PhD, and all of this because the world is uncertain. And it's all this driven by fear Scarcity.

Luz Olid: 29:23

Scarcity uncertainty.

David Caballero: 29:26

So that's a lot of what we start working on what's happening inside of people, so that these tools and methodologies can work.

Jesper Conrad: 29:41

Because otherwise they're pretty empty if we don't do the internal work. In your free ebook you mentioned in the start of it the origin of the school system and maybe many people don't know the origin of the compulsory school system, so if you could explain about that. But also I wanted to take a little talk about how long time have this experiment actually been going on of the compulsory school system? It feels like a lifetime for for many of us, but it's actually not that long historical so. So if you mention, uh, what you wrote about in your e-book around it, yeah, it's something like 200 years, more or less.

David Caballero: 30:27

It's what the schooling system has been around 200 years within human existence. So if we think about when we started, human started, agriculture was something like 15,000 years ago. So that's from agriculture, so it's really a really small time frame to derive from that that. This is the way human beings learn and there's a structure that has been set in place for the last 200 years and how it was started.

David Caballero: 30:58

Compulsory primary education started in Prussia before it was called Russia after the First World War, to have a better trained army. In some of the battles the soldiers back up and they run away. They didn't like what they saw and then they thought we need to start from childhood. We need to establish a system where we train young people to be obedient, to follow orders without questioning them. And there is as well when knowledge was breaking down into subjects. Up to that point, there wasn't anything as a math class. Maybe novels went to some sort of priest or something like this, where they talk about philosophy and nature and a lot of things that were connected.

David Caballero: 31:44

This is when, as well, subjects were created, the kind of the timetable structure of, of of primary schools, then secondary schools and so on follow with industrial revolution and the. The way universities work was later on in the us um I think it's called um, I don't remember now, but it was like a group of 10 men in the US during the Industrial Revolution that decided how the preparatory system for high school needed to be for people to be ready to then take on a specialized training at universities to fit into the works that they were requiring at that point. And from that point in history we have just been tweaking that kind of within that same structure, 200 years old. We are just making small modifications. Oh, let's change the name of the subject, or rather than one hour, let's make it 45 minutes or one hour and a half the time of the break one hour, not 30 minutes.

David Caballero: 32:42

Or the structure of the class, like oh, now sitting in rows instead of um circle, whichever really small changes, but you can see many of these, even army-like um instruction in the ways that rows are made in many countries, kind of raising the flag, singing the anthem, are many things, many things, things to make us feel more patriotic. In fact, schools have been used as a method for nation building around the world. Well, actually, people should know as well about residential schools and how it was shifted. Now from the origins of power in the world in the West, europe and the US, and now we move into a world where those powers are colonizing other countries.

David Caballero: 33:32

Schooling was a tool used to dominate other countries as well.

David Caballero: 33:36

In India, for instance, the British delegates set up the schooling system and literally the quote was they can be brown on the outside, but we need them to behave as if they were white on the inside, and that was the reason to be for the schooling system that was implemented in India residential school system or in Australia, children were taken away from their families to civilize them, to remove any elements of their culture, their language, and that's one of the populations in the world that right now has the highest rates of suicide, drug addiction and lots of other problems because of the massive destruction that was done to their own identity and in places like Mexico, where we live now, it was a way for nation building.

David Caballero: 34:26

So after independence even so it was it was already pretty much a Spanish people that remain in Mexico in power just now. They call themselves Mexicans, but it's still the power was in the same hands, and they use schooling as a way as well to to unite people, because in the schools in Mexico, even though there are lots of native languages, none of them are talked. The only language that is talked is Spanish. Everyone sings the anthem, Everyone learns about the heroes of the revolution, which were again the same Spanish people fighting against other Spanish people that went back to Spain, all of these things. So it's really been used as an element of domination around the world.

Luz Olid: 35:08

Yeah, it's a colonization method to remove the identities and the different cultures. It's removing diversity, which is craziness, because one of the things that I really value is the whole diversity of the world and, for example, languages not which define how we like different ways of thinking. It was something like five percent of the population were speaking 90, like the 98 percent of the different languages, which is like wow, massive restriction. No, like now really few people have different ways of seeing the world and then the rest is kind of standardized.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:48

So that's craziness yeah, it is a crazy story. It's. It's also. It's just complicated. We are just with our three teenagers that still live at home studying at the moment the history of Denmark and Greenland. We're Danish and Greenland is part of our country and it's on the table at the moment because of the American government's interest. So we felt we need to know what's going on with that, because we don't know. Greenland is very far away from the rest of Denmark and it's a different language, a different culture and what really happened and the more I dive into it, it's really really complicated.

