The Renaissance in Education Summit
FLORENCE ITALY FEBRUARY 2028
A Recentered Education Convening
Florence gave the world its first renaissance.
In February 2028, it will host the next renaissance…in education
The Renaissance in Education Summit is a four-day gathering of the world's most serious educators, school founders, and thinkers — convened to do the work of reimagining education
By creating the conditions to spark inquiry, awaken imagination, and foster collaboration across different perspectives and experiences, The Renaissance in Education Summit helps usher in a new vision of education and the telling of better stories for schools and the world
Why Florence, Italy?
Florence didn't earn its place in history by accident. It was the city where bankers, clerics, sculptors, and scholars decided the inherited forms of medieval life no longer matched what they understood about the human person — and instead of convening a task force, they gathered, argued, walked the same streets, and read the same texts aloud to one another until they produced a renaissance whose intellectual scaffolding still holds up most of what we mean by a liberal education.
We believe education needs the same kind of reckoning, and we believe it belongs in the same city.
Florence isn't a backdrop for this Summit — it's a participant in it. The Duomo, the Uffizi, the narrow streets of the Oltrarno were all built by people convinced that human formation, not the transmission of isolated skills, was the proper end of education. Walking through that city while wrestling with the same question gives the conversation a kind of weight no conference hotel ballroom ever could.
Who should attend?
This gathering is for
the educator who feels the gap every day between what they know schools should be and what the metrics demand of them
the school founder who has built something genuinely different and is searching for peers who understand why
the professor or dean looking to dream bigger dreams for students and learning
the philosopher, theologian, or scholar whose work touches the formation of human beings and who is tired of watching education conversations happen without them in the room
the funder who senses that the models they have been funding are not producing the flourishing they were promised, and who wants better language for what they are actually after.
The only currency that earns a place here is the seriousness with which you hold the question: What is education actually for?
The Rhythm
The rhythm of the Renaissance in Education Summit is to gather for both specific conversations related to reimagining education and for long walks through the magical city of Florence as we pause to consider our collective goals, hopes, and dreams for a new renaissance in education.
Morning sessions bring the full gathering together for the day's central question — structured enough to focus the room, open enough that the conversation goes where it needs to go. These are not lectures. They are the kind of dialogue that happens with an espresso and pastry in hand.
Afternoons belong to Florence. Small groups take to the streets — the Oltrarno, the Piazza della Signoria, the Duomo, cloisters and courtyards where the original humanists walked while working out the same questions we are carrying. There is no agenda for these hours. There is only the city, the company, and the conversation it tends to produce.
Early evenings are for reflection and transition — time to write, to sit, to process the day before the group reconvenes. Some of the most important thinking of the week will happen in these quiet hours.
Communal dinners close each day. Long tables, local food, unhurried hours. No panels, no presentations, no name-tag networking. Just the room, together, continuing the conversation that began in the morning and deepened in the streets. These dinners are not a social amenity. They are an intrinsic part of the program.
What to Expect
The Renaissance in Education Summit is four days built around the conviction that the most important thing a gathering like this can protect is time — time to think, time to disagree, time to walk, time to sit with a difficult question long enough that something genuine emerges from it
The Renaissance in Education Summit is four days built around the conviction that the most important thing a gathering like this can protect is time — time to think, time to disagree, time to walk, time to sit with a difficult question long enough that something genuine emerges from it.
The magic of this gathering is what happens in the margins: the conversation that starts at dinner and doesn't end until midnight, the walk through a Florentine neighborhood that turns into a two-hour argument about what vocation means, the moment when two people from opposite ends of the education world realize they have been working on the same problem in different languages.
This is how the first renaissance began…and it is how we plan to foster the next renaissance in education
Topics to Include:
Creating a Renaissance in Education
Reimagining the Purpose of Schooling
The Human Person in an Age of AI
Restoring the Vocation of Teaching
What this Summit Produces
A Practical Response to the Driving Question
Every session, every dinner, every walk through the streets of Florence is oriented toward a single question: What would we need to believe, build, and commit to in order to spark a genuine renaissance in education? By the final day, the gathering will have done enough work together to answer that question in writing.
A Founding Fellowship
Participants in the Renaissance in Education Summit become founding members of the Renaissance in Education Fellowship — a standing community of educators, founders, scholars, and funders committed to the long work of reimagining schooling. The Fellowship convenes annually, grows deliberately, and gives every person in that first Florence room a community that outlasts the week.
A Body of Shared Work
The conversations, arguments, and ideas that emerge from four days in Florence will be gathered, curated, and published — as podcast episodes, as essays, and eventually as a volume that gives the broader education world access to what the room produced. The Renaissance in Education Summit doesn't end when everyone goes home. It begins there.
Cost and Details
Fellow — $4,500
This investment includes lodging for the duration of the Summit, breakfast and dinner each day, and guided walks through Florence's historic districts and curated cultural experiences.
A limited number of Participant fellowships are available for educators whose work belongs in this room and who require financial support to attend. To inquire, include a note in your invitation request.
Founding Patron — $15,000
Everything included in the Fellow experience, plus a private dinner with the Summit's anchor guests and permanent recognition as a Founding Patron of the Renaissance in Education Fellowship.
Not included:
Transportation to and from Florence (though we are glad to assist with planning), hotel accommodations before or after the Summit dates, and personal expenses.