Responding to a distributed blues riff on teacher resistance to systemic change (Will Richardson, Artichoke, Chris Sessums, and Terry Elliot - here and here again). I have a quick story.

We were working on a mission statement for our school. At the end of what had been a drawn-out process in which an experienced mission statement writing leader from downtown had walked the staff through surveying and defining our core values, the job of putting it all into words fell to a Committee of 5. We got together after school one day and began parsing the language from our former statement, streamlining and clarifying the school vision. After an hour we had one sentence: “…school community members will foster a lifelong love of learning, appreciate multicultural experiences, and support diverse learning styles.”

I’m not going to comment here on the content of the statement, or my opinion of the need to write one, or my view of mission statements in general other than to say that where schools are concerned, they are the equivalent of educational mouthwash.

It was time for us to be done, but we weren’t done. We’d had some laughs and figured that we could finish up in one more hour. So we had to arrange another meeting. It seemed to me that this was something which could easily be accomplished with a google doc, or a wiki page. So I suggested that we finish it up over the internet. I hesitated saying anything because of the reaction that I knew would follow, but I said it anyway, and I wasn’t surprised. My good idea was instantly squelched. One teacher said, “I don’t want to mess around learning how to communicate in some chatroom.”

Lifelong learning, I see now, is all about your own personal goals, and presuming to decide for anyone else what that should entail is a wrong-headed waste of time. Who are we kidding?

I really liked what Terry said:

The tools have turned the classroom to rubble so that now you must build anew, not clean the mortar off the block and build another schoolhouse. Unless, of course, you just want to run out the clock to your retirement. I do think that there are ways to work within the system, but it is obvious to me that most of us will be Moses seeing not even a foggy glimpse of the Promised Land.

The real issue now is deciding what’s worth keeping and what form that should take. Another time, perhaps.

Artichoke’s post prompted me to check out Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society, which I’ve seen but never read. I’m coming to terms with the fact that technologies which introduce compelling new possibilities also displace established designs, both personal and institutional, a point that was clearly made in Stephen Downes’ article.

From Ivan Illich, A Constitution for Cultural Revolution:

We need an alternative program, an alternative both to development and to merely political revolution. Let me call this alternative program either institutional or cultural revolution, because its aim is the transformation of both public and personal reality. The political revolutionary wants to improve existing institutions - their productivity and the quality and distribution of their products. His vision of what is desirable and possible is based on consumption habits developed during the last hundred years. The cultural revolutionary believes that these habits have radically distorted our view of what human beings can have and want. He questions the reality that others take for granted, a reality that, in his view, is the artificial by-product of contemporary institutions, created and reinforced by them in pursuit of their short-term ends. The political revolutionary concentrates on schooling and tooling for the environment that the rich countries, socialist or capitalist, have engineered. The cultural revolutionary risks the future on the educability of man.

Artichoke has me wondering whether we’re prisoners or guardians of the nation-state.

Illich on the web.