Schools are notoriously busy places. Anyone who has spent time in one knows how reliably the urgent crowds out the important.
Yet this need not represent a problem if the urgent and the important overlap. In that case, reacting to the urgent simultaneously chips away at the important.
A problem does emerge, however, when the school is self-consciously following a “change agenda”.
In this case, the “urgent” is predominantly the product of the status quo and the “important” is the quality of a well-considered alternative.
The emergent problem is proportional to the change sought, and is at its greatest when the school is seeking to explore, sketch and, in time, implement a “paradigm shift” in education.
The Bermuda Triangle of Talent
At International College Hong Kong (ICHK) secondary, this is a dilemma we face. We have spent more than a decade trying to resist the gravitational pull of the current educational paradigm, while still recognising the imperative of meeting its core demands.
The current paradigm is a child of Enlightenment rationality and industrial-era instrumentality: predominantly cognitive, standards-driven, test-focused and, therefore, necessarily, text-bound. It produces credentials and qualifications, on which students’ futures hinge.
Its most stellar products were tellingly described by author Rutger Bregman recently in the : “Every year, thousands of brilliant teenagers write beautiful application essays about the global problems they aspire to solve.
“Climate change, world hunger, infectious disease. But a few years later, most have been funnelled towards companies like McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and Kirkland and Ellis.
“A friend of mine who studied at Oxford calls it the ‘Bermuda Triangle of Talent’: consultancy, finance and corporate law. A gaping black hole that sucks up so many of our so-called best and brightest.”
Our contention is that this situation is not mysterious. In valuing examinable credentials above all else, the current paradigm neglects the quality of the humans who acquire and hold those credentials.
The system is designed to graduate encyclopaedias and computing machines, not well-rounded, thoughtful, concerned, compassionate humans. As such, it serves its purpose well.
This is the context in which a new role was created at ICHK. In September 2025, I became our school’s first mission and vision architect: a position deliberately designed to sit outside the urgent flow of school life, while remaining alert to it.
The role is neither operational nor managerial. It has no “leadership” component. It is not about recruiting staff, running the timetable, overseeing departments, balancing the budget or troubleshooting crises.
It is about deepening the ideational, theoretical and philosophical hinterland that sits behind the school’s explorations of an alternative paradigm.
If that sounds high-blown or grandiose, it only highlights the issue that the role is meant to address: many schools have no time for ideas, theory or philosophy. A recipe, then, for inertia.
Yet as , schools that do not evolve their own ideas are fated to fall “from one formalism into another, from one dung hill of inert ideas into another”.
My first months in post have confirmed our key priority as a school: to appreciate and understand better the relationship between the two forms of knowledge by which humans must operate, only one of which the current paradigm fully recognises.
‘Small-k’ and ‘big-K’ knowledge
We call them “small-k” and “big-K” knowledge.
Small‑k knowledge - formal, explicit, symbolic, representational - is the currency of conventional schooling. It is what can be written down, transmitted efficiently, examined reliably and compared at scale. It is clearly indispensable.
Without it, there would be no permanent records, no shared intellectual inheritance, no accumulated knowledge base, no inter-generational growth. It is crucial, but also, by its nature, incomplete.
Big‑K knowledge - pre-conceptual, lived, experiential, tacit, embodied - is what makes small‑k knowledge matter. It founds and vitalises the capacity to judge, to care, to respond wisely to novel situations; to integrate what one knows with who one is; to know in one’s heart what should and should not be done.
It develops slowly, through participation, feeling, reflection, error and relationship. It cannot be reduced to text, grades or data points. It undergirds human sentiment.
Making space for both
The problem is not that schools teach small‑k knowledge. The problem is they are structurally organised as if small‑k were sufficient, with big‑K knowledge treated as an optional by‑product: something that might emerge, rather than something that must be cultivated and protected.
Once entrenched, this imbalance confuses intellectual proficiency with human depth and development.
Students perform understanding, without forming it. They are fluent without being personally or ethically grounded; articulate without being oriented; successful as manipulators of symbols shorn of resonance.
The pressures schools face, then - rising anxiety, instrumental attitudes to learning, a thinning sense of purpose - are not unfortunate side-effects.
They are outcomes of a system that prioritises what can be efficiently produced over what must be patiently formed. A new paradigm will bring redress, and the role of the mission and vision architect is to envisage and construct it.
Toby Newton is mission and vision architect at International College Hong Kong. He was previously executive head. He can be followed on his Substack
