School Isn’t Broken, It’s Working Exactly as Designed

Coconut Thinking

In this episode of the Coconut Thinking Podcast, I take a hard look at what school really does, and what it would cost to truly change it. We keep saying education needs fixing, but maybe it’s doing exactly what it was built to do: sort, rank, and hold the world in place.

Drawing on Bourdieu, cultural capital, and the myth of meritocracy, I unpack why mastery and competency models only repaint the same house, why knowledge has to be understood as situated rather than transferable, and why real transformation demands letting go of the symbolic capital many of us depend on.

From learning&doing in service of Life to the testimonies of humans and more-than-humans, this episode asks: if learning isn’t serving Life, what are we still schooling for?