At a conference packed with new tools and faster systems, one of the most grounding conversations at FETC came from someone who kept talking about slowing down.
Sean Forde has taught in some of the most different learning environments imaginable. A remote village in Alaska. An international school in South Korea. Now, a school in Jamaica. Early childhood. Elementary. Secondary. Technology leadership.
What he offered wasn’t a comparison of countries or systems. It was a pattern he’s seen everywhere.
School keeps speeding up.
Learners don’t benefit when it does.
Pressure Changes Learning Before It Improves It
Sean described South Korea as a place where education is deeply respected — and deeply pressurized.
“They respect education, but take it overly serious to a fault sometimes.”
The seriousness runs so deep that laws were introduced to limit how late young children could attend after-school academies.
“They had to institute a law where eight-year-olds couldn’t go to hagwons past ten o’clock.”
That detail landed hard. Not because it was extreme, but because it made something visible. When achievement becomes the sole measure of worth, learning turns into endurance.
Sean had just come from a radically different environment.
“I went from a remote fly-in village in Alaska… education gets thrown out the window. It becomes a safe space.”
Neither extreme worked perfectly. But the contrast clarified something important.
Pressure doesn’t automatically produce depth.
Resources don’t automatically produce understanding.
Time Is the Missing Ingredient Everywhere
Across systems, cultures, and funding models, Sean kept returning to the same constraint.
“Teachers do not have time.”
Even in well-resourced schools, he described classrooms operating in survival mode.
“You pile on, pile on, pile on… and you never fully get to proficient.”
New platforms arrive. Standards shift. Systems change. But time never expands to match the expectations placed on educators or learners.
The result is motion without mastery.
Global Perspective Breaks Classroom Walls
For Sean, technology only mattered when it did one thing well.
“It’s always been global collaboration. Global projects. Breaking down the walls.”
That instinct was shaped early, teaching students who rarely left their communities.
“When I was in Alaska, they go into Anchorage, see a Taco Bell sign, and get excited. They don’t actually go there.”
Later, he saw the same isolation in wealthy international schools.
“They stayed at a hoity-toity hotel and never left.”
Different privilege. Same limitation.
Exposure isn’t about travel. It’s about perspective. Technology earns its place when it expands a learner’s sense of the world, not just their screen time.
When Learning Stops Being Fun, We Lose the Learner
One of the most disarming moments came when Sean named something rarely defended in serious education spaces.
“We forget the F word. Fun.”
He wasn’t arguing for chaos or lowered expectations. He was pointing out how joy quietly disappears when learning becomes nothing but boxes to check.
“Why can’t they write about a unicorn monster who’s saving something?”
The skills don’t change. Engagement does.
When students care about the story, they persist. When they persist, learning deepens. Fun isn’t the opposite of rigor. It’s often the doorway into it.
The Projects That Matter Are the Ones That Connect People
Near the end of the conversation, Sean casually mentioned a project he once ran.
“It’s called the World Read Alouds.”
Each page of a book was read by someone from a different part of the world. Students mapped locations, calculated distances, and connected literacy to geography and global awareness.
“Each page is read by someone across the world… then we put it together.”
There was no grand branding. No platform pitch. Just a simple idea that connected learners to real people.
“It kind of fizzled when Flipgrid died.”
The idea didn’t fail. The infrastructure did.
And that’s the quiet tragedy Sean’s story surfaces. Some of the most human, meaningful learning experiences disappear not because they lack value, but because there’s no system designed to protect and grow them.
What This Signals About the Future of Education
Sean’s story doesn’t argue for less technology or more technology.
It argues for better pacing.
Learning improves when time is protected, curiosity is allowed, pressure is moderated, global perspective is normalized, joy is not treated as optional but the theme.
Across countries and systems, the same truth keeps surfacing.
When we rush learning, we lose learners.
When we slow down, they show up.
