Intermezzo: Breaking away, redefining freedom

When we wrote Manifesto 25, we knew it would never be complete. The manifesto was not intended as a final prescription or rigid doctrine, but as an open provocation. It calls for challenge, revision, and expansion by those who engage with it.

The original signatories who contributed to this companion volume were invited to respond to two questions:

1. What inherited truths or habits are you breaking away from, and why? Which educational assumptions do you now recognize as myths or traps?
2. Where do you see learning freedom struggling, thriving, or being redefined — in your professional, geographic, or political context?

Educators, activists, learners, and community builders from around the world answered. Their contexts differed, but their purpose converged: to rethink how we understand and practice learning. What follows is a synthesis of those reflections, a pause between the manifesto’s provocations, and an opportunity to listen across boundaries.

We inherit more than physical traits from earlier generations. We inherit beliefs, rituals, and habits so ingrained they become invisible. These traditions shape how we think about learning, school, and education itself. Some help us grow. Others trap us in outdated patterns until someone decides to step aside and question them.

Constanze Beyer captures this tension with a metaphor:

AI sits in a box and processes texts and images about the world outside. Students sit in boxes and process texts and images about the world outside.

The difference, she explains, is that students can leave the box. They can explore, connect, and experience. That potential is squandered when classrooms and curricula cut them off from the real world.

Let’s give students the freedom to explore the world outside the classroom, to interact with people, to make mistakes and learn from them, to coöperate with others instead of competing.

Bob Kartous reminds us that the box is no longer only physical. It is also digital. He describes the “digital jungle” where algorithms manipulate emotions, trap learners in echo chambers, and seduce them into aggression and bullying. Breaking away from inherited truths, he argues, means cultivating digital space as carefully as we cultivate classrooms: practicing self-control, building resilience against manipulation, and balancing online and offline life. Learning freedom here is not just the ability to leave the classroom box, but the ability to navigate digital predators and reclaim space for critical thinking, dialogue, and care.

The box has many forms

This “box” is not always made of four physical walls. Minh Trung Doan, reflecting from Vietnam, sees it reinforced in policies and practices that rush to embrace novelty without preparing the ground for it. “Shiny tech tools enter classrooms with great fanfare, but they often lack the emotional and social scaffolding necessary for inclusive learning.”

He points out that “spaces for non-formal learning, homeschooling, and creative alternatives are either marginalized or dismissed altogether.” In his view, even within formal systems, too many models remain outdated, offering learning environments that are neither culturally responsive nor attuned to the complexities of a hyperconnected world.

For him, the most glaring absence is planetary awareness. Despite the urgency voiced by scientists and youth climate movements, ecological literacy is still peripheral. Education has not caught up with the planetary consciousness that future generations need. Yet he also sees hope in the activism of young people. Armed with intersectional awareness and creative advocacy, they are not waiting for systems to reform. They are building community education hubs, challenging digital divides, and inventing new forms of solidarity that redesign education from below.

The redefinition of learning freedom, he argues, is happening elsewhere: “in living rooms, public squares, digital networks, and informal gatherings — anywhere curiosity resists containment.” This involves transforming our entire idea of what learning should be: “dynamic, inclusive, joyful, sustainable, and empowering.”

Breaking the racetrack mentality

Curiosity, however, is hard to sustain in a culture that treats education as a race. Alejandra Mendoza Garza has seen the pattern repeatedly: “Whether it’s ‘getting to the weekend,’ ‘getting to the end of the semester,’ or ‘getting to the end of the year,’ we are always running.”

This race, she argues, is an exhausting myth that leaves students, teachers, and leaders burned out. Education becomes about finishing rather than experiencing. She describes the toll of rigid timelines, heavy workloads, and leadership cultures that normalize constant motion: “When teachers run, leaders run, and parents run, we inevitably make our students run too, and we all end up tired.”

Her alternative is to “deconstruct the idea of the race” and focus on the journey, where goals are “opportunities for learning… not just checkpoints.” Learning, she reminds us, occurs in ecosystems, not in boxes or hamster wheels.

Her reflections go further. She warns against fear-driven responses to technology, particularly AI. To ban or restrict AI without exploring its potential is, she argues, another form of running away. Like past moral panics over television or home computers, it reflects fear more than ethics. “Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood,” she recalls from Marie Curie. For Alejandra, rejecting AI is a trap: the real task is to teach the ethics and creativity needed to use it responsibly.

Drawing on Robert Merton’s (1938) framework of deviant adaptations (conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, rebellion), she sees learning freedom provoking a range of responses from conformity to rebellion. For her, disruption is a necessary stance in contexts where education is misused as political spectacle.

