I am converting some of my long academic articles into short blog posts using AI. Here is another one.
Education is constantly changing.
Schools adopt new technologies. Governments rewrite curriculum standards. Teachers learn new pedagogies. Assessment systems are revised. New programs promise creativity, personalized learning, student agency, and 21st-century skills.
And yet, strangely, schooling itself seems remarkably unchanged.
Students are still largely grouped by age. They still follow a prescribed curriculum. Teachers are still expected to deliver that curriculum. Students are still assessed according to how well they have mastered what adults decided they should learn.
After more than two centuries of reform, the fundamental structure of schooling remains surprisingly resilient.
Why?
One answer is that education behaves much like an ecological system.
Schools Change Without Really Transforming
Ecological systems can adapt to new conditions while preserving their basic identity. Education does something similar.
Schools have absorbed computers, the internet, new textbooks, new teaching approaches, standardized testing, and countless reforms. These innovations may alter parts of the system, but the central structure survives.
This is the difference between adaptation and transformation.
An adaptive change improves the existing system.
A transformative change creates a different system.
Most educational reform has been adaptive. It asks how we can teach the existing curriculum better, assess it better, or use technology to deliver it more efficiently.
But the age of AI raises a much deeper possibility. If students can access knowledge, explanations, expertise, and intelligent assistance almost anytime, perhaps they need much greater control over their own learning.
That would require transformation, not simply improvement.
The Curriculum Is the Anchor
The central obstacle is the prescribed curriculum.
Curriculum does much more than tell teachers what content to cover. It organizes almost everything else in schooling.
It shapes timetables, textbooks, teacher preparation, assessment, grouping, classroom practices, and even how schools define success. Teachers are expected to teach it, students are expected to master it, and administrators are expected to make sure it is delivered.
In this sense, curriculum acts as an anchor for the whole educational system.
That creates a fundamental tension between curriculum control and student autonomy.
The more completely schools prescribe what students learn, when they learn it, how they learn it, and with whom they learn it, the less autonomy students have.
Yet genuine personalized learning requires the opposite. Students need meaningful opportunities to decide what they want to explore, what strengths they want to develop, and what problems they want to pursue.
This does not mean abandoning the curriculum entirely.
A more realistic possibility is a balanced curriculum: part prescribed by society and part controlled by students. The balance could vary by age, context, and students’ experience with self-directed learning. Autonomy does not mean leaving students alone; teachers remain essential as coaches, mentors, advisers, and supporters.
Why Top-Down Reform Usually Fails
But there is another difficulty.
Education systems are very good at accepting innovations that strengthen the existing system—and very good at rejecting innovations that threaten it.
A new textbook can be adopted.
A new assessment system can be introduced.
A new technology can be added.
But giving students substantial control over their learning challenges the system’s central organizing principle: control over curriculum.
This helps explain why genuinely transformative approaches such as Montessori, the Dalton Plan, Waldorf education, and democratic schooling have existed for decades without fundamentally reshaping mainstream education.
Trying to transform an entire education system from the top down may therefore be the wrong strategy.
Start Small: A School Within a School
Ecology suggests another possibility.
Panarchy theory describes complex systems as consisting of nested subsystems. A classroom exists within a school; a school within a district; a district within a state or national system. Change can move not only downward from large systems but also upward from smaller ones.
This suggests an intriguing strategy for educational transformation:
Do not change the whole school. Create something different within it.
A “school within a school” can provide a protected space where willing students and teachers experiment with another educational paradigm.
Students might personalize significant portions of their learning. They could identify problems they want to solve, develop their strengths, work across age groups, use AI extensively as a learning partner, and create products or services that contribute value to others.
Teachers would become coaches, facilitators, project advisers, and socio-emotional supporters rather than primarily transmitters of prescribed content.
Most importantly, participation could be voluntary. Instead of forcing an entire school community to adopt an unfamiliar model, interested students and families could experience it first.
If the new subsystem works, it can grow. Other teachers may become interested. More students may join. Other schools may imitate it.
Small change can eventually influence the larger system.
Transformation Does Not Have to Begin at the Top
This may be one of the most important lessons for educational change in the age of AI.
We often imagine transformation as something that must come from governments, ministries, districts, or entire school systems.
But perhaps transformative change is more likely to begin in small spaces where people have enough freedom to do something fundamentally different.
The question, then, is not:
How do we reform the entire system?
A more productive question may be:
Where can we create a small space in which a different kind of education is allowed to live, grow, and demonstrate its value?
That small space may ultimately have more power to transform education than another system-wide reform.
Based on the original article:
Zhao, Y., & Zhong, R. (2025). Paradigm shifts in education: An ecological analysis. ECNU Review of Education, 8(1), 21–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/20965311241296162
The article was first published online on October 31, 2024.
