How culture, community, and play transformed Tonga’s education system

Education is in crisis. Around the world, organizations like UNESCO and the OECD are seeking new models for education as we enter the age of AI. AI can synthesize information in nanoseconds and offer coherent, though sometimes shallow, arguments that answer basic questions. How can we use the science of learning to prepare learners for this new age? What is lost when human-human portions of education are replaced or supplemented by AI? How can we design systems to retain the most crucial aspects of the learning process?

The science teaches us that human-to-human connections and relationships are at the core of education. These interactions literally build infant brains. And at the start of formal schooling, teacher and peer to peer relationships are central to mastery of outcomes that range from math and literacy to skills like collaboration, critical thinking, and creative innovation. Regardless, U.S. data suggests that little collaborative instruction (not just passive listening) is happening in classrooms, hovering at around only 5% of a student’s class day. Student-to-student engagement is even more scarce, even though both are cornerstones of how children learn.

The small Pacific island nation of Tonga—a kingdom of just over 100,000 people, with an estimated 8,000 children in early education—decided to wrestle with this gap. Its Ministry of Education and Training (MET) concluded that nesting education in authentic and culturally meaningful relationships was foundational for learning. Key for the Ministry was honoring the science of learning and the pivotal role of human connection in that science. 

Prioritizing relationships and cultural history

When MET set out to redesign its national primary school curriculum, policymakers, curriculum writers, and consultants faced a tension shared by many Pacific island nations: how to prepare children for a rapidly changing world while honoring the cultural values, languages, and identities that define Pasifika life. The Pacific Regional Education Framework (PACREF) acknowledges this tension, calling for curriculum that is both Pacific grounded and future focused. Tonga’s Curriculum Development Unit (CDU) writers sought to represent multiple—sometimes competing—priorities in their curricula:

• Cultural integrity: embedding “faka’apa’apa” (respect), “tauhi vā” (relational harmony) and “anga fakatonga” (Tongan ways of being)
• “21st-century skills”: including breadth of skills needed for today’s workforce beyond literacy and numeracy. These comprise communication, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration.
• Pedagogical transformation: moving from teacher-centered instruction to learner-centered, inquiry-driven learning

MET’s solution was to work in partnership with consultants to identify robust, research-informed practice that aligned with Tongan cultural and historical values and philosophies. Studies on Active Playful Learning (APL) provided the pedagogical mechanism to bring this alignment to life. APL’s focus on guided play, storytelling, hands-on inquiry, and collaborative problem solving offered children ways of learning that resonated with Pacific ways of knowing and being while keeping the focus human-centric. It also draws on the science of how children learn and a broad base of foundational skills that include mastery of content but also mastery of collaboration, communication, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence (The 6Cs).

A unique, culturally grounded framework, called the “Vā Framework,” was constructed to conceptualize learning and teaching in the Tongan context. “Vā” translates as “the space between”—not an empty space, but a relational space, actively tended (“tauhi vā”) so that it stays warm in the heart (“māfana”) and alive between teacher and student.

Importantly, the Vā Framework builds upon the influential work of Professor Konai Helu Thaman, a highly respected Tongan academic and Professor of Education who has made significant contributions to Pacific indigenous education and philosophy. Her Kakala Framework—gathering flowers (“toli”), weaving them with judgment (“tui”), and gifting the finished garland (“luva”)—gives Tongan teachers a metaphor for pedagogy: that learning is something gathered, woven with care, and given with love, not simply delivered. The Vā Framework aligns closely with the Tongan ECE Curriculum Framework, “Learning through Play the Heilala Way,” which focuses on culturally relevant early childhood education.

In the age of AI, a breadth of skills approach to educating students has become even more important—emphasizing development of “21^st century skills” like critical thinking, problem solving, and creative innovation gives kids the competencies they need to navigate an AI workforce. Finding places where these skills are already present in a culture-embedded context was vital. For example, leveraging the Kakala Framework meaning that incorporating critical thinking competency training into Tonga’s education systems was not a Western/Global North import. The culturally grounded practices of toli, tui, and luva already reflected the processes of collecting ideas and data, selecting, evaluating, and making reasoned choices and judgements. The fundamental and central concept of connecting was chosen to represent both cognitive connections and relational, human ones.

Uniquely for the Tongan context, the conceptual aspect of the framework also includes the cultural value of respect (“faka’apa’apa”), cited in the Tongan ECE Curriculum as the most important Tongan value to foster in early years settings. In Tonga, it is held that effective learning can only take place in a respectful space, with respectful thoughts and actions.

Research embodied: The new framework in playful practice

Crucially, the Vā Framework needed to be more than words in a policy document—it needed to be embodied and come to life for educators. The same active, playful approaches designed for children’s learning turned out to matter just as much for the adults introducing them. Ministry officials and teacher-trainers working through the new pedagogical approaches for the first time needed to explore, talk, and play their way into the framework before they could ask children to do the same. This should not surprise anyone who takes APL seriously: if playful learning is how the brain learns best, that does not stop being true once a person turns eighteen, or once they hold a ministry title. Officials who experienced the curriculum’s collaborative, hands-on workshop sessions for themselves were the ones who could speak to it with the most conviction in classrooms afterward—a small but telling confirmation that playful learning is not for one stage of life, but learning for life.

Early signs of change are already visible in classrooms. In a Class 1 lesson introducing English vocabulary, observed by Ministry and World Bank officials, children were not seated in rows repeating words back to the teacher; they were on their feet, acting, singing, and dancing the new language into memory. The room was alive with māfana, the warm joy that comes from shared relational energy. Teacher and students laughed together as they learned, and the vocabulary stuck because it was embodied, social, and meaningful. This is tangible evidence of what happens when a system chooses to place human connection at the center of learning.

Tonga’s adoption of APL is not simply importing a model. It is a Pacific solution to a Pacific challenge—one that aligns with PACREF, UNESCO’s human flourishing agenda, and Tonga’s national priorities. By choosing APL, Tonga is cultivating confident, creative, culturally grounded learners who can navigate the future while remaining anchored in the wisdom, values, and human-to-human relationships that define Tongan life.

What makes Tonga’s experience matter beyond its shores is that vā has been intentionally positioned at national scale—embedded within a formal ministry‑led reform rather than confined to isolated pilots in selected classrooms. It is one thing for relationship‑centered pedagogy to emerge where a talented teacher or a well‑resourced school chooses to nurture it. It is another for an entire curriculum development unit, a ministry, and a nation’s early educators to adopt a shared relational approach—and for that adoption to strengthen the coherence and rigor of the curriculum rather than dilute it.

This is evidence that human-centric education systems can address how children will flourish in the age of AI. Human relationships, cultural responsiveness, and rigor are not competing priorities to be traded off, but a foundation and a structure that the rest of the world has good reason to learn from today. Tonga’s experience speaks to this.