Education is How We Become Boundless
Paradigm Shift Series – Part One
We say education prepares us for life.
But education is life! Learning is the art of becoming boundless.
At the Edge
I have never been held the way the ocean embraced me. As a scuba instructor in the Cayman Islands, I loved to dive off the wall into the Cayman Abyss alone. At about 100 ft (30 metres) the sea floor would suddenly drop - a sheer 6,000 foot (2 km) plummet into darkness. I would swim off the wall until all reference points disappeared, endless water in every direction, and spin with my eyes closed until I lost myself in the blue. I felt like I was flying in water - a delicious vertigo. Sometimes a lone eagle ray would soar past, or a school of hammerheads would loom as shadows in the deep. The boundaries of my body and mind dissolved until all that remained was the sound of my breath and the sensation that I was the sea.
What is the boundary of what we call ourselves? The skin filters the world but doesn’t separate us from it. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the organisms within us - our existence is entangled with everything beyond us. Remove the sun or the galaxy, and what remains? Looking inward: from trillions of cells to subatomic particles, we are a universe within a universe. Where do we end and the universe begin?
What I fear most isn’t being lost at sea, but absolute isolation; being trapped within myself, unable to connect with life beyond my own boundary. Like all life, I long to be unbounded.
Perhaps this longing to dissolve boundaries is why moments of unpredictability and vulnerability have always left their mark on me. If the ocean offered immersion, it was on land - sudden, chaotic, and unscripted - where the known could, in a heartbeat, collapse into the unknown.
The Myth of Preparation
We are raised to believe that education prepares us for life. There’s truth in this, but it is also a myth - one that quietly shapes our sense of what is possible.
The fragrance of frangipani, petrol fumes, and sea breeze blended together as I stepped off the school bus in Hawaii. I was about eight years old. We spun at the sound of a crash, followed by guttural roars. A truck carrying several bulls had been hit, and the beasts spilled out, bellowing and slipping as they scrambled to their feet. Enraged, they charged after us. I felt a cold fever spread across my body. For a moment I froze; then my body ran before my mind could think. The bulls followed. My sisters and I sprinted to the nearest building - a McDonald’s at the corner. Once the doors closed behind us, adrenaline gave way to a flood of tears. The people inside pressed to the windows, watching the bulls dart amongst the cars. An employee handed us soft ice cream cones, which I licked in panicked relief as tears dried on my face.
I learned from life what the classroom can’t teach, that chaos rarely arrives with warning; no preparation could have predicted bulls in the road. The sense of safety can vanish in an instant; one moment the world is familiar, the next, chaos floods in.
If education is intended to prepare us for life, it must acknowledge that the future is never fully knowable. Our minds evolved to predict in a mostly stable world, but rapid change now outstrips our capacity for prediction. AI, robotics, climate, politics - how can we prepare for a future we cannot imagine? We need to prepare for adaptability - the capacity to quickly respond, not merely to react. We should be careful not to prepare for a future that never arrives, leaving us exposed to the one that does.
How would our schools look if we educated our students for flexibility and ‘response ability’? The only schools worth having are those that can respond as quickly as the world changes outside their doors.
Boundlessness
Every now and then, a lesson hijacks me - unscripted, channelled rather than delivered. I remember being asked to sub a biology class two minutes before the bell. I moved the tables into a circle and sat on a desk. Without a plan, I riffed on what Life meant to me, challenging the textbook definition. I don't remember what I said - words just flowed. Every student was locked in. Time vanished. The bell rang and the class ended in profound silence. Later, a few parents told me their children were floored - changed. I don't say this to praise myself. Somehow, I became a conduit for something bigger. This has happened a few times. I don't know what it is or how it happens, but it's transformative - for me and my students. This is what education can become when it’s boundless - grace flowing rather than me teaching.
Humans are agents of creation, ever expanding thought and possibility. Yet we create boundaries. Every conclusion risks becoming a cage of certainty; conformity draws invisible lines. We segregate an undivided universe - biology, chemistry, physics, art; as though these are separate things - and then congratulate ourselves for our own brilliance. We imprison ourselves within walls of our own creation and then wonder why we feel lonely, disconnected, trapped. That day, our circle dissolved the division between lesson and learner, but it returned the moment the bell rang.
