The Hummingbird’s Part: Doing What We Can to Transform the World of Education

Have you heard the fable of the hummingbird?

As a great forest fire rages, all the animals flee in fear — except for one tiny hummingbird. It flies back and forth, carrying droplets of water in its beak to drop on the flames.The other animals laugh at its efforts: “You’ll never stop the fire!”And the little bird replies simply:

“I’m doing my part.”

This image has stayed with me for a long time, but it came back to me with new force when I heard Andreas Schleicher in the ARTE documentary Demain, l’école (Tomorrow’s School).

He said something that struck a deep chord:

“If we use 21st-century technology combined with 20th-century pedagogy and a 19th-century school system, we create a tension that results in less learning from students.”

A System Under Strain

That sentence has never left me. It echoes in my daily conversations with my son, who struggles to find meaning in the way school works today.

He often talks about endless worksheets, memorised vocabulary lists, and repetitive tasks that feel meaningless — a mismatch in an age when machines can already do those things better than we can.

I tell him that change takes time.That, for now, he needs to learn to navigate the system as it is, while keeping alive the vision of what education could become.

My Hummingbird Contribution

In my work training teachers in Neurolanguage Coaching®, I feel like that hummingbird myself.

It’s not the solution, but it’s a contribution — a drop in the vast fire of educational transformation. An approach that puts the learner back at the centre, respects individual rhythm and autonomy, and helps each person learn to think for themselves.

It’s about reconnecting learning to meaning, and teaching to humanity.

Hoping My Drop Creates Ripples

I hope that my drop will create ripples — that it will join others, forming waves of change.Because rather than joining the chorus of lamentation, or clinging to outdated certainties, or freezing in fear, I’ve chosen to act.

To do my part, however small it may seem.

To contribute, at my own scale, to the birth of a true 21st-century education.

And You?

And you — what’s your hummingbird’s part? What change would you like to see in education, and what small steps are you taking to help it happen?