What conditions let both teachers and learners thrive in education at any scale — mass systems, one-to-one settings, or anywhere between?

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

Experience has two aspects, as Dewey understood them: the principle of interaction and the principle of continuity. Interaction is the give-and-take between the inner life of an individual and the conditions around that person. 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 dull individual experience. This is precisely why a coherent philosophy of education is needed now.

That students should be treated with dignity has never been in dispute. What has not been thought through is what dignity is, how it can be present or absent — and whether it is integral or simply additive. The ways in which dignity is attended to are foundational.

The site includes examples and personal anecdotes that have helped shape these ideas. They are drawn from vivid memories of ten primary schools in five countries, later education in the UK, and four decades of teaching, materials design and curriculum work in Japanese universities.

The Living Curriculum Architecture brings practical and theoretical work into one coherent map. It offers a language for understanding any educational situation as part of a system of interacting conditions. It can illuminate, for planning committees and individual teachers alike, realities and possibilities that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Kevin Mark 真明ケビン

Professor Emeritus, Meiji University