She also points to how political agendas can turn education into a “showcase,” where programs are launched for visibility and votes but abandoned before they take root. In these contexts, she sees disruption not as a slogan but as a necessity: a conscious refusal of superficial reforms in favor of deeper, slower, more human transformations.

Finding new purpose

Shifting pace is one step; shifting purpose is another. Silvia Enríquez warns of the trap of mismatched intentions and methods. She has spent years teaching linguistics and educational technology to trainee teachers, pushing them to apply theory to their own practice, not just repeat definitions. She tells students explicitly why they are studying theory and asks them to reflect on its value for their own work, rather than treating it as abstract content to be memorized.

Yet this clarity often collides with the reality of exams, which create a contradiction that undermines innovative teaching: “If you try to teach your students to think… but then you have to use an exam format that is just repetition… then what’s the point of having taught differently?”

For her, the change must be holistic: curriculum, assessment, and classroom culture moving in the same direction. Otherwise, students revert to what they know, studying to jump through hoops necessary to pass the course, rather than studying to learn.

Silvia also highlights collaboration as an antidote to the trap of repetition. In her classes, trainee teachers are asked to solve problems together, each contributing from their own practice. Cooperation does not come easily in systems that reward individual performance, but she insists it must be practiced deliberately. When students experience the value of collaborative problem-solving, they are more likely to reproduce it in their own classrooms. For her, the point is clear: change cannot stop with new methods alone. It must reach curriculum, assessment, and culture at once.

Integration instead of fragmentation

For Luis R. Lara, the break with tradition involves integration. Teaching electronics, he refuses to treat his subject as a self-contained silo: “Our education has historically been delivered in a fragmented way… But why not do it at the very same moment we are learning…?”

He argues that real-world problems are inherently multidisciplinary, involving social, ecological, and economic considerations, alongside communication, marketing, and environmental care. Waiting until professional life to integrate these perspectives is a missed opportunity. If students learn in context from the beginning, they can become professionals who act in harmony with their environment and community.

Richard Fransham reinforces this integrative perspective through age-mixing. Drawing from a Canadian pilot program, he tells the story of two older students who entered intending to isolate themselves but soon realized that age differences dissolved when they worked in a mixed community. What began as separation turned into solidarity, showing that age segregation, like disciplinary fragmentation, impoverishes learning. Integration (across subjects and across generations) creates the conditions for empathy, resilience, and shared growth. The boys even admitted they had intended to ignore the younger students, but soon realized that prejudice dissolved in practice. The community taught them that age barriers are artificial.

Rejecting standardization

The Cloud School team in Poland challenges other persistent myths: the belief that education must be “linear, standardized, and equal for everyone” and the reliance on grading and ranking as motivators. They see how “numbers can kill natural curiosity and motivation to learn.”

Their critique resonates with Christel Hartkamp’s reflections on the Sudbury model. She describes how schools that trust children to direct their own learning dismantle two of the most enduring myths: that children require constant external motivation, and that learning must be measured to count. In practice, Sudbury students choose their paths, engage across ages, and learn democratically. For Hartkamp, breaking with inherited truths facilitates reclaiming faith in human potential.

Instead, they use “feedback, dialogue, and self-reflection” and focus on questions such as “What have we learned? What can we improve? What have we achieved?” They define the freedom to learn as “the right to choose, the right to make mistakes, and the right to set goals independently.”

They acknowledge that systemic limitations (e.g., overloaded curricula, bureaucracy, and external control) still hold back bolder experimentation. But they also see freedom flourishing in self-learning groups, mentoring sessions, and student initiatives. Technology and remote models dissolve geographical barriers, allowing young people from around the world to collaborate and co-create.

Placing trust in learners

Trust is also central to Christel Hartkamp’s engagement with the Sudbury model. She describes its radical premise: “Rather than seeing education as a passive act of receiving knowledge, Sudbury schools view it as an active, self-driven exploration.”

In Sudbury-type schools, there are no grades, no mandatory classes, and no top-down curriculum. There is only an assumption that children are naturally curious and capable of directing their own learning. The model challenges two pervasive assumptions: that children require constant external motivation, and that learning must be measured and ranked to count.

Breaking free, she says, is “an act of reclaiming our faith in human potential.”

Education as a rights issue

For Juraj Mazák, this is a matter of rights. “One of the biggest lies… is that education is something done to children.” Children, he insists, are “rights-holders” entitled to an education that respects their autonomy and potential.

Grades, standardization, and micromanaged curricula are, in his words, mechanisms of exclusion. He argues that “deregulation isn’t chaos — it’s primarily a possibility. It’s air.” Without it, schools cannot adapt, care, include, or imagine.

