Reimagining Education: The Eden Conspiracy Meets Liberating Structures

Toward Schools That Actually Work for Learners, Communities, and the Future

In The Eden Conspiracy: Educating for Accomplished Citizenship, Joe Harless invites us to imagine a radically redefined education system—one built not on rigid compliance or content overload, but on performance, purpose, and outcomes that matter. His vision is crisp: schools should be in the business of producing accomplished citizens, capable of critical thinking, effective decision-making, and meaningful contribution to society.

But Harless doesn’t stop at critique; he outlines a path forward using the rigor of instructional systems design, performance analysis, and needs-based curriculum planning.

Yet, while Harless’s model provides the architecture for a new educational system, it needs something more to animate it fully: a cultural shift in how people engage, collaborate, and lead change inside schools. That’s where Liberating Structures come in—not as decorative add-ons, but as vital tools for bringing Harless’s theory to life in classrooms, staff meetings, and school districts.

Together, The Eden Conspiracy and Liberating Structures form a blueprint not only for reforming education—but for transforming it.

Performance with Purpose: Harless’s Wake-Up Call

At the core of Harless’s work is a deceptively simple question: What are schools really for? For Harless, the answer is not standardized tests, transcripts, or even diplomas. The true measure of education is how well it prepares people to perform in real life—at work, in families, and in democratic society.

Using a systems-thinking lens, Harless urges educators to reverse-engineer instruction. Begin with the end goal: what specific skills, behaviors, and knowledge do students need to thrive? Then design learning environments that foster exactly those outcomes. It’s a rigorous, no-fluff model that replaces guesswork with data-driven precision.

But even the most elegant systems design will falter without engaged humans. Teachers, students, administrators, and families must not just comply with change—they must co-create it. This is where Harless’s "conspiracy" becomes literal: transforming schools will require an intentional, distributed movement. And that’s precisely what Liberating Structures are built to support.

A Missing Link: Why Schools Need Liberating Structures

Liberating Structures are a toolkit of simple, adaptable facilitation techniques that disrupt the dominant “presentation and discussion” format found in most classrooms and meetings. Instead of a few people talking while others passively listen, these structures activate every voice, build trust, surface insights, and uncover collective intelligence.

Think about it: Harless wants schools to become places of high performance and purposeful design. But what makes those changes stick? The answer isn’t just better lesson plans—it’s better ways of thinking and working together.

Liberating Structures provide the “human operating system” that allows the technical brilliance of Harless’s instructional systems design to take root in messy, real-world environments. For example:

• 1-2-4-All could help students co-construct definitions of what an accomplished citizen looks like in their context.

• Nine Whys enables teams to connect daily instruction to deeper purpose—perfect for aligning classroom content with performance-based goals.

• TRIZ allows educators to diagnose and eliminate counterproductive practices (like grading for compliance instead of mastery).

• Appreciative Interviews can capture what’s already working in classrooms and scale it across the school.

These structures are not complicated—but their impact is profound. They allow for distributed leadership, shared ownership, and a culture of curiosity and improvement. Most importantly, they respect students and teachers as capable contributors—not passive recipients of a top-down plan.

Cultivating Accomplished Citizens Through Shared Design

Joe Harless was clear: performance = knowledge + skills + motivation + environment. What he didn’t fully articulate—though his work implies it—is that motivation and environment are social constructs. They’re shaped by how people are treated, how decisions are made, and whether learners feel seen and empowered.

Liberating Structures directly influence the motivational and environmental aspects of performance:

• They increase psychological safety, allowing students and educators to take risks and express uncertainty.

• They shift power dynamics, giving marginalized voices the tools to participate and shape the system.

• They model democratic participation, helping students practice the very behaviors Harless believes are essential for citizenship.

Imagine a school system where lesson planning begins with Harless-style task analysis, and curriculum co-design happens in Liberating Structures-facilitated workshops with students, teachers, parents, and community partners. Imagine school improvement processes driven not by compliance checklists, but by ecologies of engagement—where every stakeholder has a voice, and every decision links back to real-world performance.

This is not utopia. It’s the conspiracy Harless dreamed of—made operational by Liberating Structures.

From Reform to Transformation: A Conspiracy Worth Joining

Most educational reforms nibble at the edges: a new policy here, a tech tool there. But The Eden Conspiracy asks for something bolder. It asks us to rebuild education from first principles, guided by real needs and observable performance. It is a theory of change with a built-in metric of success: can our graduates make wise decisions, solve authentic problems, and thrive in unpredictable contexts?

Liberating Structures offer a means of implementation that is flexible, inclusive, and scalable. They turn ordinary people into architects of transformation. They give flesh to Harless’s skeleton and energy to his logic.

This isn’t just about making schools better. It’s about building a society that works—where education is a living system of human development, not an industrial relic. Harless provided the map. Liberating Structures give us the vehicles to travel it—together, in community, in conspiracy.

Final Thought: What If We Actually Did This?

What if the conspiracy wasn’t a secret, but a movement? What if school board meetings used Open Space instead of Roberts Rules? What if students helped design rubrics using 25/10 Crowdsourcing? What if the next principal was selected not by a closed committee, but through Wise Crowds?

Harless dared us to ask: What if schools actually worked?

Liberating Structures help us say: Let’s find out—together.