I was speaking with a friend recently when this idea found me. We were talking about music.

Gonzalo and I have these conversations every couple of weeks, wide-ranging, no agenda, the kind of exchange that wanders into places neither of us planned to go. A couple of weeks ago, we started talking about the old radio show, American Top 40, where he served as Kasey Kasem’s assistant for over 10 years. He made a case I wasn't expecting: that popular music isn't just entertainment. It answers the same questions every mythology has ever answered. Who are you? What do you owe the people around you? What happens when you lose, and is recovery possible? Joseph Campbell spent a career arguing that every mythology across every culture shares the same structural bones (Campbell, 1988). Gonzalo was saying that John Coltrane and Bruce Springsteen are working with the same architecture.

I pushed the frame. If music operates as mythology, what is the mythology of education? What are its deities, its foundational narratives, its journeys, and its answers to the questions that don't have clean policy solutions?

I haven't stopped thinking about it since. 

Here is the argument I want to make across three issues of this newsletter, and I'll start with the most important piece: education is not a system that borrowed mythological language. It is a mythology that got institutionalized. The bureaucracy came later. The belief structure was always there.

Every human community, long before there were schools or state standards or accreditation bodies, had a process for transmitting what mattered. What to believe. How to survive. What you owe the community from which you emerged, those who came before you, and what you owe the ones who will come after. That process was never neutral. It was wrapped in story, in ritual, and in archetype. It answered the big questions that mythology has always answered.

The school building is a recent invention. The mythology it carries is ancient.

John Dewey understood this even when he was arguing for something new. His case for democratic education was not primarily a pedagogical argument. It was a moral one. Education, he wrote, is the process by which a community preserves itself and its values across generations (Dewey, 1916). That is not a systems design statement. That is a mythological claim.

Ibn Khaldun made the same observation from a different continent five centuries earlier. In the Muqaddimah, he argued that education is the means by which civilization reproduces itself - not just its knowledge, but its character (Ibn Khaldun, 1377/1967). Character. Not competency. Not proficiency. The word matters.

The institution came and went. The belief structure persisted.

What makes education mythological is not its language or its rituals. Those are the culture-defining elements. The mythology is the questions it keeps trying to answer.

Who are you, and what are you capable of becoming? What do you owe your community? How do you earn your place among adults? What happens when you fail, and is recovery still possible?

These are not curriculum questions. They are not assessment questions. They do not appear on a school improvement plan. But they are present in every school, every day, shaping what teachers believe about students and what students believe about themselves.

Paulo Freire (1970) named the tension directly: education is never a neutral act. It either conditions people to accept the world as it is, or it equips them to ask whether it has to be. That is a mythological binary. Every mythology offers it. Every tradition of educational thought has had to choose a side.

Across Confucian academies, indigenous oral traditions, Socratic dialogue, and the one-room American schoolhouse, the questions are the same. The answers differ. The questions do not. That consistency is not coincidence. It is evidence of something deeper than curriculum alignment. It is the signature of a belief structure operating beneath the institution.

If you still need convincing, look at graduation.

Strip away the catering, the parking problems, and the principal's three-page script. What remains is a rite of passage. The cap and gown. The processional. The crossing of a stage. The handover of a document that formally and publicly declares that this person has changed.

Campbell called this structure the monomyth: the call away from the familiar, the ordeal, the transformation, the return (Campbell, 1949). We enact it every June in gymnasiums across this country and call it a ceremony. It is not a ceremony. It is a ritual. The distinction matters because ceremonies mark the external acknowledgment, but rituals mark the actual change. Graduation insists that we acknowledge that the person who crosses that stage is not the same person who walked into the building years before.

That insistence is mythological. It is also, at its best, true. 

I am not writing this to be provocative. I am writing it because educational leaders are working inside a belief structure they have never been given language for, and that absence costs them.

When you understand that you are not fixing a broken system but working inside a living mythology, the entire history of education reform looks different. The recurring promises. The cycles of hope and disappointment. The reforms that arrive with certainty and leave without explanation. They make a different kind of sense.

In our next issue, we name the archetypes, the figures that populate the education mythology and what they tell us about the work we do every day.

Campbell, J. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Pantheon Books.

Campbell, J. (1988). The power of myth. Doubleday.

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. Macmillan.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Herder and Herder.

Ibn Khaldun. (1967). The Muqaddimah: An introduction to history (F. Rosenthal, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1377)

This week's article argues that educational leaders are working inside a belief structure they have never been given language for. The Edupreneurs Network goes one step further: once you can name what you know, the next move is to share it. Most educational professionals possess expertise that never travels beyond their immediate colleagues. That gap between what you know and what the field knows costs everyone. If this series has prompted you to think differently about the mythology you are working inside, this piece gives you a practical framework for what to do with that thinking next.

“When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” — Paulo Coelho

Chapter 8 — Thought Leadership in Educational Policy and Reform

This week's article argues that education operates on a belief structure running beneath every institution, every reform effort, and every policy debate. Chapter 8 makes the same case from a different angle. In his treatment of the Advocacy Coalition Framework, Valentino writes that educational policy debates often resist resolution through data alone because issues tap into fundamental beliefs about education, authority, and equity (Valentino, 2025, p. 175). That is not a policy failure. It is a mythology at work. Data does not dislodge a belief structure. It never has. The leaders who understand this stop asking why reform cycles repeat themselves and start asking what beliefs are driving them.

This week: Read the "Advocacy Coalition Framework" and "Argumentative Turn Framework" sections in Chapter 8. Then ask yourself: In the last reform initiative your school or district attempted, what belief was being protected — and by whom?