The Education Pivot offers a compelling vision for educational transformation in an era of artificial intelligence. Pam Roy and Elliot Washor remind us that as technology transforms the nature of work, the uniquely human capacities for purpose, relationships, creativity, and contribution become even more essential. Grounded in decades of innovative practice, this timely book challenges educators, parents, and community members to create learning environments and design schools where every young person is known, valued, and prepared not only to succeed, but to lead lives of meaning and mattering.
Praise for The Education Pivot
Artificial intelligence isn’t destroying education. It’s exposing how much of schooling is already artificial. The Education Pivot makes a powerful case, rooted in the authors’ experience building alternatives, for a better system — one that replaces compliance, comparison, and empty achievement with real work, consequential relationships, and the deeply human experience of mattering.
In The Education Pivot, Washor and Roy have presented their readers with a timely and extraordinary gift. Just when many of us felt doomed and trapped by the growing presence of AI with its ability to render humans intellectually powerless and lazy, they remind us that there is good reason for hope and optimism. The authors remind us that humans possess the ability to problem-solve and utilize creativity to confront the challenges we face. They do this by showing how it is being done in schools that use education to cultivate and unleash these abilities and encourage students to tap into a higher sense of purpose to find joy and meaning in their lives. This book will be an invaluable resource for educators who haven’t given up on the idea that education can be used to transform lives. Read it and return to teaching with a renewed sense of optimism, relevance and conviction.
A superb book exploring one of the most important questions facing us all: Will AI make us more robotic, or will it unlock our deepest human qualities? And nowhere is this question more important than in education. Everyone should read this.
Pam Roy and Elliot Washor have written the moral call education needs: restore meaning to the center of learning, not compliance. This was Viktor Frankl’s core insight. For educators and parents ready to question the system they serve and rebuild from conscience, this book will change how they see their work.
I’ve met tons of straight-A students who check every box and still go blank when you ask what lights them up. That blank stare from today’s children is the whole crisis in one sentence, and Pam Roy and Elliot Washor name it without flinching. They offer a vision for designing schools where every young person develops purpose, deep relationships, and the capacity to make a meaningful contribution to their communities and the world.
In The Education Pivot, Elliot Washor and Pam Roy draw on decades of experience at Big Picture Learning and B-Unbound to make a timely case for education built around meaning and mattering, not compliance. Their case is grounded in real stories from the learners and communities living this work every day. Even as AI further exposes the limitations of a system built for another era, they provide a clear-eyed, hopeful path forward: double down on what makes us human and build learning environments where every young person is seen and known, not just measured.
There are many things that stand out about this book and make it worthy of your time. Two things, however, should not be missed: the depth and range of innovation and insight its two authors continue to deliver. In a timely inflection point, The Education Pivot considers AI. But this book is about so much more. In the end, AI is simply a new tool, a new wave, a different challenge, and equally an opportunity. That opportunity is to clarify how education and learning can have their greatest impact and lead us to something greater than hopeful talk about the power of purpose. That something is the path to finding and fulfilling purpose. Rather than discount AI, this book is a reminder to be deliberate and thoughtful about what you really want – and who you choose to guide you.
Meaning and mattering have often been given nods as important, but rarely if ever have they been put forth as the filters for how we should understand and incorporate newness, in this case, artificial intelligence. Pause, and really think about that. Then, open this book. Open your eyes; and open your mind. Enable the pivot you unquestionably need. You couldn’t have a better resource or better guides to the powerful journey ahead.
In an era increasingly dominated by synthetic intelligence, The Education Pivot is a profound and soul-stirring call to reclaim the human heart of learning. By grounding their vision in the rich metaphor of the overstory—our reach for meaning—and the understory—our deep need to matter—Elliot Washor and Pam Roy brilliantly elevate educational discourse far beyond pedagogical strategy to a moral imperative centered on the human spirit. This book offers a vision that ensures education doesn’t just process students but ensures every single student knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are indispensable, irreplaceable, and deeply needed. Essential reading for anyone ready to transform the heart of education.
With Viktor Frankl supplying the why and Big Picture Learning illustrating the how, Roy and Washor make clear that education was always supposed to help us become ourselves and find our place in the world. AI is showing us how far schools have drifted from that purpose. The Education Pivot reminds us why we built public education and offers a blueprint for reclaiming it.
In the education field, concerns about the impact of AI abound. But if AI is the overstory of this moment, Roy and Washor have written the understory: how our schools often leave students’ most fundamentally human attributes—their sense of mattering and discovery of meaning—to chance. With tangible examples from the field, the authors offer a roadmap to migrating meaning and mattering to the core of our educational system. They don’t insist that we slow the pace of change, but rather that we act now to equip our students to adapt and thrive in the face of it.
Big Picture Learning saw something on the horizon decades ago. We have now reached it. As headlines insist AI has broken education, Pam Roy and Elliot Washor make the case that it has simply revealed what was already broken – and they do so with the clarity of people who’ve spent decades building the alternative, one rooted not in standardization but in meaning, mattering, and the kind of intergenerational connection no algorithm can replicate.
This isn’t a book about repairing old systems. It’s a call to a new generation of builders and navigators – to become, individually and together, the kind of people a child can be held by. In an age obsessed with what AI can do, The Education Pivot is a reminder of what only we can still do. This has always been the real work. Now it’s unavoidable.
The Education Pivot is a beautiful and timely reconsideration of the purpose and practice of education. Elliot Washor and Pam Roy make the case for meaning and mattering as forms of wisdom that emerge through relationship, responsibility and lived experience—an artful blending of Big Picture Learning and Viktor Frankl philosophy. As they conclude, this call to conscience “reminds us that our humanness is sacred and powerful.”
The world is well aware of the shortcomings of current education and the corresponding decline in young people’s engagement and wellbeing. Yet we rarely stop to wonder: is it the system itself that is broken, rather than the young people?
Pam and Elliot’s latest book is a passionate reminder of the case for viewing education as a human endeavor rather than a system. Instead of ‘re-forming’ the tired old industrial education model, the BPL international network has long been ‘transforming’ the way young people experience learning, and we know it’s working.
As I read this book, I felt proud that the 30-year-old Big Picture Learning design is so human-centered and ahead of its time, and that the more recent International Big Picture Learning Credential is unlike all other secondary schooling credentials in its capacity to show the whole person behind the transcript.
I, too, have found meaning in this work and know deeply that our work together matters. The Education Pivot reaffirms the value of helping young people find their purpose, discover their talents, contribute to their community, and confidently represent their accomplishments to the worlds of employment, training, and tertiary study.
What makes Pam Roy and Elliot Washor’s book worth reading is that they understand something thirty years of ed-tech investment has already proven: it’s not technology that transforms schools, but the capacity of learning environments to foster human connection and agency. Proven at scale for over three decades, the Big Picture Learning model foregrounds “meaning and mattering” as the measure of what counts. In the age of AI, this is the paradigm shift education actually needs—grounded not in promise, but in proof and the hard work of professional practice.
How do we educate in the age of AI? Roy and Washor’s inspiring new book offers a deeply human answer: design schools where young people are well-known, engaged in authentic, community-connected learning, and assessed through demonstrated understanding rather than testing and sorting. The good news? The International Big Picture Learning Credential is already doing this in Australia — and now being piloted here in the US. Onward!
This book could not be more timely. As artificial intelligence spreads into virtually every corner of our lives, Roy and Washor open a pathway to preserve what AI could destroy: our capacities for imagination, creativity, personal connection, and basic physical skill. These traits are not only what make us human, they also make life worth living.