He rejects three myths in particular: that control creates quality, that standardization ensures fairness, and that school is only preparation for life. Each, he argues, betrays children’s rights. For him, deregulation is not chaos but “air”: the condition that allows schools to respond to real communities, children, and life as it unfolds. His words sharpen the argument: learning freedom is a human rights imperative, not a policy choice.

He challenges us:

If we truly want to prepare children for a democratic world… we must build schools that are democratic. If we want responsible citizens, we must stop raising manageable ones.

Lenka Mazáková offers a personal counterpart to this systemic argument. She recalls the moment she stepped away from positional authority: “When I stopped standing behind the ‘I know best’ wall, something unexpected happened: I met the children as equals.”

That shift, though risky, created space for real connection. She has also let go of the idea that good learning should feel smooth: “Comfort seems to be a weak teacher. Real learning begins when something breaks down… Children grow when they face challenges and figure out what to do.”

For Lenka, comfort is a weak teacher. Real learning begins when groups fail, when disagreements surface, when a train is missed and the plan breaks down. Growth comes through struggle, not avoidance. She now embraces what she calls “mandatory tasting,” the chance for children to encounter ideas, values, and experiences they might never choose on their own. Unplanned sparks (e.g., a strange video, or a debate overheard on the bus) can shift perspectives more than carefully planned lessons. To her, learning freedom means balancing direction with openness, resisting the urge to over-script children’s journeys

Redefining the role of the adult

The team at the Slobodná Škola in Slovakia articulates this as a redefinition of the adult’s role. “Our task is to hold the space where learning may happen—not to force it to happen… True consent means they choose because it matters to them, not because it pleases us.”

This requires living with discomfort: choices that look boring or chaotic, slow progress, and parental fears about productivity. “Freedom sounds great on paper—but in practice, it’s slow, unpredictable, hard to measure. People want safety. And the old system, despite all its flaws, promises clarity.”

Yet they return to trust as a necessary condition in schools, because in discomfort there is honesty, and in honesty, trust. “We keep choosing discomfort… because in that space, we find honesty. And in honesty, we build trust.”

Taken together, these voices echo across contexts — digital and ecological, political and personal, formal and informal. From Prague to Vietnam, from Mexico to Slovakia, their reflections converge on a simple but radical truth: freedom in learning is fragile, but it is also resilient.

Patterns that emerge

Stepping back from the individual stories and contexts, it becomes clear that these reflections are not isolated commentaries. They form a constellation of recurring priorities and a shared undercurrent in diverse experiences of breaking away from inherited truths and redefining learning freedom.

1. Rejecting speed as a measure of success

One of the strongest points of convergence is the critique of speed as an indicator of quality. While rapid progress is often celebrated in institutional and political narratives, these contributors see it as a false economy. This suggests a trade-off that sacrifices depth, connection, and human well-being.

As one contributor noted, rushing can take many forms: compressing curricula into unrealistic timelines, demanding immediate results from new reforms, or expecting learners to perform at a uniform pace regardless of context. Others describe how political decision-making compounds the problem, prioritizing visible quick wins over sustained change. This “hurry up” culture narrows the scope for exploration, risk-taking, and meaningful reflection, threatening the very conditions where learning deepens.

In different ways, they remind us that the most transformative learning often unfolds at a pace that resists measurement: the time it takes to build trust, to recover from setbacks, to integrate new understanding into lived experience.

2. Dismantling false measures

A second shared theme is the rejection of reductive metrics. While grades and rankings remain entrenched in many systems, these voices highlight their distorting effects, turning learning into a performance for external judgment rather than an authentic engagement with ideas.

Several contributors point out that such measures do more than misrepresent learning; they actively shape behavior in ways that undermine it. When students understand that their value will be reduced to a mark, they learn to prioritize what is tested over what is meaningful. Educators, too, can be drawn into teaching to the metric rather than to the learner.

This pattern extends beyond academic grading to encompass the broader culture of audit and inspection. Respondents describe how constant measurement can crowd out innovation, discouraging educators from experimenting with new approaches that may not yield immediately “measurable” results. They do not call for the abolition of evaluation outright, but for new forms of accountability that honor complexity, context, and growth over time.

3. Integrating rather than fragmenting

Many of the contributors see integration as both a pedagogical principle and a survival skill for the 21st century. In their accounts, learning that remains siloed (i.e., detached from lived realities and from other fields of knowledge) is incomplete and brittle.

Several point to the way real-world challenges resist neat categorization. Environmental issues, for example, require an interplay of scientific understanding, civic engagement, ethical reasoning, and communication. The same holds for the digital sphere, where technical literacy must be matched by media awareness, social empathy, and cultural fluency.

