An Apology

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Last week I posted a blog after the Alabama special election.  I have received some feedback that it was overly harsh and condemning of people and a region, and that some educators were so upset that I will probably no longer be in their circle of respect.  To those who have given me some private feedback, I am thankful and always grateful for collegial input.  For those who are angry, I want to apologize. It is never my intent to be overly harsh, but always my intent to push us to look at what we are doing, and why, using all of the tools that are available to us.

As I have been writing in my blog series about Sen. Ben Sasse’s book, perhaps the most powerful tool we have in this great country is that of discourse.  We will not agree on everything, but we should want to enter into discourse to find where we can agree, and then move forward to solve our problems.  It is one of the wonders of our educational community: we may disagree on politics and economics and even some important social norms, but we tend to be willing to share our ideas, and respond to them without calling into question more sinister motivations.  If that post, which I have taken down, implied sinister motivations on the part of any large group of Americans, it was certainly not my intent.

We have real problems in this country and in this world. Solutions will lie at the nexus of objective facts and our willingness to imagine a better future.  As educators we have a special role to play in finding that nexus.  That is my intent. If I failed in that post last week, I apologize and will hopefully learn from that risk and failure.