Our addiction to certainty, to facts and opinions, warps the lens of our perception, and understanding our own vast potential is our greatest blind spot. Education is the 'technology' through which we must realise ourselves, but to do so we must wipe the mud of certainty from the lens.
The boundaries we inherit - intellectual, social, physical - are the very contours of our inner world. Each limit we accept or challenge shapes how we see ourselves and what we might become.
Limits We Inherit, Limits We Transcend
For millennia humans gazed up at the night sky and tried to imagine their place in the cosmos. We were earth-bound - constrained to a single point of view. In a push to expand beyond our limitations, humanity reached for the stars and set foot on the moon. When Armstrong stepped out of Apollo 11 in 1969, for the first time humans were able to see Earth from the outside; to look upon our home and better understand the boundary that constrains us.
That boundary fell not only to rockets, but to imagination and learning. Some boundaries are technological, like the lunar landing; others are physiological, like breaking the four-minute mile, or learning to read by Braille. In each case, what was once impossible became, suddenly, achievable. All these breakthroughs are, at their root, educational. Before the body can break a limit, the mind must imagine that it’s possible.
We believe in our limitations because we've created them ourselves. But the same building blocks of life have made a bat, a fish, a tree, a turtle, a human, a mountain. All these have arisen from the same material, the stuff from which we are made, and the unrealised possibilities of each live within us. We are plastic potential - we should not limit what we might become.
What self-imposed limitations live within each of us waiting to be dissolved?
This recognition - that we are our potential is unbounded - awakened in me to drive to experiment with dissolving boundaries in my own teaching practice, searching for emergence rather than compliance.
Education as Spiritual Midwifery
When I launched LALTech Lab, a student-directed edtech start-up integrated into the core curriculum, I believed students would thrive if they chose roles based on what excited them. They were given real agency to express themselves and to pursue both personal and collective aims. I set out to dissolve classroom boundaries, guiding them to reach out to businesses and community rather than simply following my direction. They were empowered to create and expand, guided by our collective vision.
This course has felt like teaching a child to ride a bicycle, where one hand is on the back of the seat until they find their balance, before slowly letting go. What I had not anticipated was that the students often reverted to learned behaviour. I remember a moment when I was encouraging a very strong student to create work that inspired him, asking what he wanted to achieve. He responded, "I just want to be told what to do, and then I'll do it." There was a silent tone of agreement with other students in the lab. I was taken aback by the overt rejection of agency, but I had also noticed this conveyed in more subtle ways by other students. Agency can be daunting, or exhausting, if you’ve spent years being rewarded for obedience.
I learned that emergence is not a curriculum outcome; it can't be commanded. It can only be invited. I can set up the conditions but there is no guarantee it will be embraced. Like birth, the crossing into autonomy can't be forced; the new self emerges only when it's ready to move beyond the old boundary.
I've lain awake many nights in my struggle to bring this class to life, critically reflecting on my inability to deliver this agency. I've tried different approaches but haven't yet found the catalyst. Perhaps we've groomed a generation to chase approval and consumption at the expense of longing and creation?
Return to the Boundary
Every minute of every day is the right moment for living. There is no practice run. I like to tell my students, "Today has never happened before, and it will never happen again." We've framed education as preparation for life, obscuring the truth that education is life. We've designed a system where we're never fully prepared: K-12 prepares us for university, university prepares us for career, in career we begin climbing a ladder towards retirement, and when retirement arrives we wait for death. We've drawn lines between the past, present and future, but the past no longer exists and the future hasn't yet arrived. The only moment that matters is now (and now...and now...).
Learning happens in this ‘eternal now’; never as mere rehearsal, always as reality. Perhaps education is at its best when it prepares us for what lies ahead by making this moment meaningful.
Teaching is less the work of settling what is, than of opening space for what might become. Questions open; explanations close. When learning becomes an encounter then discovery often follows, not through the acceptance of what is, but from the willingness to embrace what is not yet known. To create is to dwell at this threshold, in the space where what is known gives way to what might be.
What if success isn’t about how well you perform within the boundaries you’ve inherited, but how often you dare to step beyond them? There’s beauty in the irony that each time you transcend these limitations you become more yourself.
Education is not preparation for life - it is life. Becoming boundless isn't a lesson plan, it's a way of being.
AI Disclaimer: All words, ideas, and composition in this article are my own. AI was used during planning and editing to support clarity, structure, and accuracy.