What If?

"Promise to yourself to live your life as a revolution and not just a process of evolution."

Anthony J. D'Angelo

There is always a great deal of debate around educational reform issues.  The rationale behind a lot of what we do in education is decades and even centuries old.  We continue to settle for evolving when much of what we do goes against what we believe.


For example:

• We believe learning can occur anytime/anywhere yet we have bells that tell us when the learning starts/stops.  
• We know that students develop at different rates yet we put all students on a 13 year track (K-12).
• We judge student/teacher/principal/school success on the ability to answer multiple choice questions yet we know it does not tell the whole story.
• We force unsuccessful students to repeat the same grade/course in largely the same way and expect different results.

We know that many of our students are entering the workforce without the requisite skills yet we still teach in many places to a standardized test.  In "Stop Stealing Dreams" Seth Godin writes that there are only two tools available to the educator.  The easy one is fear.  Fear is easy to awake, easy to maintain, but ultimately toxic.  The other tool is passion.


I have said before that "Nobody is Passionate about Bubbling in Answer Sheets".  What would happen if we began to operate from a place of passion instead of fear?  Imagine what school and ultimately the world could look like then...