In 2009 I began an internship at the Innovation Unit in London. It being an internship, I was doing a little of everything, but my main project was Learning Futures, whose goal was to make school more engaging for students.

Learning Futures was led by David Price, a musician who’d co-founded the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts with, among others, Sir Paul McCartney, and who had already achieved extraordinary success with “Musical Futures.”

Musical Futures aimed to transform how music was taught in schools across the UK. At its heart was the insight that when people learn a musical instrument informally, they nearly always start by trying to learn a song that they want to be able to play. And if they can, they start playing in a band with their friends.

This is not, traditionally, how it works when you study music in school, where “learning to play a song you like” is, at best, the reward at the end of a long process of developing technical fluency through exercises designed to drill you in specific techniques. In Musical Futures, the kids didn’t even start by choosing an instrument. They chose a song, and, with support, worked out how to play it with their friends, trying out different instruments as they went. Unsurprisingly, this approach proved extremely popular.

The reason I’m writing about David Price in this newsletter is that David died of cancer in May. His is a tremendous loss to education, to the world, and, let’s not kid ourselves, to me. David’s presence was somehow both electrifying and totally unprepossessing. In his presence, the world just seemed like a warmer, funnier place, alive with boundless possibilities. It was only in his absence that you realized it felt like this because of him, though with any luck some of that magic had rubbed off on you by then. The world is full of people who have learned to be a little warmer, a little funnier, and a little more alive to possibility because of the time we spent with David.

To be honest, while my overwhelming feeling when I think of David is gratitude for having known him, I also feel regret—for never having him on the podcast, for just not keeping in touch as much as I might have. David was sort of my boss when I was at the Innovation Unit, but when you’re an intern everyone is your boss. The word that really comes to mind when I think of him is “mentor.” If this makes you think of anyone in your life, and they’re still around, send them an email. Please.

This issue opens with a piece that David wrote in 2023 about school improvement. I think he would like the rest of the issue too. He’d love the stories of schools and non-profits taking relationships seriously, of professional development where teachers can actually try out their ideas. He’d be delighted to read about school lunches, and of course, about the projects—the music festival of course, but he also would have been excited about the fiction-writing during lockdown in India, the cardboard arcade in Minnesota, and the virtual-reality geology. David lit up when he saw students doing meaningful work.

Finally, I’m most sorry I can’t share the final piece with him, the one co-authored by Stacey Caillier and Rob Riordan, which is as clear an expression of the beliefs about education that guide this journal as anything I’ve ever read.