Seeking Collective Ways to Learn and Eat

An interview with Ida Rose Florez, author of The End of Education as We Know It: Regenerative Learning for Complex Times

Ida Rose Florez is an educational psychologist and complexity thinker who focuses on the future of education. And, full transparency, the mother of a dear friend! I've been interested in Ida Rose's work for years and her book debut was an excellent excuse to ask her some questions. The End of Education as We Know It: Regenerative Learning for Complex Times, is out on January 28 from New Society Publishers, an activist press based in Canada. You know how important preorders are — get your copy or forward this to a friend.

AZ friends, join me at the book launch on Sunday, February 9 @ 5pm at Changing Hands Phoenix (300 W Camelback Rd, Phoenix, AZ 85013). Full details here. Ida Rose will read from her book and then I get to ask her even more questions. What fun!

Devin: To start off as an introduction, can you tell me a little about your background and path to writing The End of Education as We Know It?

Ida Rose: It took me about thirty years of being a school and then an educational psychologist (yes, they are two different things) to come to the daunting conclusion that we need a whole new way of doing school. I did my graduate work to become a school psych in a unique program in central Pennsylvania that required us to become family systems therapists before we were credentialed in school psychology. I was immersed in complexity thinking before folks were calling it that. I loved it! It helped me understand so much about my work, my life, and even how the world works. But then it was time to move from my sheltered academic setting out into the realities of public schools. My training to see children as complex beings nested in complex, interacting systems didn't fit with schools as we know them. I thought it was me. I thought I was just missing something. After more than a decade, I decided to finish a doctorate in educational psychology and work at institutional and policy levels, thinking that was where complexity thinking might have influence. Nope. I encountered the same mechanistic, industrialized ways of thinking. A respected colleague told me she attended a workshop I'd given on complexity thinking in education. She said she knew there was something profound in what I was saying but that an hour's workshop left her with more questions than answers, so I realized I needed to give the topic a long-format treatment. 

Devin: What can people who are interested in (or worried about) the future of education do to impact their lives and communities? 

Ida Rose: We can change our thinking. The core message of my book is that we need a whole new way of doing school, not merely tweaks here and there. The same applies to our lives and communities. And the way we get there is by opening ourselves to seeing our lives, our world, schools, communities in whole new ways – ways that may be new to us but that are as ancient as humanity. Through our industrial education systems, most adults have been educated to see the world and all the world holds as machines. It's subtle, so we're not always aware of it, but from thinking of brains as computer processors to seeing the sun's daily path across the sky as clockworks, our mechanistic ways of thinking shape decisions large and small. We and the world in which we live are, in fact, not machines but rather wondrously complex systems living in networked complex systems. Beginning to see the world that way opens up tremendous opportunities to influence how we educate humans.

Devin: What advice do you have for parents, caregivers, or aunties and uncles of children going through school?

Ida Rose: Question everything. So much of what I've seen as a professional educator and parent has left me questioning everything about how we do school. In the first chapter of The End of Education, I talk about my expertise in educational assessment and how, after years of working at all levels of our educational systems as an assessment expert, I can say that nearly all educational assessment is so lacking in validity that it should be tossed in the garbage heap. That hurts. But the questioning was necessary. It's too easy to internalize as some mystical "truth" what experts advise or what a particular curriculum directs a teacher or homeschool parent to do. My top two pieces of advice are: "Trust your mom gut" (dads too, but my experience has been that moms have this uncanny intuition about what kids need) and "Ask the child." I can recall countless situations where adults were flummoxed by something going on with a child, and when I asked, "Well, what does Eric (or Tilly or Myleek) say about that?" no adult had a clue. When we ask the kiddo, the fog often lifts, and a way forward seems to magically appear. 

Devin: Did you notice parallels between the education and food systems as you wrote your book? 

