But the thing about complex problems, is especially in schools, is that solutions to them don’t really exist. There is no single bullet, according to Dorst, that will magically satisfy the needs and wants of all stakeholders. What we can do in a complex problem situation is to instead create high-quality interventions that move the entire system to a more desired state.

We tinker.

This is what the grammar of schooling looks like: the organisational and pedagogical forms of schooling that persist, despite efforts of many to change it. And this grammar, much like the way we learn to speak, is formed through our experience of education, and our interaction with educational environments. It is an invisible system of beliefs, values and accepted norms that are transferred and shared through relationships and generations. Our parents go through schooling; we go through it and some of us then become teachers and school leaders. Our politicians, and the people who have the power to allocate and spend money experience the same type of schooling. Over decades, we have internalised the idea that this is how schooling is done when it is done the right way.  

This idea of reimagining schooling isn’t new, and many voices have come before me to offer blueprints for a path forward and best practices. But we have to consider something: reimagining something asks us to: re (do again) and imagine (dream, vision, create). But what happens when our capacity to imagine is shaped by our experience of a system that nearly all of us have been through? How can we imagine schooling to be any different when our ways of talking about it and experiencing it exist deep in our collective cultural consciousness?