Entangled Education: How Teacher Consciousness Shapes the Future of Learning

A Provocations article from Tammy Oesting

There is a vital force in every human being which leads them to make ever greater efforts for the realization of individual potentialities. Our tendency is to realize them. Joy and interest will come when we can realize the potentialities that are within us. (Maria Montessori, 1946 London Lectures, page 79)

At the heart of this article lie a few essential questions: “What if the future of learning isn't about the curriculum or new technology, but rather something we're already deeply entangled within? How might educators shift their efforts more towards cultivating how they show up rather than rely on external drivers of change?”

Resonant Visions

In exploring these questions and the ones that arose along the way, revolutionary thinkers Maria Montessori (1870-1952) and Paulo Friere (1921–1997) revealed points of resonance that speak of a shared intuition about the indivisible nature of teaching and learning. While Montessori and Friere never met nor directly referenced each other's work as their active careers and geographical contexts diverged significantly, their legacies offer complementary insights into cultivating a more equitable, impactful, and ultimately, more integrative approach to education.

Their work hints at a quantum understanding of human development. Cosmic forces reveal a vast, interconnected web where the awareness and intentions of the teacher have a ripple effect and impact the future. In the quantum understanding of reality, particles once connected remain influenced by one another across vast distances, responding to changes in their counterparts instantaneously, as if space itself were merely a convenient illusion. This remarkable phenomenon is known as quantum entanglement. Might the relationship between teacher and student operate in a similar fashion?

Years ago, fresh from a year as an assistant to the teacher in an early childhood Montessori classroom and learning about Montessori from every book I could find, I miraculously manifested a job co-teaching at a Montessori school. With a strong vision, a great year in the classroom, and no formal training, I had more enthusiasm and determination than skill and understanding as I entered a frenzied environment where pandemonium ruled. My efforts in building a harmonious class culture led me to learn about the social-emotional coregulation that occurs between humans, a kind of reciprocity that builds awareness.

Coregulation is a bidirectional hardwired process where both adults and children mutually adapt to co-create emotional stability. Coregulation forms a foundation for self-regulation as children internalize attuned responses from others around them. When educators and students co-create rhythms of cohabitation, are empathetic to others, and have shared attention, they influence each other's hormonal, neural and behaviors. In my Montessori early childhood community, when I was tired or feeling cranky, the children were like emotional barometers and would reflect to me my own state of being through their behaviors.

It took me much longer to both identify my affect in the classroom, and even longer to harness this built-in superpower to support the children’s well-being. For example, before class each day, I checked in with my own emotional state by visualizing the classroom doorway as an “emotions detector” and then factored my status when responding to a student. To the child, this might have looked like their teacher taking a moment to exaggerate several slow breaths before responding. Whether or not educators are aware of this superpower, we are wise to adopt everyday practices that are conducive to their character, or spiritual development, as Parker Palmer writes in The Courage to Teach,

“Teaching, like any truly human activity emerges from one's inwardness for better or worse. As we teach, we project the conditions of our soul onto students, our subjects, and our way of being together. The entanglements we experience in this classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of our inner life.”

Beyond the visible structures of classrooms and curricula lies an invisible tapestry where teacher awareness and student development intertwine. Within this interconnected field, our collective potential awaits recognition—a space where individual growth nurtures community evolution, and where the boundaries between self and others begin to dissolve in service of something greater.

Syntropy as a Quantum Field

Montessori and Friere were prescient in discovering a quantum approach to human evolution. In looking to cosmic forces at work within and in relation to development, Montessori incorporated mathematician Luigi Fantappie's discovery of syntropy, a universal tendency towards order, complexity, and interconnectivity, into her understanding of individual and collective evolution. Unlike entropy's dissipative force, syntropy represents a cosmic principle of connection. Like Montessori, who emphasized creating environments that allow children’s innate curiosity and independence to flourish, Freire saw the educator’s role as creating the conditions for each person’s singularity and potential to “unfold,” akin to a gardener nurturing a flower.

