Reflection
This research-based article convincingly shows what many education innovators already know: even highly innovative digital technologies are still used in most classrooms only within traditional practices – merely as substitute tools. As a result, the arrival of new technology rarely brings about transformations in school architecture, interior design, furniture or spatial organisation, let alone in teaching methods, learning content or assessment practices. An interesting finding presented in the article is that even today’s generative artificial intelligence fails to imagine the classroom of the future with genuine originality, instead reproducing the familiar 19th-century classroom image merely dressed in a modern aesthetic.
In Estonia, the large-scale implementation of digital innovation in education has so far relied on schools’ and teachers’ autonomous initiative from the bottom up. Yet educational researchers have long described the so-called Munchausen effect, referring to the baron’s famous tall tale of pulling himself and his horse out of a swamp by his own hair. As early as 1993, Seymour Papert, creator of the LOGO programming language, wrote that ‘school reform is bound to fail if it depends solely on schools changing themselves from within without demanding structural transformation.’23 Michael Fullan,22 the world’s most prominent scholar of educational reform, has suggested that successful innovation in schools should be supported through external catalysts – such as mentors, inspiring visits and self-evaluation tools – along with activating innovator networks and implementing state-level funding measures. Another leading authority on educational reform, Peter Senge,24 has argued through systems thinking that schools’ inherent inertia prevents deep change, as no system can easily transform itself without external influences.
It would be even worse, however, to leave responsibility for radical renewal of schools and classroom practices entirely to external forces – politicians, ministry officials, companies, parents or technology visionaries such as Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Fullan25 warns against top-down reforms imposed on schools and teachers without any sense of ownership, arguing that such initiatives are doomed to fail. His research shows that successful reform occurs when internal and external forces of change align behind a shared vision.
While involving teachers in the search for new solutions is both essential and inevitable, the article indicates that they tend to focus on refining existing practices rather than pursuing radical transformation. To develop an educational paradigm suited to the age of AI, innovative schools need not only autonomy but also external catalysts and material support to experiment with dialectical opposites to the traditional classroom: hybrid or outdoor learning, and project-based learning carried out across different spaces in the school. Architects could serve as external catalysts, working with teachers and pedagogical researchers to imagine entirely new types of learning environments – a direction already explored in recent years by Arhitektuurikool.
Drawing on the experiences of past reformers, schools that are open to – and capable of – change could also experiment with the surgical removal of key systemic components from teaching and learning practices – for example, eliminating classrooms as in the ‘schools without walls’26 of the 1970s, doing away with textbooks or grades,27 or abandoning compulsory curricula and subject divisions. Such measures would provoke reflection and nudge school communities towards radically new solutions. Other possibilities include adopting the Living Lab approach with external facilitators28 or conducting evidence-based pedagogical design experiments.
However, any such radical reforms must consider the ethical dimension of educational innovation: parents have not entrusted their children to schools as experimental subjects. Every innovator therefore has a duty to ensure a fallback option for students should a reform prove too radical or an experimental school fail – as happened with the 22 Steve Jobs Schools in the Netherlands.
