EDUCATION IS FIRST ABOUT VALUE FORMATION BEFORE IT IS ABOUT LEARNING
Today is World Teachers’ Day.
And coming immediately after our TeacherFIRE® Revolution Global Conference this past weekend, my heart is first filled with gratitude.
To our speakers, teachers, school leaders and everyone who made it a point of duty to be with us on Friday and Saturday: thank you.
Teachers joined us from across the world, from Africa, Asia, North America, Australia and Europe.
We do not take your participation for granted.
Our theme was:
Building the Teacher Who Builds a World Fit for Children.
And after sleeping over everything that was shared during those two days, one thought has remained with me:
Education is first about value formation before it is about learning.
That, for me, was beautifully summed up by our keynote speakers, Rouble Nagi of India, winner of the 2026 Global Teacher Prize, who shared what she called the Five Cs:
Conviction: that every child matters.
Commitment: to show up, even on difficult days.
Compassion: to lead with kindness.
Courage: to enter difficult spaces.
Creativity: to imagine solutions where others see problems.
In those Five Cs, Rouble captured much of what the TeacherFIRE® Revolution has communicated to teachers since we began this journey about fifteen years ago.
The teacher is the first curriculum.
Before the technique is the person.
Before what you teach is who you are.
Because people do not merely teach values.
Their values do.
A teacher teaches dignity by treating children with dignity.
A teacher teaches compassion by being compassionate.
A teacher teaches integrity by living with integrity.
A teacher teaches respect by being respectful.
The child is listening to the lesson.
But the child is also reading the teacher.
And this is why a school must be more than a place where children come to acquire hard skills.
School should be home sweet home for every child.
Teachers stand in loco parentis—in the place of parents.
The child should therefore encounter safety, dignity, belonging and positive values at school.
But teachers cannot do this alone.
Parents and teachers must be partners in the formation of the child.
The home cannot outsource value formation to the school.
The school cannot concern itself only with learning outcomes and leave behavioural outcomes to the home.
We are forming the same child.
A school that produces children who are excellent in mathematics, English and science but neglects character and values has not completed the work of education.
We cannot concentrate on producing intelligent children without asking what kind of human beings will carry that intelligence.
Because eventually society will reap what home and school have jointly sown.
And that brings this World Teachers’ Day reflection very close to home for me.
We are homeschooling our four-year-old son.
I have wanted to write about that for some time.
We work with teachers who teach him at home, so our decision is certainly not a rejection of teachers.
It is actually an expression of how seriously we take teaching.
At this phase of his life and state of development, my wife and I want to be deeply intentional about not merely what he is learning, but who he is becoming while he learns.
There are hard skills.
There are soft skills.
There are learning outcomes.
And there are behavioural outcomes.
Value is the foundation that carries everything else.
For me, as a follower of Christ, this goes even deeper.
The child is made in the image and likeness of God.
Education, therefore, cannot merely be the loading of information into a child.
The old root educere speaks of leading out, drawing forth.
What are we drawing out?
Not merely the capacity to calculate, read, write or compete.
We are participating in the formation of a whole human being—spirit, soul and body.
And this requires the whole teacher too.
That is what Building the Teacher Who Builds a World Fit for Children means to me.
Not merely building a technically competent teacher.
Building the whole teacher who can participate in building the whole child.
Which brings me back to my son.
Homeschooling does not remove our need for teachers.
And having teachers does not remove our responsibility as parents.
It is partnership.
Whether education takes place around our dining table or inside a conventional classroom, two questions must remain before us:
What is this child learning?
And even more fundamentally:
Who is this child becoming?
On this World Teachers’ Day, I celebrate every teacher who understands that education is not merely the transmission of knowledge.
It is the formation of human beings.
To every teacher who joined us from around the world this weekend, and to teachers everywhere:
Thank you.
Keep teaching from the heart.
Keep modelling what you teach.
Keep being the value you want the child to embrace.
Because ultimately:
Education is first about value formation before it is about learning.
Happy World Teachers’ Day.
Let us keep Building the Teacher Who Builds a World Fit for Children.