Perhaps syntropy is an unseen force of love and unity and is expressed as an allurement of the learning materials for the purpose of self-construction, as social cohesion in learning communities, and within the connective tissue an adult and student co-create in observation and learning moments. In this sense, syntropy is like a quantum field in that it evokes the idea that there are unseen connections and potential for interactions that go beyond what's immediately visible. The principle of syntropy aligns with microbiological syntrophy (mutualistic interdependence) and harmonizing systems as seen in quantum coherence. This quantum coherence is at play in every moment, in every way.

“To have a vision of the cosmic plan, in which every form of life depends on directed movements which have effects beyond their conscious aim, is to understand the child's work and be able to guide it better.” (Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, p.135)

Imagine the child that suddenly grasps a concept, not through explicit instruction such as most educators are expected to perform, but through the steady presence of an adult who exudes confidence in the student's exploration and has a friendly attitude towards error, illustrating an expanded consciousness. The subtle, nuanced behaviors of this vitally responsive practitioner divulge a dimension that mechanistic authoritarian and factory approaches to teaching do not. They hint at what physicist and philosopher David Bohm called the "implicate order" or Montessori's indirect preparation of embodied understanding within the explicate order of the curriculum, the materials, the methods and outcomes.

Recognizing the implicate order of knowing as key to optimizing education might lead educators to examine in what ways they might let go of rigid, automatic habits to create more fluid and connected environments. Their analysis and subsequent unconditioning has the potential to transform rigid curricula into quantum-coherent spaces.

The Holonic Nature of Transformation

Early in my career as a Montessori guide, I realized the importance of peeling back the layers of self and identified the sources of my thoughts and beliefs that led me to default, or automatic and less-desirable reactions in my interactions with children and at times, other adults. This unconditioning process, what I think of as a great unfolding, benefits from understanding holonic systems, or a nesting system approach. Austrian author Arthur Koestler coined the concept of holons in his 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine to help navigate the paradoxical nature of systems that are both autonomous and interdependent, both singular and plural.

Figure 1. Holonic structure of the cosmos

Visualize concentric circles, where each classroom, each relationship, each moment of learning and interaction is simultaneously represented as a circle, a whole unto itself, and as a part of increasingly larger whole circles. The individual teacher is a holon, complete as a whole and part of a greater whole that is the classroom, a school system, a community culture of education. The classroom is also a holon, a unique ecosystem with its own emergent properties. Extending this phenomenon to human development, just imagine the emergent impact of a learning moment and the potential impact on the lives of both the teacher and the student, a kind of quantum contra dance along the shimmery edge of a universal dance floor of growth.

Figure 2. Holons represent a classroom containing relationships, individuals, and even the spark that ignites learning and the “shimmery” spaces that create emergence.

In considering the paradox of a self that exists both as a whole and as part of a larger web of experiences, educators might begin to sense the evolving nature of selfhood within an ever-expanding universe, as well as the subtle, emergent qualities that shape their relationships with students. For instance, when a child in a Montessori classroom chooses to help a younger peer with a new activity, the teacher may quietly observe how both children’s identities and sense of connection gently shift and grow through this shared experience, revealing new dimensions of their relationship and individual development. In this, an 'entangled' or 'quantum' educator co-creates the conditions for transformation within the context of their student relationship within the conditions of the environment and group dynamics.

They embody a kind of knowing, an awareness and appreciation of the interconnectivity of all things identified as cosmic consciousness by Montessori, and Friere's key philosophical tenet of conscientização, translated as 'critical consciousness'. Conscientização means awakening to how consciousness has been shaped by cultural narratives, economic structures, and historical conditions they did not choose.

Just imagine what might emerge when an educator's awareness intentionally ripples outward through these nested systems, constructing conditions for transformational moments. I suspect encouraging critical thinking assists in shaping a quantum field of consciousness rippling outward and seemingly riding the connective waves of syntropy.

Critical Consciousness as Foundation

Despite my steadfast adoption of Montessori, an educational paradigm driven by universal and human tendencies with its vision of a new human with an expanded consciousness, I believe it was my earlier foundation in learning Friere's concept of a critical consciousness that primed me to accept and understand what Montessori intimated as cosmic consciousness.