Cecilie Conrad: 36:44

Yes, yes, schooling and language standardization. It was a tool of suppression and and was hierarchically leveled, so one group is better than another group. But even so, it wasn't all black. There was some white there as well. There was some good intention going on and there was something.

Cecilie Conrad: 37:14

I mean, I'm no professor of this area, but I think to some extent, maybe 100 years ago, it was true that education, even standardized education, gave you better options in life and removed you from children dying before the age of two and starvation and things that maybe actually needed something, actually needed something, and was it fair that one group had that and the other group didn't have it Now that we had met each other. I mean, we had met each other. The British were in Australia and the Danes were in Greenland, and some things were not fair, and, of course, a lot of it happened because of greed and because of a lot of, I don't know, imperialistic ideas, but some of it happened out of compassion and a want to help, and maybe at some point it was true that education was the savior keeping up with history. Now, if I can avoid talking about imperialism because I think it's too complicated, I have nothing smart, I think, to say about it, except let's talk about, let's at least introduce the idea of nuance.

Cecilie Conrad: 38:35

But I think now, in 2025, it should be well established that we don't need to sit down a five-year-old to shut up and listen for six, eight hours a day in order for them to learn to read. Leave them alone and they'll learn to read. Let them play Minecraft and they will read within a month, or whatever they want to do. We should know by now, but somehow we don't. And why don't we? Why do we keep going with this outdated system? So many other things are being changed quickly.

Luz Olid: 39:22

But, yes, we just keep doing it. We think that success in life depends on that, that you do well in life. It depends that you go to school. There is this definition of what you have to do in order to be successful.

David Caballero: 39:36

And also I feel like we're talking about a repressed population, children, Repression towards black people. In the US, it took a long time from the black people fighting for it for women to get their votes. It was more or less at the same time. It took a long time for women's demonstrations to be able to vote and be considered full human beings. This is just insane. But this is recent history. Now we're talking about a repressed population that is tiny and that even less kind of physical power, less voice to be able to express what they need, and where everyone else feels that we know better than them. So how can we listen to their voice? How can we let them choose what they want to learn? So it's a massive questioning of how repression affects different repressed populations.

Luz Olid: 40:30

It's also happening with aging, like when people get old and then they go out of the system of working, then they are also not considered enough. So, pretty much like people that are working, those have a voice, I'll say, well, women still are. There is a lot of things that that still need to be done in terms to reach that equality, but, yeah, that that's a reality. Like not, there is no horizontal structures in which we listen to everyone.

David Caballero: 41:02

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of challenges, no challenges. I think the element of repression, the element of change in society, is really hard. The element of the impact of changes in education takes decades in being seen what they're doing with children today. So any political change is hardly going to be beneficial for the political party in power that day or those four years they're not going to see. Probably they will see even negative statistics if they use the same statistics, if they don't change what they're measuring in the short term.

Luz Olid: 41:43

So yeah, that's a lot. I guess another thing is that it really depends on the country and the situation, because, for example, we have one of the people that is training with us. She's from Sierra Leone and she was telling me the situation and when I was telling her about education, children need to be self-directed, they need to have the possibilities to choose and so on, and she was like Luz luthier, that's not like for women here going to education, like having education means that they are not gonna get pregnant and they are gonna have the possibility to do something different in their lives rather than just to serve the men, and for me that was like shit that's. It is like we have to have in mind that it's really independent, depending on the country and the situation that people is, the needs and what education is going to do for you. It's going to be different.

David Caballero: 42:34

And even if we leave aside the complexity of the educational systems and we think about those early pioneers, the people that are creating new learning centers that are horizontal, democratic, self-directed they are struggling a lot to find families that understand what they're talking about.

David Caballero: 42:50

Their families aren't completely scared of anything that is new, anything that is different.

David Caballero: 42:56

So that's one of the key things that we work with them is how to communicate this to people that have never heard about Because, yes, you want the best for your children.

David Caballero: 43:04

That have never heard about. Because, yes, you want the best for your children, but how do you know that that is the best when everything that you have seen through all your life and your father's and mother's life was a standardized schooling and that was a way to success and the way you got the job and the salary you got. Now, now you got children and you're going to do something completely different with what's the arguments that I got to convince myself as a parent and with people that are creating new learning centers. It's a long journey for families to get this different view and the different way in which they need to also integrate in these learning centers and the way they relate with their own children, because usually it doesn't work, or or I mean ideally. We want a change both in the families and in the learning centers, not that they go completely separate and we got full hierarchy on one side and none in the other there's need to be coherence.

Luz Olid: 43:56

If not, we are going to just but everybody's gonna get completely crazy like what was the? That's happening yeah, what's happening there?

