Danielle believes strongly in the vitality of words, numbers and ideas, the living things that fall off the syllabus when schooling narrows to small parts for children to memorise for exams. Thinking is learned the way a language is, in the earliest years, long before anyone writes it down, yet a mindset in which young people are taught how to reason is rarely fostered. She left the UK ten years ago to look for how education could be made better.
Her own schooling in the UK left questions unanswered. French conjugations and mathematical methods were difficult to make sense of, and it was only in her teens, when literature opened another way into learning, that the world began to feel like her classroom. Italy became her classroom next. In 2016 she moved to Rome and began working with international families whose children attended the city’s international schools, from KS2 through GCSE, A-level and IB, and Genia Academia took shape there alongside her own discovery of what it means to learn by living what you learn. Five years teaching students in those schools, and from 2018 collaboration with teachers and leading agencies across Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, strengthened the principle she had arrived at: a student needs opportunities to notice, talk, make connections, try an idea and discover why it holds. Examination success and admission to leading universities followed, but understanding remained the purpose.
The same method runs through every subject. Learning a language is an immersive experience that often centres on an exchange with another person: in a café, in a shop, at a cash machine. It was at a cash machine that Danielle first noticed the word parliamo and wondered why so many Italian words end in -iamo, and what she discovered, that -iamo marks the speaker as one of those doing the action, turned a column of endings that had eluded her at school into a pattern she could hear, question and use. Mathematics asks to be met the same way, and a linear function can begin with a starting amount and something that changes at a steady pace rather than an unfamiliar equation on a page: a cost that starts at £3 and rises by £2 for each unit used reaches £11 after four units, so y = 3 + 2x says exactly that, the gradient describing the steady increase and the intercept where the total begins. Science asks first and answers afterwards. Watch water bend towards a rubbed balloon, or hold together on a coin instead of running off, and the questions arise on their own, so that polarity, cohesion and adhesion become answers a student has earned rather than vocabulary to memorise.
Today Genia Academia supports students through GCSE, A-level, IB and SAT with an education that makes ideas meaningful, and exists to move young people through the education system without losing the point of it. The art being taught is the art of thinking, and that art is immersive in the way a language is: understanding grows by moving between an experience, a pattern and the words or symbols that describe it, so learning to reason mathematically, to read scientifically and to meet literature with curiosity is an experience rather than a list of instructions. Our focus is global because reasoning belongs to no single country, language or syllabus, and students who can think for themselves carry it into every subject, every exam and every part of their lives beyond school. All of it rests on a question worth asking out loud: how did our education system become what it is today? It was not designed to fail, but to move large numbers of students efficiently, and what it measures is how reliably a young person follows a method correctly. Genia Academia asks something different of schooling: could this student explain why it works, and would they know what to do when the method runs out?