This integrative stance also extends to the boundaries between school and community. Contributors envision learning ecosystems where formal institutions are porous, connected to local contexts, global networks, and the full range of learners’ interests. In these environments, integration serves as the default approach to cultivating knowledge and skills, not an enrichment activity on the periphery.

4. Trusting learners and letting go of control

A recurring thread is the belief that learners of all ages are capable of steering their own growth when given the trust and conditions to do so. For some, this trust is built into the structures they work within, such as democratic or self-directed schools. For others, it is a deliberate personal practice in more traditional settings, requiring conscious restraint from over-directing the process.

Contributors acknowledge that letting go of control is rarely easy. It demands that adults accept choices that may not align with their own plans or aesthetics, and that they resist intervening simply to speed up progress or tidy the process. Trust in this sense is built from an active stance that involves careful listening, honest dialogue, and a willingness to share responsibility.

Several also point out that trust works both ways. For learners to embrace autonomy, they must be able to trust that the adults around them will support rather than punish experimentation, and that mistakes will be treated as part of the process rather than as failures to be avoided. Learners respond to that trust with greater ownership of their learning, a willingness to take risks, and deeper engagement in the process.

5. Confronting systemic barriers

While personal and local practices matter, these contributors are acutely aware of the structural forces that shape what is possible in their contexts. Bureaucratic procedures, legislative constraints, and deeply ingrained cultural narratives about “what school should be” all influence the scope for change.

In some accounts, these barriers are logistical: rigid timetables, inflexible curriculum frameworks, or underfunding for alternative approaches. In others, they are ideological: mistrust of non-traditional pathways, resistance to student-led initiatives, or the framing of education primarily as workforce preparation.

Several participants observe that even well-intentioned policies can become obstacles when implemented without flexibility or attention to local needs. This is particularly evident when reforms are driven by political agendas, which can result in abrupt shifts of direction, fragmented programs, and the erosion of initiatives before they have time to take root.

6. Locating spaces of thriving

Despite the pressures, every contributor identifies places, however small, where learning freedom is alive. These spaces are often modest in scale and informal in structure, but they carry disproportionate influence in shaping what is possible.

Some of these are physical places: community workshops, intergenerational programs, or mixed-age learning groups where mutual teaching is valued. Others are relational spaces: circles of practice where peers mentor one another, or networks that connect learners across distances through shared projects.

What unites these thriving spaces is their responsiveness. They adapt to learners’ needs rather than forcing learners to adapt to them. They allow for the unpredictability of genuine inquiry, and they treat autonomy as a lived reality rather than a slogan. Importantly, these spaces often exist at the margins of formal systems, which makes them both precious and vulnerable.

Across these six patterns, the through-line is clear. Learning freedom shows up moments of fragility: a student trusted to choose their own direction; a class that takes the time to explore an unexpected question; a community project that bridges disciplines without worrying about where it “fits” in the curriculum. It is pressured on all sides: by bureaucratic inertia, by politics, by the deep habit of measuring worth in numbers. But it continues to appear, often where it is least expected, because people make deliberate choices to protect it.

Our task is to see them as part of the same shift, one that prizes agency over compliance, depth over speed, and shared purpose over narrow performance. Learning freedom embraces trust, curiosity, and space to act. And in the long run, those are the conditions that allow education to flourish.

Full text from responses received to this intermezzo’s questions are posted at: breaking-away

References and recommended readings

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Gray, P. (2013). Free to learn: Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life. Basic Books.

Greenberg, D. (1992). Free at last: The Sudbury Valley School. Sudbury Valley School Press.

Holt, J. (1967). How children learn. Pitman.

Holt, J. (1970). Freedom and beyond. E. P. Dutton.

HolonIQ. (n.d.). Global learning landscape. Retrieved from https://www.holoniq.com/global-learning-landscape

Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. Harper & Row.

Johansen, B. (2020). Full-spectrum thinking: How to escape boxes in a post-categorical future. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3(5), 672–682. https://doi.org/10.2307/2084686

Miller, R., Latham, B., & Cahill, B. (2016). Humanizing the education machine: How to create schools that turn disengaged kids into inspired learners. Wiley.

Nouri, A., Tokuhama-Espinosa, T. N., & Borja, C. (2022). Crossing mind, brain, and education boundaries. Springer.

Sustainable Development Solutions Network. (n.d.). SDG 4: Quality education. Retrieved from https://dashboards.sdgindex.org/map/goals/SDG4

World Economic Forum. (n.d.). Strategic intelligence: Discover. Retrieved from https://intelligence.weforum.org/discover