Imagining Learning: Bios

About Imagining Learning

Imagining Learning is a research-based, learning journey seeking to answer the question, “How do we educate young people to thrive in a world of possibility?” Our goal is to design a new educational process from scratch that answers this question in a manner that is inexpensive and easily replicable anywhere in the world.

By wiping the slate clean and asking a new question, we intend to create something that is future-based and designed to meet the needs of today and tomorrow's young people.

We want to know if young people around the world are ready for a new idea. To that end, we have launched the bold initiative of conducting approximately 75 Listening Sessions in nearly 50 countries around the world. Listening Sessions are three-hour explorations where teens co-create their vision of the ultimate learning experience in 4 1/2' X 6' paintings. We will conduct these Listening Sessions on every continent.

In addition, Imagining Learning holds public conversations on what it is seeing, learning and visioning, stimulating its audiences to enter into a dialog about infinite new possibilities.

If you know of anyone who might be interested in sponsoring our project, or helping to lead or arrange for Listening Sessions or a public conversation in other parts of the United States or across the world, please let us know.

Please feel free to call us with any help or questions at 415.322.9484 or email us at charlie@imagininglearning.us

About Charles Kouns, Imagining Learning's Founding Steward

Charles Kouns or "Charlie," as he is most usually named, is an educator and visionary with over 20 years of secondary and tertiary school experience guiding and empowering young people to discover their wisdom and believe in themselves. His passion for giving young people voice, led him to found Imagine Learning in order to explore new frontiers in education. He now leads Imagine Learning's Listening Sessions, asking teens across America for their input on how education could be reinvented.

Charlie has taught school at every level from middle school to graduate school. He has also been a swimming and basketball coach as well as a mentor to many young people throughout the years.

He is an award winning communicator, having spent 15 years in marketing communications during his lifetime. During that time, he was well-known for his ability to nourish the lives of those who worked with and under him, even long after their tenure with him (he still counsels some of them today).

Perhaps, the most realistic affects of modern public and private education on young people came to his awareness through his own experiences with his three children, Elliot, Chelsea and Paris. "Their lives each required very different learning approaches and the schools just weren't prepared to offer what they needed, despite the wonderful intentions of some of their teachers and administrators." he said. "Their struggles to find fulfillment and meaning left an indelible mark on me."

In July of 2006, Charlie was sitting on his couch reading a book when he had a vision that radically changed his life. During the vision, "I was taken to a high place above the earth. It was very dark, so I could not see anything. But while I sat in this place, I could hear the prayers of young people from all over the world. Not prayers as in religious prayers, but prayers none-the-less, asking for the elders to step forward and honor their life essence and listen to what they have to offer the world."

When Charlie came back into the living room, he could feel this incredible desire within him to "work as hard and long as I could to help be and create an answer to those prayers. I knew immediately I was being called to create a new conversation about the future of education."

Shortly thereafter, he created Imagining Learning and "I have been listening and learning ever since!"

What Do Young People Say About Listening Sessions?

"This has given me a new perspective on education. Usually it is about training for facts and knowledge. Education that is about who you are, want to be and preparing for the future is more important."

Sam, 17

"This has meant a lot to me because you have brought a major goal of my life to life. You have started to create the foundation for something revolutionary. I give you 100% of my support."

Nick, 16

Usually I only talk to my parents about school, but they think I am complaining. It was nice to come here and talk with people who understand me.

Riley, 14

"I like how optimistic this approach is and how positive our input can be."

Ankober, 17

"I wish this school had been made a long time ago."

Aaron, 15

"I wasn't going to have kids, but if you build this school, I will have them."

Andrea, 18

"This whole thing has been eye opening. I have never really liked school, but this is an example of how to change it and I like what you are doing."

Journey, 17

"I never thought there could be a more favorable alternative to school."

Emma, 14

Other Interesting Quotes from Young People

"School should be more focused on learning things than showing you are learning things." Will, Ojai

"Community is an oppressive word," Arielle, Seattle

"We (Americans) keep taking history over and over again, and yet we obviously aren't learning from it." Rosa, Novato

"We've been in the same alphabetical order since the first grade." Jess, San Francisco

"Grades put the focus on excellent bullshittng." Ben, Livermore

"Most people believe their lives begin after college." Journey, Ojai

"I wasn't going to have kids, but if you make this school, I will have them!" Andrea, San Francisco

"Most things I have learned about have been repeated over and over." Ankober, Seattle

Other Great Quotes

"Their young minds ran ahead to explore, as children do when lost within the adventure of life itself. They watched through the rising tide and the retreating tide and remembered all they saw."
- Song of Waitaha

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
- Albert Einstein

"Our educational system is geared toward doing, having, getting somewhere, and is devoid of any training in being."
- Matthew and Terces Englehart

"The difﬁculty lies not in the new ideas, but in
escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”
– John Maynard Keynes

“Do we not need a totally different kind of education? - not the mere cultivation of memory, which gives the child a technique, which will help him to get a job, a livelihood, but an education that will make him truly intelligent. Intelligence is the comprehension of the whole process, the total process of life, not knowledge of one fragment of life.”
–J Krishnamurti

"School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them."
-Ivan Illich

"...as we turn increasingly to rules, rules and incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that makes them worse in the long run. Moral skill is chipped away by an over reliance on rules that deprives us on the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations and moral will is undermined by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing. And without intending it, by appealing to rules and incentives, we are engaging in a war on wisdom."- Barry Schwartz, Ted Talk Feb. 2009

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