Ida Rose: Absolutely. And parallels between those systems and all other societal systems as well. Society is composed of myriad complex systems, but we think about them as giant gears and cogs. In reality, complex systems start, behave, and end very differently from how cars, bridges, or assembly lines start, behave, and end. When we see and understand complex patterns, we recognize commonalities across various complex societal systems. For example, mechanistic approaches rely heavily on centralized control. Everyone gets their food from the local grocery store. Everyone gets their kids' education from the local school. This seems like the way things are supposed to be. And yet, centralized education and food distribution systems are very, very new in the long history of humanity. Centralized systems cultivate dependence (rather than interdependence), deskill people, and make communities vulnerable to patterns of collapse. Thinking in terms of dispersed, interconnected, local, complex networks rather than the store or school down the street opens up whole new ways of doing school and feeding communities (and organizing finances and government, to name a few).

Devin: You're building a house in northern Arizona – can you share more about how that process is going and how it informs how you live and eat?

Ida Rose: We're building Red Lake Valley Regenerative Homestead on ten semi-off-grid acres about forty miles south of the Grand Canyon. We should move into our house next month (February 2025), and we are so ready to do so! We've been living in an RV for nearly three years and it grows smaller by the day! Our house is a passive solar home, meaning it is designed to capture and store heat from the sun in winter and create complete shade inside in summer. Even though the overnight low regularly gets down to single or even negative digits in winter, our home will not have a furnace. We will have a large electric hot water heater powered by our photovoltaic electrical generation and storage system. We have radiant heat floors that use water from the hot water heater and, when it's very cold, from a wood-burning hydronic cook stove with a water jacket plumbed into our home's radiant heat flooring system. We're also rainwater harvesting and installing a HydroLoop greywater recycling system (so we will wash clothes and flush toilets with reclaimed laundry and shower water).

Clockwise from top: 1: the front (south) side of the house showing clerestory windows, 2: PV solar system, 3: grow beds with one of the high tunnels in the background, 4: installing cisterns for rainwater collection

Our microfarm is starting to take shape. We've got a variety of grow spaces, about 2,000 sq ft in total. We've got two high tunnels, a polycarb greenhouse, an insulated/heated garden shed, and about thirty outdoor raised beds. So far, we've been successful in establishing some perennials, such as elderberries, sea berries (aka sea buckthorn), and asparagus. We've been experimenting for two annual veggie grow seasons in high tunnels and outside beds. We're looking forward to a large crop of market vegetables this year to take to local farmers markets or food banks. We grow in raised beds, using Hugelkultur, wicking beds, and Olla methods to reduce our water use by about 40 percent. I've grown food nearly my entire life, but growing in the high desert is completely different from growing in San Diego, where I'm from, or other places I've lived, like Central Pennsylvania or Maui, HI. So, I took the local master gardener classes and got certified in permaculture design at Northern Arizona University. We've started hosting tours and coaching local folks about how to build their soil and grow a lot of their own food using natural and organic methods.

Devin: Something I'm going to write about more in 2025 is how if people depend on the industrial food system, then we're all actually a lot closer to food scarcity than we might think – "we" being folks with generally enough money to survive. How do you perceive and deal with / prepare for food scarcity? 

Ida Rose: I think you are spot on. We've got one (ONE!) grocery store in Williams that serves not only local families but thousands of tourists and everyone who lives between Williams and the Grand Canyon. When there's a lasting power outage, if that store's backup generators fail (and they have), they can lose all their frozen and refrigerated food. As a community, we are one major blizzard or trucker's strike away from many hungry people. In addition to growing food, my husband and I preserve it. Our house will have a "back kitchen" designed for canning, dehydrating, fermenting, and freeze-drying food. Our county is working on a master food preserver's certification course, and I plan to take it once it's offered so I can help others preserve food safely, too. And it's not just about having enough calories on your shelves to get through a period of scarcity. It's about knowing what's in our food (and loving how good it tastes – I always say nutrition is delicious!), and it's also about choosing a lifestyle that doesn't require our food to be wrapped in plastic and trucked in from hundreds of miles away. The irony is that, at the societal and personal levels, we've bought into the completely ludicrous idea that centralized, industrialized food systems are efficient. No, they're not. They create a ton of unnecessary waste and deliver inferior products.

