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Mainstream education is designed around what is taught. The work assembled on this site begins from a different starting point: not what education should deliver, but what teachers, learners, and administrators actually experience inside the systems they inhabit, and what those experiences make possible over time.

Experience has two aspects, as Dewey understood them: the principle of interaction and the principle of continuity. Interaction is what happens within an individual, and between an individual and the conditions around them. Continuity is the way one experience prepares the ground for the next. AI opens unprecedented possibilities for education organised around individuals, while also increasing the capacity of systems to suppress individuality. This is precisely why we need a coherent philosophy of education now. The Living Curriculum Architecture — a framework I have developed for understanding how learning environments shape human experience — is an attempt to think these questions through systematically.

That students should be treated with dignity has never been in dispute. What has not been thought through is how dignity needs to permeate the system itself — not only in the relations between teachers and students, but in any part of the system: the goals systems pursue, the expectations placed on learners, the ways students are evaluated, the design of textbooks and teaching materials, even the physical structure of classrooms and buildings. The framework that I am presenting on this site shows how dignity can be foundational to the system as a whole. The site includes practical examples drawn from decades of teaching and materials design. These examples are largely from the field of English language teaching, where the work has been most directly developed, but the principles they illustrate apply to education as a whole.

The ideas on this site took shape slowly over four decades inside Japanese universities, thirty-one of them as a tenured faculty member in the School of Political Science and Economics at Meiji University, from 1991 to 2022. Throughout my career there was a tension I was not able to resolve until now. On one side, the long-term question of what contemporary education systematically gets wrong. On the other, the immediate demands of the students in front of me. I never abandoned the importance of either. That work produced both theoretical writing and practical materials, though the relation between the two remained unresolved in my public work. None of my public writing until now has fully reflected the scale of the underlying work. In the four years since retiring, putting the pieces together has felt less like the end of a career than the crossing of a threshold.

Kevin Mark 真明ケビン

Professor Emeritus, Meiji University