Through examining societal inequities and educational systems that amplify oppression, I recognized how my implicit biases—those hidden schemas all humans acquire—combined with fear of disequilibrium, manifested in unconsciously upholding systems of separation. I remember initially feeling vulnerable by leaning further into learning about structural inequities, dominant narratives, and my own generational conditioning, then became empowered each time my critical awareness radar was piqued. With this unveiling came the need for new tools to navigate an expanding landscape. The “woke” moniker used by some as a sin, as opposed to the recognition of “woke” as an awakened consciousness, might distract from educating for the future, yet I contend that waking up to the reality of an educational paradigm designed for liberation is necessary in birthing a new human.

It comes as no surprise that Montessori and Friere shared a vision of a future of learning within mutual contexts identified by Friere as the "banking model" of education: a profound disconnect where knowledge is transactional, a commodity deposited into a passive vessel, reliant on the teacher as a change-agent with their intellect as currency. "The more completely [the teacher] fills the receptacles," Friere wrote, "the better a teacher [they are]. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are."

Friere's critique highlights the consequences of ignoring the impact of human consciousness from educational models, and suggests learning is a natural, living, transformative process when consciousness is punctuated as a sine qua non, or essential condition for learning.

By understanding my own enculturation and identifying the effects of breathing in the toxic messaging of hierarchical frameworks posing as transformational education, I've been able to adopt a more critical, or liberatory awareness; which in turn constructs a field of connectivity rather than fragmentation for my students. Connecting my knowledge with my own and my students' lived experiences, promoting student agency, and positioning us all as entangled, creates an ecosystem of mutual growth.

From Theory to Practice

This might sound like a purely theoretical pie-in-the-sky vision of education, yet my own family has witnessed the profound impact of a learning community cultivated by a guide committed to acquiring a critical consciousness. Our neurospicy daughter thrived in a Montessori environment nurtured by a guide who implicitly understood that diversity is a cosmic condition and is inherently beautiful and essential to the well-being of the individual and the community. The guide's intention in creating a safe learning space that promoted a sense of belonging, also aligns with the cosmic harmonizing force of syntropy.

Although my child's teacher certainly manifested her liberatory consciousness in co-creating a learning environment in which every child was able to naturally develop, this transformation took concerted effort on her part. How did she develop this awareness? As a marginalized identity in dominant society, the stage was likely set for her transformation through direct experiences of oppression and healing, and then during her coursework to become a Montessori guide, she found Montessori relied on the adult to pursue lifelong learning and character development to best serve the child before them. The guide’s intention, their growth, and meta cognizance, or awareness of her understanding form yet another positive feedback loop.

In his book Changing Consciousness, author Bohm explains that consciousness has the possibility to shift in the space between thought and response. Bohm, according to Lee Nichol in Bohm's Holoflux,

Speaks of three aspects of human experience—the individual, the collective, and the cosmic. In the domain of the individual, Bohm articulates a thread of inquiry that seeks to loosen our tacit, compulsive addiction to the 'self- world image.' In the collective domain, this inquiry is carried into a group setting, in which the flow of meaning among participants is enhanced by this same loosening of personal identity. In the cosmic domain—which Bohm clearly states is what dialogue is oriented toward—he suggests that both individuals and groups can open to new orders of intelligence, largely untapped and unknown to us in our current state.

Bohm's understanding of dialogue as a key to unlocking knowing and co-created understanding, correlates to Freire's 'dialogical praxis' in education where both the teacher and the learner enter a shared field of inquiry where reality is approached not as static content to be transferred, but as a dynamic process where all experiences, perspectives, and questions are essential to understanding the whole.

Figure 3. Holonic Analysis of Bohm's Dialogue & Freire's Dialogical Praxis.

This shift from transactional to transformational approach represents more than a technical or methodological adjustment; it signals a profound reorientation towards consciousness itself.

Toward a New Humanity

“The revolutionary movements of our days are a sign of the great crisis from which the universal consciousness of humanity is about to be born.” (1946/1989 The child, society and the world, p.110: 1946 Lecture in India, ABC CLIO)

To honor the possibility of a flourishing future for our living earth, educators today might explore ways to nurture in children the seeds of transformation— encouraging the gradual expansion of their awareness and their potential to participate in a shared, evolving consciousness. For example, when children in a Montessori classroom collaborate to care for a classroom garden, they may begin to notice their interdependence with one another and with the natural world, quietly awakening to a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves.

