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The Systems Curriculum · A whole education
Subjects light the world. Formation lights the person. Nothing in the usual timetable is answerable for joining the two.
From the first encounter with the physical world to the founding of institutions. A whole education is grounded, in the school years, in the architecture of material reality and the principle that complex things exist by reproducing themselves. Through university and working life it builds institutional literacy, the capacity to lead and manage within institutions, then institutional design and stewardship, and finally the leadership, strategy and vision to found what will outlast the founder.
Four ways of knowing
Every subject can be located on the four-realm tree, and its location shows what it leaves untaught. But a subject carries only what can be said and what can be shown how. The other two ways of knowing are not carried by any subject: they are formed by holding a position and belonging to a practice. This section is about all four, and above all about the two the timetable cannot hold.
Propositional knowing
Knowledge of facts and explanations: that the Earth orbits the Sun, that a contract needs consent.
Procedural knowing
Skill: how to solve an equation, read a balance sheet, chair a meeting, throw a pot.
Perspectival knowing
The felt sense of a situation from inside it: what matters here and now, which no list of facts conveys.
Participatory knowing
The knowing that comes from being a member of a practice or a place, which shapes who one is.
The cognitive scientist John Vervaeke distinguishes four kinds of knowing: propositional (knowing that), procedural (knowing how), perspectival (knowing what a situation is like from where one stands) and participatory (knowing that comes from belonging to a practice or a place).
Each way of knowing has its own condition of acquisition: propositional knowing can be transmitted; procedural knowing needs performance corrected by someone competent; perspectival knowing needs occupancy of a position; participatory knowing needs membership over time with real stake.
What formation is
Formation
Formation is the cycle by which a civilisation bears, forms and sustains the people who run every other cycle. Schooling is one node in it: the only node a society can design at scale, and therefore the one this section addresses.
Imagined · frameworkFrom carried to carrying
Development is the move from being carried by the cycles to carrying them, and everyone forms someone: a child, a colleague, an apprentice, a parent in old age.
Imagined · frameworkPerspectival and participatory knowing are formed by being at stake in a body and an arena, so no one can undergo another person's formation on their behalf, and no machine can undergo it for them.
Why now
The argument for urgency
The blueprint's argument for urgency: for two centuries schooling has been built around acquiring, retaining and examining the propositional, and capable artificial intelligence now removes the floor from beneath that conception of an educated person. Knowledge still matters. But the centre of gravity of a worthwhile education must shift toward the ways of knowing that no one can undergo on another's behalf.
Imagined · frameworkThe inversion
The pathway inverts the usual weighting. Ordinary schooling front-loads the propositional and treats the perspectival and participatory as by-products of school life. Here they are the spine, and the propositional and procedural are recruited to serve them: provisions for the journey into knowing what it is like and knowing by belonging, never the destination.
Imagined · proposalOne architecture, studied three times, and the channels that reproduce it
The same architecture is studied three times: in the heavens and the soil, in one's own body and mind, and in the institutions one will build, until world-knowledge, self-knowledge and the knowledge of civilisation turn out to have been one knowledge studied from three vantage points. Beside the architecture runs the mechanism by which it is reproduced in human life: what is said, what is shown and what is done. It is met first in the small economy of a team and a classroom, then at scale in the institutions where adults spend their working lives.
What is formed
An education that neglects any one of these produces a characteristic deformation. Their balance shifts across a life, but none is ever absent, and advancement at any stage asks for evidence across all five.
Knowledge of one's own constitution, temperament, strengths and besetting weaknesses, without which every other capacity is mis-aimed.
The settled disposition to act well under pressure: integrity, moral courage, perseverance, and the alignment of what one says, shows and does.
The propositional and conceptual grasp of the universe, the self and the civilisation, integrated rather than fragmented.
The procedural competences, embodied and technical, through which knowledge becomes effective in the world.
The capacity to belong, to contribute and to build across difference: the participatory element, through which a person becomes a member of something larger than themselves.
Where it happens
Where the propositional and the procedural are laid down and examined: the intellectual basis of everything else.
Any sustained practice in which a person is at stake alongside others over time: a pitch, a stage, a workshop, a choir, a trail. The primary site of perspectival and participatory formation.
Where learning meets consequence: service, responsibility and engagement with real people and real places, ranging from community service in the early stages to local-government engagement and policy influence in the later ones. Knowing is completed only when it is tested outside the gates.
No setting works in isolation: a concept met in the classroom is enacted in the arena and has consequences in the community. A failure in one is a signal that the other two have not yet done their work.
What formation is for
These are what formation is for: the relations a person can stand in to a cycle. Their universal case is the reproductive cycle itself, since everyone forms someone.
The arc follows the order the author gave: literacy, design, stewardship, then leadership, strategy and vision. One segment is named before design, leading and managing, because what one cannot yet read, keep, repair or defend one cannot responsibly design. Stewardship comes after design in the blueprint's sense: the stewarding of whole ecologies of institutions.
The order of formation
Propositional knowledge may run far ahead of a person's sphere: a ten-year-old can learn how money works. Participatory knowing cannot: it follows where the person actually stands.
Participatory knowing cannot precede participation, so formation follows the widening of a person's actual sphere of participation: the body, the household, the small group with a shared task, the local institution, the society, and last the intergenerational and the planetary.