For as long as I have been a teacher, a principal, now a Head, I have believed that education comes down, in the end, to individuals. Not to cohorts, or averages – but to this child, and then that one.
Teachers know this. We know it so well that we can’t stop saying so – differentiation, meeting every child where they are, personalised learning – all reflect a deep truth: attend to the actual child in front of you, not the abstraction.
As parents, we know it more deeply still. My three are grown now, one in music, one in philosophy, one teaching, but those descriptions are generic and of course cannot capture the texture of them as people; no parent summarises their children as categories (though I just did ☹️). So the impulse to focus on individuals is the right one. And when I stand in front of students or teachers to remind them about what we are for as a College, I always reach for their responsibility as individuals, or their responsibility to individuals. It moves them. The idea moves me, to be honest – it’s both inspiring and daunting, as great ideas tend to be. I believe it.
Of course, just because I believe it doesn’t make it true, or certainly not the only truth here – and the individual view is complicated by Brownstein and Madva, who take issue with Mother Teresa’s famous position that she was called to help the individual, to love each poor person, and not to deal with institutions. She was wrong, they say – or at least she was only half right. Being good to the person in front of you is a type of virtue, they argue, but there’s also another type, one aimed at the systems and structures that put those people there in the first place. Going upstream, we might say; they call it ‘structure-facing virtue’. Their own example – writing from the US – is racism: not being racist yourself is a virtue directed at the people you happen to meet, but they argue that there’s a second virtue directed at the systems that produce the discrimination in the first place. Anti-discrimination law makes the point easy to see. The laws were built by individuals, of course, but the legal system did what decades of individual goodwill on its own had not: open jobs and housing to people who had been shut out of them.
The principle applies more widely – a generous family can pay for one sick child’s treatment in a ward, but what works better is a funded, mandated vaccination programme that reaches all children and prevents anyone getting to the wards in the first place. The former may be more attractive, because an individual face taps into our emotions in ways that abstract systems cannot.
The same thing happens in schools too. When we make a timetable we are not looking at individuals; we are looking at categories – those who chose Entrepreneurship and those who chose Art. For it to work at all, individuality has to go. To a student who can’t get her choices, that is a real failure – but it’s also what allows anyone to teach her at all. We need the system; it cannot all be about the individual.
The distinction matters, because of the progress I mentioned about in my last post where I wrote about individuals – millions of them, working independently, most of whom never met. So here’s another way to look at the progress: it came through structures, systems and institutions, assembled over decades. Of course, systems can also do terrible harm. Sometimes by design – apartheid was such a structure – but mainly by accident, and by people who meant well. Educationally we can point to the 11+ in the UK, designed to widen opportunity, which turned out to make no difference to it at all – what it gave the children who passed, it took from the children who didn’t.
But look at the systems that work. Mass healthcare, mass education, food, water and power systems, global transport and supply chains, economic policy that protects people while it keeps things growing – these are among the most impressive things people have ever built. The trouble is that they are largely invisible – at least until they fail – easy to take for granted, and easier still to criticise. Pulling them down is faster and cheaper than building them, and it isn’t hard to see examples where that is happening today. Decent individual behaviour doesn’t build these things, because it is, well, individual. It needs structures to let it accumulate to more than the sum of individual efforts.
I started this piece with individuals, but I’ve gone somewhere else. Meet them where they are may be a whole truth about a child, but it is certainly not the whole truth about the world. Which is a problem for us, because one of the things we do is prepare them for their future. And if it’s structures that carry the improvement, then a child who leaves here able only to be decent to the person in front of them is not equipped. They need to be able to see more than individual interactions.
So how can a school do this?
There are three steps. They need different capacities, and the order matters – these are years apart, not weeks. Try to explain complex systems to an eight year old and you risk teaching her they’re too daunting to question; tell a seventeen year old the structural truths before she has ever changed anything, and it sounds like resignation, or even endorsement.
1 Recognising that a system exists at all. In K1 much of term one goes into making the classroom: learning who is in the room and what each of them brings; discussing what might work for everyone, co-writing the agreements, working out what the expectations mean in practice. And it leads to a four-year-old who puts the shared materials away because that is what she agreed to do. She isn’t being kind to anybody in particular, or just doing what she’s been told to. She’s doing something for an arrangement – which means she is being led to an understanding that there is one. It is not systems thinking, but it is the first time a child sees that the room has rules which were made up by someone (including her) and that could be changed.
2 Working out how a system holds together. Our G3 Changemakers unit asks whether small actions can make a big difference, and the first thing we teach is to not answer it immediately – before anyone proposes anything, students choose something real and map it: the composting programme, the route a library book takes from shelf back to shelf, what happens to the rubbish at home. Only then do we define ‘leverage point’ as the place where a small push moves the whole structure, and ask them to find it in their own system. One girl spent her time on the place where students return their bento boxes, and came back with an account of why there was a queue. That is the habit: look at the process before you look for the fix.
3 Finding out whether a system can be moved, and moving it if it can be. A group on the IB Systems Transformation pilot set out to reduce the campus’s energy use and went for the obvious lever – air-conditioning hours. But our Facilities team had been optimising it for a decade and the students found nothing to fix (I am not sure whether to be pleased about that or not!). Sometimes the quality of the system is invisible until you look; and here it was the looking that’s the point. So then they thought about the College’s email traffic, and looked there instead; and this time they found something that no-one else had seen. Everyone they spoke to was receiving daily subscription emails that nobody opened; across a school our size that is tens of thousands of unwanted emails a day, with a real carbon cost. So they undertook a campaign – assemblies, a stall in the plaza, a pitch at the Community Fair, and with the help of some sweets and a silly costume, got hundreds of people to unsubscribe from thousands of mailing lists. The carbon saved is small – what’s more important is the method: they had a hypothesis, tested it, found the system already worked, looked again somewhere less obvious, and found something nobody had thought to measure -and then did something about it (more details here from the student perspective – worth a look).
None of that is specific to email traffic. The same thinking can, in future careers or voting decisions, be applied to a supply chain, a health system or an ecosystem. These matters may be harder by orders of magnitude, but the systems learnings apply just as well.
It’s hardest when the system is our own. International schools serve the wealthy and advantaged, and I recognise my own part in that, having spent so long here, and had my own children go through the College – as our students sometimes point out, to their credit. So that’s a system we need our students to see too, because if they leave unaware of their advantages, then we are leaving them with the most comfortable blind spot there is – one about themselves.
None of that is any child’s fault – no child owes anyone an apology for where they are born or which school their parents can reach. We can’t ask a fourteen year old to go upstream against the current that carried her to school, but we can make sure she knows the current is there. I hold faith that when the time comes, some of them will look at the structures they themselves are part of, even when the easy thing is to lie back and enjoy the view.
Teachers begin with the people in front of them, because that is where a child’s world starts. Over the years that world grows and the instinct to help their neighbour can be carried into the systems and structures that protect people – building them, and defending them.
With thanks to Yuki Hiramatsu, Erin Witthoft and Clayton Chimiel for the correspondence and conversation
References
Graphics by Gemini. prompt by Claude
Boliver, V. and Swift, A. (2011). “Do Comprehensive Schools Reduce Social Mobility?” British Journal of Sociology, 62(1), 89–110.
Brownstein, M., & Madva, A. (2026). Mother Teresa was virtuous, but she was wrong about virtue. Psyche.
Hiramatsu, Y. (2026, August 16). The IB let me fail. More specifically, Systems Transformation, the IB pilot course I had the honour of taking LinkedIn.