We aren't just teaching—we're participating in the grand weaving of a tapestry where individual threads become something far greater than their separate parts.

Entangled Education isn't just a catchy title—it's what happens when you let education theorists hang out with quantum physicists at the same dinner party. Relying on stories from the sages to explore this query into how Dr. Montessori framed her understanding of human potentiality, and from where this language evolved, it was during a regular chat with my mentor and Dean of The Institute for Educational Studies Dr. Philip Snow Gang , who gifted me with a story thread to tug in seeking the genesis of this idea. From what he can surmise, Montessori may have first encountered the phrase cosmic consciousness through her study of philosophers Henri Bergson and William James and possibly discussed this idea with her friend and President of the Theosophical Society Annie Besant.

Dr. Gang’s story is woven with enough curiosity and wonder in divine connections to lead us to discover how Besant impacted Montessori and in turn, how Montessori influenced generations of learners. Montessori attended a London lecture by Besant in 1907, where Annie won Dr. Montessori's friendship when she openly admired the outcomes of the newly opened Casa dei Bambini.

Between 1924-1955, geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, mathematician Édouarde Le Roy, paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, proposed the potential impact of a greater collective consciousness gained through entwining geological, biological, and technological activities into the rise of a what Teilhard de Chardin described in Chapter 10 of his essay collection The Future of Man, as a noosphere, or "an envelope of thinking substance." Montessori's grounding in the telluric, or story of the earth, through her research of geologist Antonio Stoppani and her writings on what she called the psychosphere, were certainly prescient of today's understanding of a collective consciousness, or a noosphere. Today, Evolutionary cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme continues this work in collaboration with a team of scientists, scholars, philosophers, educators and other professionals at the Human Energy Project.

Besant likely had heard of the concept of cosmic consciousness from founder of theosophy, a 'divine wisdom', Russian-American mystic Madame Blavatsky who was known to use the term, yet Gang suspects Besant may have met with Vernadsky, Le Roy, Bergson, and Chardin in Paris during the 1920s, and shared their ideas with Maria and we can imagine Montessori bridging the idea of an individual's expanded consciousness and the impact of a collective cosmic consciousness.

Figure 4. Photograph of one part of one of Dr. Montessori’s bookcases in her Amsterdam office taken by the author.

My story is not unusual in that the first time I remember hearing about this idea of the cosmos being something beyond my previous experience of being gobsmacked while stargazing, was during my initial Montessori coursework. I read of Montessori's Cosmic plan, Cosmic vision, Cosmic task, Cosmic expression, and Cosmic energies as found in The Formation of Man,

“To the young child we give guides to the world and the possibility to explore it through [their] own free activity; to the older child we must give not the world, but the cosmos and a clear vision of how the cosmic energies act in the creation and maintenance of our globe.”

As we transform our educational approach to honor both individual development and our profound interdependence, we create spaces where separation gradually dissolves into recognition of our essential unity. This isn't just educational philosophy—it's about reshaping reality itself through the quantum field of each learning interaction.

Reminding educators of the vital responsibility to promote conditions that amplify potentiality, Montessori (1946) recognized, "In these times, more than ever before, our hope is that education will offer an aid to better the condition of the world" (p. 24).

And isn't that really what we're all after? A world where we finally realize we've been parts of the same cosmic dance all along.

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Tammy Oesting MEd is an internationally recognized Montessori educator, speaker, and mentor who blends big-picture curiosity with practical application. A self-described "practitioner of awe and wonder," she travels globally through her company ClassrooMechanics to empower educators, merging neuroscience, social justice, and cosmic inquiry. A founding member of Montessori Everywhere, an author liaison at Trillium Montessori, she serves as faculty for The Institute for Educational Studies and board member of the Montessori Network of New Mexico. With AMS credentials (Early Childhood/Elementary), her work focuses on equitable teaching practices, staff development, and exploring the interconnectedness of learning and the universe.

Special thanks to Tammy for her Provocations contribution!

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