While we may differ on the best definition of the role of education, most of use probably agree that providing students the tools to seek truth during their lives is an important part of the mission of education. So, what do we do when falsity is winning the battle? A new study by three MIT [...]
Wayne Gretzky famously said. "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been". How about a corollary for schools: "Design schools for the future, not for today". This sounds embarrassingly obvious, yet it is not. This morning I read an article about the 11,000 student Carlsbad School District on the [...]
Here's the problem: We can lose the future if we forget the past, but we can't win the future with the past as our guide. What does that mean? None of us really know, because for the first time in human history, the past is a decreasingly useful guide to what will work and not [...]
My article on "community" was posted today in Ed Week as a Guest Blog with Next Generation Learning Challenges: I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that there may be no single piece of the education puzzle that is already starting to undergo a more fundamental, radical, and unpredictable evolution than the relationship amongst schools, [...]
Yesterday I spoke with an independent school head who emailed me on my views about strategic planning, how I might help, and who else they should reach out to. Here is what I shared: As I have written and spoken about for almost five years, the traditional independent school strategic plan is ineffective for a [...]
Sometimes numbers speak for themselves, so I am not going to write much commentary. In the most recent issue of Net Assets, the National Business Officer Association shared these tidbits, artifacts of our time. I don't have the original source citations, but I very much trust our colleagues at NBOA, as well as these authoritative [...]
A dozen years ago just a tiny fraction of schools had started to transform in response to the realities of a rapidly changing world. Five years ago, we started to see powerful conversations and intentional, significant change at a much wider range of schools. Today we may be approaching the tipping point, at least in [...]
What kind of choices will our students make when faced with big, hairy problems in their own lives, and for the world we leave them? Will they have the tools to make these choices based on sound information and reasoning? Will they repeat mistakes of the past, or will they learn from them? Will they [...]
The American experiment, which now seems so natural to us, is a thoroughly artificial device designed to counterbalance the natural impulses of group suspicions and hatreds. . . . This vast, artificial, trans-tribal construct is what our Founders aimed to achieve. And they understood that it can be achieved effectively only by intelligent schooling. (From E. D. [...]
While this space is used exclusively for matters related to education, we increasingly must find and deal with the Venn overlap of social, economic, and political trends that both reflect and impact the ecosystem of which education is just one element. What we teach/learn, and how we teach/learn MUST recognize the reality of the world [...]
