The School as Commons
Why belonging requires more than proximity
Consider two versions of a school day.
In the first, students proceed through a sequence of activities designed to facilitate their individual development. They open laptops, complete tasks, and submit work. They eat lunch in small groups, or sometimes alone, scrolling through their phones. Many leave at the end of the day having had no hand in caring for the place that they just spent seven hours. The school is a building they pass through.
In the second, the school day is inhabited by its students. They assist in the preparation and service of lunch to their classmates. At the end of the day, they help clean the corridors, wipe down desks, and discard trash. The institution belongs to them, not rhetorically, but in practice. They demonstrate this belonging every day, with their hands.
I spent four years working in South Korean schools. The second version is not a thought experiment. It’s simply what school looks like there.
Atomization as Design Outcome
Most of the essays I’ve written under the Walled Garden framework have focused on the cognitive dimensions of what schools owe their students: protecting opportunities for sustained attention, cultivating working memory and executive function, and preserving the “desirable difficulties” through which their capacities are built. These arguments rest on the claim that schools must be sanctuaries, deliberately designed environments that protect the developmental conditions children actually need, rather than Marketplace Mirrors that reflexively adopt whatever the broader culture offers.
But there are further dimensions of the framework worth articulating. A few weeks ago, I quoted Paulo Freire:
No one liberates anyone else, nor do they liberate themselves alone. People liberate themselves in communion.
I used that line to highlight the social costs of relying on AI in K-12 education, whereby students may be siloed and isolated into hyper-individualized pathways. But Freire’s insight can serve as something more: a design principle.
A Walled Garden Education isn’t only a sanctuary for cognitive development; it’s a community that students help to build and maintain. That community membership — the experience of belonging to something you are responsible for, alongside others who bear that responsibility equally — is itself developmentally fruitful.
In North American schools, three forces that I’ve touched on in the past, converge to undermine this possibility:
The first is the algorithmic personalization of learning. Adaptive platforms, which I examined through McLuhan’s tetrad in “The Civic Cost of Algorithmic Pedagogy”, create individualized pathways that deteriorate opportunities for shared intellectual struggle. What they render obsolete, when pushed to extremes, is negotiated understanding — the face-to-face work of deliberation and forging meaning with others. Students in these environments learn to justify answers to algorithms, which tend to be a less demanding audience than other human beings.
The second is the collapse of embodied experience. In “When Childhood Conditions Change, Schools Must Adapt”, I documented the measurable decline in physical play, unstructured time, and face-to-face peer interaction. I argued that schools have failed to counteract this trend, often replicating its conditions through one-to-one device programmes and screen-mediated instruction. In one of my early essays, I described an impassive student standing in the schoolyard on a beautiful spring afternoon, completely indifferent to the physical world in front of him. His experience isn’t merely anecdotal, it’s an outcome of our design choices.
The third is the reduction of school to a service-delivery institution. When schools are designed primarily to transmit content and assess its acquisition, students are understood as recipients, or as customers, rather than participants. Nothing in this model asks them to take responsibility for the community they inhabit. The relationship between student and school is transactional, and transactional relationships do not produce belonging.
What these three forces produce together is not only the risk of cognitive atrophy, as I’ve documented elsewhere, they lead to social atrophy. Students practiced in the private mastery of strictly defined skills, but not in public responsibility, are optimized for individual metrics without consideration for collective obligation.
Looking East: School as Commons
In South Korea, and in Japan — where the practices are formally codified in the national curriculum under the framework of tokubetsu katsudo, or tokkatsu — students carry responsibilities that extend well beyond academic performance. Every day, on a rotating basis, students clean the school. They sweep floors, wipe tables, and maintain the common spaces they share. In Japan, this practice is called sōji. In Korea, students rotate through 청소 당번 or cheongso dangbeon (cleaning duty). In both counties, students also serve lunch to their classmates. They don aprons, collect food from the kitchen, and eat the same meal together. Teachers eat alongside them.
These are not service-learning initiatives. They are not character education programmes scheduled once a month. They are structural features of the school day, embedded in the timetable and treated with the same seriousness as academic instruction. These practices extend throughout a student’s entire school career. The pedagogue Yutaka Okihara describes sōji as “an essential school experience that encourages a child’s sense of responsibility, cooperation, cleanliness, interpersonal and socialization skills and duty towards the community and society,” and adds that cleaning is “much more than a goal in itself, but rather a tool to reach a more important goal.” In the Japanese curriculum, sōji is intended to inculcate a sense of responsibility within a social context.