Devin: What do you find lacking in conversations around systems that are breaking down? What's hardest to talk about, and how do you talk about it?

Ida Rose: At the risk of sounding redundant: that it is absolutely critical that we change our thinking. As much as small changes can and do make a difference, true and lasting change will only come about when we embrace the reality that we need whole new ways of living, learning, and being. In my book, I talk a lot about paradigms and how they shift (and what we can do to set conditions for those shifts). It's hard to talk about because it can seem too cerebral and not practical. But I've seen for myself the practical power of mind shifts. When we see things differently, suddenly, we act differently. We feel different emotions. We are energized and empowered to influence in ways we hadn't even considered before. Human cognition has gotten a bad rap over the last several decades when, in fact, it is one of the most powerful complex forces on the planet. When we start to think in complex patterns, we start to recognize patterns of collapse. Rather than feeling powerless, seeing and understanding how complex systems collapse allows us to take wise action, know where to focus our energies, have realistic expectations, and know how to set conditions for what emerges following collapse. 

Devin: Are there any questions that you don't get asked?

Ida Rose: Ah yes! That's a great question! Here goes: How do you define school?

We can't have whole new ways of doing school with our current definition of what schools are. So, I define schools as any place set aside for any group of people (or could be an individual) of any age to learn about anything. A Scout troop is a school. Three siblings baking bread together is a school. In a week, I'll gather with other growers in my area for an annual seed-buying collective. We'll learn about what everyone is growing and about their experiences with various seeds. That's a school. The farm created by Kim and musician-husband Jack Johnson on Oahu is a school. 

You know what? I want one more question: What do you mean by "regenerative?" 

Regenerative refers to a commitment to live in such a way that our existence contributes to restoring what humans have destroyed on Earth. In my book, I identify three regenerative values that I believe are foundational to personal and collective regenerative lifestyles: reverence (respect tinged with awe), reciprocity (means more than mere cooperation - means everyone/thing involved in an endeavor gets what they need), and mutual thriving (my thriving is tied up in your thriving - I recognize and live as if I can only do well when you do well).

Devin: What's next for you? Any other book projects brewing?

Ida Rose: 2025 will bring the emergence of many things that my husband, Rick, and I have set conditions for over the last four years: the publication of The End of Education, the completion of our house, and the official launch of the homestead. So, in the next couple of years, we'll focus on nurturing those new aspects of our life together. I have a couple of writing projects I'm noodling on. One is a set of books (or zines) for children and their grownups on complexity concepts such as cycles, emergence, self-organizing, and tipping points. Another is a book expanding on Chapter 10 of The End of Education – how do we help societal systems learn? We need a cadre of complexity thinkers who know how to set conditions not only for our own mind shifts, but for shifting the prevailing paradigm.

Devin: And last, for fun, what small things are bringing you joy recently? 

Ida Rose: I love, love, love Mary Oliver's poetry and read one or more of her poems daily. I also take great joy in Bogey, our beloved barn cat. I've always had dogs, mostly because people I've lived with were allergic to cats. But we adopted this black beauty as a feral kitten. It's the first time in my life I've had a cat love me. He's a furball of surprises! My husband and I have also been enjoying the Netflix series This Is Us. The storylines, the acting, the writing, and the cinematography are all top-notch, but it is the way the series weaves profound issues into the gripping exposé of one family over multiple generations that really gets to us. Oh. And Manny's tacos. In Williams. Such great street tacos! 

Pre-order the book | Learn more about Ida’s work

Phoenix metro friends, don’t forget to come to Ida Rose’s book launch on Sunday, February 9 @ 5pm at Changing Hands Phoenix (300 W Camelback Rd, Phoenix, AZ 85013). Full details here. Ida Rose will read from her book and then we’ll be in conversation. Bring questions!

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The Good Enough Weekly comes out on Fridays, alternating essays, interviews, and shorter updates. I also take on freelance editing and writing projects. Reach out if you’re looking for help in those departments — I’ve worked on everything from zines to textbooks.