It’s the ontology, stupid.

I’m Dylan Adams, a Senior Lecturer in Education at Cardiff Met, but I didn’t start out wanting to be a teacher. In fact, despite coming from a long line of teachers, my parents and grandparents included, I ran in the opposite direction. I studied music at the University of Sussex, focusing on aesthetics because I was fascinated by what music reveals about the human condition. I was obsessed with ontological questions of being and reality, yet I hadn’t actually heard the word ‘ontology’ at that point in my life. Ironically, I didn’t know of its existence. 

My firm conviction against becoming a teacher hit a snag during a module entitled “Children and Music in Education.” As part of this course, I spent a few days at a local primary school helping children compose music. This experience taught me more about the fundamental nature of our relationship to music than any previous study. I loved facilitating the children’s creativity and seeing their reactions to their own music making. Looking back, I realise I was witnessing the profound ontological power of their music-making, a concept I only understood in those terms much later. The children were completely immersed, effortlessly exploring ideas through sound and using their imagination to transform their reality. Seeing the world through their eyes was a revelation.

Suddenly, I wanted to be a teacher. I secured a spot in a PGCE course, leading to many happy years in the classroom. After about a decade, I began a part-time MA in Education while working full-time. While my undergraduate studies had been sporadic, I discovered a genuine passion for academic research during my MA, finding solidarity in the theoretical perspectives I was exploring. Although I was deeply dissatisfied with some aspects of mainstream education, I discovered a history of theorists whose ‘alternative’ visions resonated with my own. Fundamentally, I realised that my passion lay in designing educational experiences, or ‘lessons’ that positively impact children’s understanding of themselves and their reality.

The etymology of “lessons”, derived from the Latin lectio, “a reading” (Online Etymology Dictionary, 2026), points towards my perspective on the purpose of education. Paulo Freire (1985; 2018) argued that education should enable a “reading” of the world, not merely to help learners fit into reality, but to elevate their critical consciousness and transform reality. Therefore, education is fundamentally an ontological concern. While I was unfamiliar with Freire or the term ‘ontology’ at the time, I believed that teaching should be of existential significance. However, I observed that mainstream schooling often downplayed this, favouring the quantifiable improvement of skills and knowledge, what Freire (1996) termed the “banking approach,” which involves “the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human” (p. 62). Later, for my MA Education dissertation, I investigated how music affects children’s experiences of themselves and their emotional states, explicitly exploring these ontological concerns and their impact on learning.

After completing my MA in Education, I continued exploring how music-making and storytelling positively impact children’s understanding of themselves and the world. I was particularly interested in how these practices can transform a child’s experience of reality – their ontological understanding. I viewed storytelling as a fundamentally musical activity, rooted in the creative exploration of sound. To further these passions, I transitioned into educational consultancy, which led to part-time lecturing and eventually a full-time role at Cardiff Metropolitan University. This position allows me to combine my love of research and teaching. My PhD research initially investigated children’s music-making at Neolithic sites across Wales; however, early data analysis revealed that the natural, outdoor environment, rather than the historical sites themselves, had the most significant impact, and when combined with their music-making, was the primary catalyst for the children’s shifting self-perception. This discovery set me on a scholarly path through critical and contemplative pedagogy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, deep ecology, ecopedagogy, Indigenous Philosophies, new materialism and posthumanism. The common thread across these fields is their focus on existence and being. They collectively argue that mind and matter are co-constituted, entangled, and inseparable, rejecting the idea of a detached human mind observing a static, passive world. Much of my research has consequently focussed on the pedagogical and existential significance of human beings’ experiences of interrelationship with the more-than-human (Abram, 1997) world. 

Ontological matters in education have arguably never mattered more (the new materialist pun is intentional). We are currently facing what has been called the polycrisis as the neoliberal, consumerist ideas about existence, and their constructions of reality, wreck devastation on humans and more-than-humans alike. Yet mainstream schooling seemingly exists in a frozen futurism (Smith, 2014) where a narrow conceptualisation of knowledge is prioritised and ontological concerns are ignored (Adams and Jardine, 2026). At times it all seems hopeless as educators the world over have to succumb to the tightening grip of this status quo maintained by aggressive accountability measures administered by ‘managers’ of various kinds (Ball, 2016). But Freire (2021) reminds us that “hopelessness is but hope that has lost its bearings, and become a distortion of that ontological need” (p. 2). This is not to say that hope alone is enough to change reality. Rather “hope as an ontological need demands an anchoring in practice” (Freire, 2021, p. 2). I believe good education (and for me this involves scholarly work) provides such practice. Like Freire (1996) and others, I believe the “quest for human completion” (p.39) is our “ontological vocation” (p.32). It is at the heart of who we are as human beings. In contrast, the neoliberal view contends that education should provide and prepare workers for society, for the marketplace, to improve a nation’s GDP. To borrow and adapt a catchphrase, education is for the economy, stupid. But like Freire, I believe good education does not prepare students for society. Good education enables students to better understand themselves as human beings and change society for the betterment of all. In short, good education is about ontology.

References

Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous: Language and meaning in a more-than-human world. Vintage Books.

Adams, D., & Jardine, D. (2026). New place-based educational initiatives in the Welsh curriculum and some legacies of the Canadian experience: a conversation. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 60(1-2), 45-71.

Ball, S. J. (2016). Neoliberal education? Confronting the slouching beast. Policy futures in education, 14(8), 1046-1059.

Online Etymology Dictionary (2026) Lesson. In https://www.etymonline.com/word/lesson. Retrieved March 22nd 2026. From https://www.etymonline.com/word/lesson.

Freire, P. (2021). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed: 50th-anniversary edition. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Freire, P. (1985). Reading the world and reading the word: An interview with Paulo Freire. Language Arts, 62(1), 15–21.

Smith, D. (2014). Teaching as the practice of wisdom. Bloomsbury Publishing