I watched this logic operate in practice for four years. What struck me most wasn’t the cleaning itself, but what it communicated. Students didn’t see themselves as guests in an institution maintained by others. Through their experience, the school was theirs, and they understood this because they were asked to demonstrate it every day.
What These Practices Actually Do: The Pro-Social Mechanics
Three things happen when schools are structured this way:
The first is that students begin to see and understand each other outside of a hierarchy of individual academic performance. When a student serves lunch to a peer, or sweeps a hallway alongside a classmate they wouldn’t have otherwise spoken to, they encounter each other as equals who depend, cooperatively, on each other in a shared task. Gordon Allport theorized that social cohesion emerges when a group has equal status, common goals, cooperation, and institutional support. Japan’s sōji and Korea’s cheongso dangbeon satisfy all four conditions. The school that asks students to clean together is doing something structurally different from the school that simply seats them in the same room.
The second is that distributed responsibility brings community to life. Civic capacity, as I argued in “The Civic Cost of Algorithmic Pedagogy”, is not produced by private mastery. It’s produced by public participation, by contributing repeatedly to something beyond oneself. These can be small acts, but the habit of contribution, practised from a young age, is the foundation of civic capacity later in life. It’s difficult to expect people, let alone students, to care for institutions they haven’t actually been required to care for.
The third is that communal responsibilities ground the experience of school in the body. In a world that can seem bent on the disembodiment of childhood — the displacement of physical, unstructured experience by screen-mediated alternatives — sōji and cheongso dangbeon offer a bulwark against this trend. They require presence, effort, and physical coordination with others. Unlike screen-mediated interactions, these routines offer students an experience of having done something real, together, with their hands. As I’ve written previously, philosophers like Charles Taylor and Hubert Dreyfus have argued that the body is not incidental to identity and community membership; it’s the site where both are formed. When students use their hands to care for a shared space, they’re enacting that membership.
The Walled Garden as Inheritor of this Tradition
A Walled Garden Education, as I’ve explained across my work, is a framework of conscientious, intentional design. It asks what young, developing human beings actually need, rather than privileging what the market currently values. What this piece adds to that framework is the claim that belonging is a developmental need, one that is not produced automatically by proximity to others, and not produced at all by siloed personalization, but by the repeated, embodied experience of mutual responsibility.
The school day as I described at the beginning of this piece exists. It’s not a utopia, but it is a design choice that hundreds of millions of students in East Asia experience as ordinary. It doesn’t need to be replicated wholesale in North America (or wherever you may be); culture is not easily transplanted, and the argument is not about cultural imitation. It’s about the underlying logic: that a school is a commons, that commons require collective stewardship, and that stewardship is learned by doing.
Years after leaving Korea, I often think of an image that became an ordinary daily sight for me: a group of 13-year-olds sweeping a hallway at the end of the day, without supervision, laughing and joking while finishing their work, because that’s simply what you do. They weren’t being prepared for community. They were already in one.
That is a design outcome. And design outcomes can be chosen.
If this piece resonated with you, I’d be grateful if you’d share it with the educators, administrators, and parents in your network.
If you’ve spent time in a school system outside North America, or if you’ve witnessed something like what I’ve described here, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. This is the kind of piece that gets richer with other people’s experience added to it.
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My family spent 5 years in Taiwan, and my kids got to experience this since kindergarten. I totally agree that it built responsibility and I appreciate your point about embodied experiences.
In Taiwan there was another element: older kids supervising younger kids for some jobs, which brings a great element of mentoring. The recycling system was strict and complex, including food waste sorting as well as all other trash sorting. If the school had the wrong things in the wrong bins they would get fined. So when my first grader’s job was to sort the food trash, they had a high schooler watching over them, making sure they did it right. This was a daily occurrence— and then the jobs would rotate after a week or two. Brilliant.
Beautiful. Agreed. My children's teachers devote time in the schedule each week for the students to care for the classroom as well - cleaning the room, taking the plants outside to be watered, washing the rags used on the chalkboards, cleaning the paint brushes used for painting - it is such a crucial element of their feeling a part of the school and community, and they're fiercely loyal to the place as a result. I am beyond grateful to them for doing this. It's a Waldorf charter school, so a unique pedagogy - wishing this were the case for all, as it is in South Korea.