Speaking at the Teach the Future Festival
Back at the start of September, I was invited to give the opening keynote at the Festivalul Digital Predau Viitor - the Teach the Future Festival in Romania. The festival has been running since 2022, and in its 2025 edition, saw over 5000 participants join talks, workshops, and events for the biggest education conference in the region. It’s a powerhouse event and is both a really impressive feat of logistical engineering and an expression of enormous commitment to education and educators in Romania.
The festival had some impressive speakers giving talks and running workshops, including people from the Council of Europe and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, as well as teachers, academics, and writers. Elena Corman, my brilliant colleague at Associatia TechSoup, who hosts the event, introduced me and followed the keynote with a Questions and Answers session as well. Elena and I have been working for a while now on a Teaching Fellowship programme for teachers and educators in Romania, which was launched at this year’s festival.
Elena asked if I might speak about the question “Why do we go to school?” Suspecting, quite rightly, that I might have some thoughts about this, both from a teaching and learning point of view, and from a broader philosophical perspective. I wanted my response to be as grounded and meaningful to the teachers and education professionals in the audience, whilst still relating my thinking to some of the philosophical work that really informs my understanding of education. Striking a balance between the philosophical and the practical was always my hope and intention, and I think, from the responses and feedback, I managed to get somewhere close to that. In particular, in this keynote, I was thinking of Gert Biesta, Hannah Arendt, and Aristotle - two of whom I reference directly in my talk, with Aristotle being woven between the lines of the claims and arguments I’m making.
The recording of the keynote, and the questions and answers session that followed it, is above - and available on YouTube - and I’ve also included, down below, a little recommended reading if anything in what I say jumps out as worthy of further attention. I have also put together a lightly edited transcript of the talk as a blog post for those who prefer to take things in via the eyes rather than the ears.
Recommended Reading
Addams, Jane, Democracy and Social Ethics.
Arendt, Hannah, The Crisis in Education.
Biesta, Gert, World Centred Education, Good Education in an Age of Measurement, The Rediscovery of Teaching, and The Beautiful Risk of Education
Claxton, Guy, What’s The Point of School?
Dewey, John, Democracy and Education.
Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Pedagogy of Hope, and The Politics of Education
Hirsh, E.D., Why Knowledge Matters
hooks, bell, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.
Kohn, Alfie, What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated?
Noddings, Nel, Philosophy of Education, Critical Lessons, and Happiness and Education
Nussbaum, Martha, Creating Capabilities and Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
Nuthall, Graham The Hidden Lives of Learners
Meier, Deborah, The Power of Their Ideas
Palmer, Parker J., The Courage to Teach
Robinson, Ken, Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative.
Ritchhart, Ron, Creating Cultures of Thinking
Sahlberg, Paul, In Teachers We Trust
Sen, Amartya, Development as Freedom
Snyder, Illana, The New Literacy: The Digital Future of Education
Willingham, Daniel, Why Don’t Students Like School?
