Dr Annalies Corbin, founder of the PAST Foundation, on why children are disengaged, and what they're really telling us
“Kids are disengaged not because they’re not interested in learning. They’re disengaged because they can’t figure out what it has to do with them. They desperately want it to matter.”
Dr Annalies Corbin is the founder and CEO of the PAST Foundation, an anthropologist and archaeologist by training who has spent more than 25 years asking a different set of questions about teaching, learning and work. Her organisation brings together an unusual mix of anthropologists, educators, designers, architects, engineers and artists, all under one roof in a 32,000 square foot education research and prototyping lab in Columbus, Ohio, where community, business, industry and schools come together to solve real problems with students at the centre. Even the sound studio she records her own podcast in was designed, budgeted and built by a cohort of students. In this conversation, Annalies makes a warm, urgent case for reconnecting schools with the communities around them, and reminds us that no one ever grew up to credit a worksheet with changing their life.
🎙️ Episode highlights
Annalies explains the problem that launched the PAST Foundation: capable, bright young people arriving at university and their first jobs woefully unprepared, with every part of the system blaming the one before it and no one owning the space.
She describes the five elements behind her approach in Hacking School: transdisciplinary, problem-based, mastery-infused learning, delivered with agency and cultural relevancy.
She argues that learning was never meant to be an insular, school-only endeavour, and that the whole community used to share responsibility for educating every child.
She makes a powerful case for mentoring, pointing out that adults never credit a worksheet with changing their life.
On what employers actually want, she shares that industry partners repeatedly tell her not to teach specific software, but to send them people who are curious, collaborative and can solve problems in context.
Her controversial opinion: stop ringing bells and stop siloing subjects into 45-minute blocks, because the world simply does not work that way.