Pathfinder Educational Model
An Avatar.Global Resource
Pathfinder Educational Model
The Pathfinder Educational Model (PEM)TM is a transformative, planet-centered approach to education designed to replace outdated industrial-era systems of education with a modern, scaleable, equitable, socially and culturally contextualized, globally scoped, locally implemented, future-oriented, planet-centered approach to education capable of raising a generation empowered to transform the planet.[1] Rooted in the Pathfinder Pedagogical Framework, emphasizing Post-Capitalist Skills, and leaning heavily on parents, teachers, local community organizations, and a specially trained Pathfinder AI, it prioritizes critical thinking, adaptability, collaboration, and holistic human development. Unlike traditional education models that emphasize standardization, obedience, and rote memorization, PEM fosters empowerment, agency, and self-actualization.
Concept Map
Components
Key Figures Pathfinder Educational Model
Pathfinder Educational Model > Ivan Illich, John Taylor Gatto, Paulo Freire
Key Terms
Pathfinder Educational Model >
Related LP Terms
Pathfinder Educational Model > Assembly Line Grading, Assembly Line Model, Educational Framework, Five Barriers to Human Flourishing, Harmonic Social Structure, Seven Components of Human Development
Non-LP Related Terms
Pathfinder Educational Model > Conscientização, Culture of Silence, Dialogic Method, Generative Themes, Love, Empathy, and Hope, Praxis, Problem-Posing Education
Educational Models
Notes
The Pathfinder Educational Model (PEM) is not designed to prepare students for survival within a collapsing system—it is designed to equip them with the skills needed to build a new world. Traditional education trains students for obedience, competition, and economic survival within a capitalist framework, but Pathfinder pedagogy recognizes that capitalism is unsustainable and that humanity must transition toward new social, economic, and ecological paradigms.
Quotes
Good Education has three purposes
"A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Such a system would require the application of constitutional guarantees to education. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support, through a regressive taxation, a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which in fact restricts the public's chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market. It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.
Hidden Curriculum
Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot get in by the door. Moreover, such new institutions should be channels to which the learner would have access without credentials or pedigree--public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon would become available.
Resources for Learning
I believe that no more than four--possibly even three--distinct "channels" or learning exchanges could contain all the resources needed for real learning. The child grows up in a world of things, surrounded by people who serve as models for skills and values. He finds peers who challenge him to argue, to compete, to cooperate, and to understand; and if the child is lucky, he is exposed to confrontation or criticism by an experienced elder who really cares. Things, models, peers, and elders are four resources each of which requires a different type of arrangement to ensure that everybody has ample access to it."[2]
Readings and Resources
Blum, Susan D. 2020. Ungrading. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.
Clark, David, and Robert Talbert. 2023. Grading For Growth. Routledge.
Gatto, John Taylor. 2006. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. New Society Publishers.
Gray, Peter. 2015. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books.
Holt, John. 1995. How Children Fail. Balanced.
———. 2017. How Children Learn. Balanced.
Kohn, Alfie. 1986. No Contest: The Case Against Competition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. https://amzn.to/2X8g70l.
RSA, dir. 2010a. Changing Education Paradigms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U.
———, dir. 2010b. Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mG-hhWL_ug.
Related LP Content and Courses
Patreon Units
Lightning Path (2024). Parent/Teacher Training. LP 4.7. https://www.patreon.com/collection/640726
Citation and Legal
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Footnotes
- ↑ Mike Sosteric and Tristan Sosteric, The Pathfinder Model (PEM) of Education 2025, https://athabascau.academia.edu/DrS/Pathfinder-Educational-Model-(PEM).
- ↑ Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. Harper & Row, 1971. p. 33.