Student Agency, Trust & Regenerative Learning (featuring Dr. Benjamin Freud)

Benjamin, thank you.

Uh, that was a perfect segue to what I wanted to talk to you.

So in your notes, you were talking about flattened hierarchies, and it reminded me back, I think you had put on, um, kind of a LinkedIn post a while back now that kinda got me thinking, and it was just along the lines of what you just described.

So, uh, what I took away from it, and I can't remember if it was explicitly stated this way, but basically, if you're a school and you don't have kids in every single committee there is to have, then you need to reconsider how it's done.

So I wanted, if you don't mind, to tap into what you just mentioned, but also talk about the, you mentioned the spirit of the school, and certainly the culture of the school.

And often you can walk into schools and tell, and of course, I'm talking more traditional spaces, but you can often tell whether everyone's kind of on the same side [laughs]-

Mm-hmm

... or whether, you know, the kids are on their own versus the teachers on their own.

There's some sort of a psychological wall there that separates, uh, the two.

Uh, and what you're describing about sitting on a sofa talking to kids, uh, reminds me of kind of the latter.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm gonna guess that it's very connected to this flattened hierarchy.

So talk to me a little bit about the, the chicken and the egg version of what a flattened hierarchy would be.

Who makes the first move? If I'm in a traditional school and I kinda wanna follow this model a little bit, what do I need to keep in mind or, or think about, uh, as I consider that?

Sure.

No, that, that's a great question.

And I'm gonna just take one step back and even introduce the idea of regenerative education, and I'm going to, uh, just say flat out that, uh, the, the, the issue even with the idea of regenerative education is that people think it's about, like, connect to nature and heal and restore and all that, and that's all anesthetized, uh, stories for a magical world that doesn't exist, and it's not attainable by most.

And it's actually a big turnoff.

Talking about, like, healing and all that, that's not, that's not the way it is.

I mean, in, in the living world, there's a lot of death, there's a lot of injuries, and we don't go heal it to, back to the status quo.

We move on.

Everything's dynamic as we move towards, you know, um, entropic, you know, uh, uh- You know, moves and so forth.

So for me, the idea of regenerative education, and this is what can be attained even in the most urban of jungles, even no matter where it is, is in terms of not just relationships, because masters and slaves have relationships, but reciprocity and the deepening of reciprocity, even if it's asymmetrical.

So the idea of flattened hierarchies is pretty simple.

You just actually talk to people in knowing that the reciprocity comes in, that you've got something to learn from them.