Jesper Conrad: 44:04

but for people out there who are listening and maybe are not all the way over where we are and they're like, oh, we want to homeschool and we want to unschool, but where they're interested in alternative education, how do they find these learning centers? Because, and how do they choose? Because it's an open world where you don't know what's going on and, as you say, can you trust them, do you dare trust them, or do you just put your kids into the normal school and it's like that was good for me, that must be good for them yeah, there what I can say.

David Caballero: 44:45

Well, how to find them. Luckily, there are more and more of these networks with online maps where you can find these centers. Still, they're not very updated. I guess lack of funding is one of the things but there are many of these communities. Some of them might be part of ecovill, or or they are connected with other cultural initiatives, and that's how you end up finding that nearby you, there are some things going on, uh, online of course as well social media and so on the congress is also like ibex or eodex or I don't know, ecoversities alliance.

Luz Olid: 45:19

So there are there are many networks. No, I also. So there are many networks that you can tap in and check what things are around you.

David Caballero: 45:29

And then, once you find something, how to know whether it's good for you or not.

David Caballero: 45:33

I think that's a process of again experimentation, of going there, spending some time, your children as well kind of trying to contribute and being an active member of that community. Because learning centers that are starting, or alternative learning centers I think they are in this very difficult balance between adhering to their values and system. Imagine you set up an agile learning center that is self-directed we got Kanban and this and that to manage things but then you also got the families requests and the family circle. When there are people that arrive and say, hey, I found this nice software for learning how to read and write or to do math, why don't you integrate it as an option for the children or something? So there's this continuous tension from what the founders set up as the basis of the structure and everything. That is all the requests and and questions that are coming from the families on a daily basis, and the children as well will have their own interests. And now I want some tools because I want to be something where those resources come from.

Jesper Conrad: 46:44

So you know so I'm trying to find a way to round off.

Cecilie Conrad: 46:47

There's a lot to talk about. That's the problem.

Jesper Conrad: 46:50

Yeah, yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 46:50

Yeah.

Luz Olid: 46:56

It's life.

David Caballero: 46:57

Yeah, I think it's yeah, exactly, this is living. This is living and it's changing and adaptation. It's not like I'm going gonna find the perfect solution and this will be forever. No, it's a, it's a nice, it's and it's fun as well. It can be fun. I think it's also switching a little bit, that that it can be fun to reinvent our lives and way of learning and interacting with one another. And it's really about, I think, at the core of this is learning to live in community and to in a different way of relating in a different way that we are not used to, because we're used to to paying for services, uh, or to the government supplying services like schooling, but being part of a learning community and actively contributing to end to each and being willing to be flexible and give up some things.

Luz Olid: 47:41

We're going out of our comfort zone, so it's, it's a lot of fun, but then we that that, that fear of oh no, this is scary, and then then we get the stack that doesn't allow us to keep growing and and evolving. So, yeah, it's kind of trusting, I guess that go. It goes back to something that I kind of think that we miss at school, like trusting ourselves. Like if we trust ourselves and we have the ability to think that I can do whichever thing I decide to do and I have my autonomy and I belong to this group, then everything is possible. But then if I don't trust myself and if I'm scared, if I am all the time being under attack, then there's not going to be flexibility of possibilities of doing pretty much anything. But then being in that safe space, I think is essential.

David Caballero: 48:30

And something that we're just starting a new project on sustainable living and in the first meeting that we had with our new collaborators, we told them no one knows the world, how the world is. The only thing that we see is our own perception. So the normal thing is going to be that we don't understand each other and we end up into conflict. So let's set up structures that allow us to uncover those different perceptions and to solve conflicts before they mount into something bigger. Let's make sure that every week, we have one hour to talk about things that we feel uncomfortable with, so that we can work on them. But this is something new, because we have never done it. They have never done it either, so it's about being open to these difficult conversations.

Luz Olid: 49:16

Yeah, and play.

Jesper Conrad: 49:18

Yeah, and play For people out there who want to know more about your research. Maybe watch some of the movies or download your free ebook. Where do they find you and where should they start?

David Caballero: 49:30

Yeah, evolvingeducationorg. That's our website. Over there you got the links to the ebook and our social media are called the same Facebook, Instagram and YouTube Evolving Education. And yeah, you're welcome to start getting engaged there and in the different communities that we manage and we're. We're now hosting as well, like a webinar series called voices of change. Just once a month, let's say this is what you do, guys, every week. It's a lot of work yeah, thank you.

Jesper Conrad: 50:03

It was super inspiring and I will go and check out some of the videos you made. I look forward to it. Thanks a lot for your time.

David Caballero: 50:10

Thank you, it's a pleasure.

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