Ontologies in Action, Part 1: Education as the Evolution of Possibility

If reality is understood as the evolution of possibility, then education must be reconceived in those terms as well. Rather than the transfer of fixed “knowledge objects,” education becomes a practice of opening, aligning, and expanding potential.

From transmission to construal

Traditional models of education often assume that knowledge is a substance: something teachers possess and students acquire. Within a relational ontology, this picture dissolves. Knowledge is not a thing but a system of potential meanings, instantiated through acts of construal. Teaching and learning are not about moving objects from one mind to another, but about guiding cuts into potential and aligning construals across participants.

Teachers as architects of possibility

In this view, teachers are not primarily transmitters but scaffolders of potential. Their work is to create environments where learners can construe differently, actualising possibilities that would otherwise remain dormant. Curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy are therefore relational architectures: frameworks that make certain construals more likely and others less likely.

Learning as perspectival expansion

Learning is the process by which learners become able to take different perspectival cuts into structured potential. Each new construal is not an accumulation of objects but an expansion of relational possibility. Education thus scales from the micro (individual shifts in meaning potential) to the macro (collective shifts in social formation).

Implications

• Equity becomes a matter of ensuring access to potential — removing constraints that foreclose possibility.

• Curriculum design becomes about sequencing relational potentials, not packaging inert content.

• Assessment becomes about tracing how learners’ construals evolve, rather than measuring how many objects they have accumulated.

In this way, education, far from being a neutral process, becomes a central site where the evolution of possibility is shaped and contested. It is here that relational ontology takes on practical urgency: the futures that learners can enter depend on how well we understand education as possibility-in-action.

The next post will extend this logic into the realm of ethics, asking what it means to act responsibly in a world where reality is relational and potential is always at stake.