Make haste slowly: What does it take to reimagine schooling?
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I launched Coherence Co-Lab into the world nearly a year ago, and while time has brought many things, including much character growth, it has brought a new clarity to why this practice exists: partnering with schools to reimagine (and redesign) schooling for an emerging future.
Reimagine is one of those words you hear all the time in education. It sits alongside others like ‘reform’ and ‘rethink’ and ‘redesign’ and is probably in danger of inflicting a bit of buzzword fatigue on all of us. And yet, when faced with technology-induced disruption, increasing volatility in society or signals in our institutions that point to changing behaviours and attitudes, we often reach for the possibilities of reimagining.
“Reimagine is one of those words you hear all the time in education. It’s in danger of inflicting buzzword fatigue on all of us. ”
Now, I am a trained senior English teacher, and there’s probably still a good chunk of my heart that is still sitting somewhere in Year 11 classroom, talking with students about Marxist readings of Macbeth, so allow me to indulge in semantics for a bit. 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? How can we design new systems for a new future when our frames of reference all look eerily similar, regardless of where we’ve come from?
This is why the concept of reimagining isn’t something to be taken lightly. It is more than the trendy cousin of ‘reform’ or ‘fixing a broken system’. Innovation is part of it, but it’s more than successful implementation of novel ideas and technology. It is not the result of one ideation session or through replication of an idea that has worked successfully somewhere else. In systems theory, reimagining goes beyond fragmented innovations that look great on LinkedIn posts and market well to prospective families. It speaks to the deepest part of the system of schooling to consider its purpose for existing, the humans that experience it, and the paradigm that built it in the first place.
“Reimagining isn’t something to be taken lightly. It speaks to the deepest part of the system of schooling to consider its purpose for exisiting, the humans that experience it, and the paradigm that built it in the first place. ”
You’re probably familiar with the much popularised saying of, “Go slow to go fast,” which comes from a Latin phrase that translates to, “Make haste slowly”. I love the paradox of this translation; I liken it to the way we often respond to the emerging future. In the face of increased uncertainty and volatility, it is tempting to move with urgency to implement one off innovations that are ‘future focused’ and will ‘future proof students’. But the idea of ‘Make haste slowly; reminds that we need to hold this urgency at the same time as our willingness to look deep beyond the surface. Past the physical structures and competing demands to that which is invisible and often unexamined: Why are we doing this? What is our purpose? What are we reinforcing? And who is all of this benefitting?
I’m applying the general paradox of this phrase to propose that in order for us to reimagine schooling and an emerging with clarity and possibility, we don’t just need to slow down, we need to look back to understand how we got here in the first place. This isn’t an exercise in confirmation bias (Of course that wouldn’t have worked!) or a post-mortem of what went wrong in past attempts (Those ideas were terrible!). Instead, we can regard history curiously through a systems lens to understand how decisions made about the philosophical, structural and operational design of schooling in the past can reveal new leverage points for us in the present.
“The idea of ‘make haste slowly’ reminds us that we need to hold urgency at the same time as the willingness to look deep under the surface.”
So, this essay is the first in a series I’m calling “Looking Back to Look Forward: Can history provide new leverage points to reimagine the future of schooling?”. It’s been informed by rich and challenging conversations with people across industries that range from design to architecture, deep work and thinking with school leaders and educators, and the disciplines that sit at the heart of Coherence Co-Lab. It’ll be part historical systems analysis, part futures design, part strategic foresight. And if you can’t be bothered with the big words, it’ll go something like this: let’s look at the history of modern schooling through a systems lens, see where there are leverage points that we may have missed, consider if we can use this as material to reimagine and redesign schooling for the emerging future.
Coming up next time: How did an experiment in reimagined schooling in 1969 manage to make so many people so angry?
Bibliography
Blenkinsop, S. (2018, February 6). Reimagining schooling: A problem of design. Centre for Imagination in Research, Culture and Education (CIRCE). https://circe-sfu.ca/reimagining-schooling-a-problem-of-design/
Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer (D. Wright, Ed.). Chelsea Green Publishing.
Meadows, D. H. (1999). Leverage points: Places to intervene in a system. The Sustainability Institute.
Dorst, K. (2025). Deep change: Creating space for meaningful transformation. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15976.001.0001
Montgomery, A., Karagianni, D., & Androutsou, D. (2016). Reimagining school: Is it possible? In A. Montgomery & I. Keitel (Eds.), Reframing the curriculum: Design for social justice and sustainability (pp. 1–14). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24699-4_1