I just read a little booklet put together as a tribute to one of my mentors, Dr. Max van Manen of the University of Alberta upon his retirement.  A wonderful tribute to a person thoroughly deserving of tributes. In my small and humble submission to this project I wrote,

“Max, sadly for me, was often a voice crying in the wilderness.  Amid the contemporary storm of calls for 'accountability' which, for most educators translates into increased performance scores, Max continued to cry out for the fundamental accounting of a teacher to his students.  His vision of the trusted, caring protector who walks with his students into the larger world, is as real in this fragmented and wired world as it was in the world of the ancient Greeks.”

 I'm pessimistic about the future of education when I see that people like Dr. van Manen and the wonderful contrarian, Dr. Alfie Kohn, are sometimes relegated to village idiot status by the present 'thinkers, movers and shakers' in education.  These new education nabobs seem to be fascinated (blinded) by two themes - themes that are not bad in themselves, but that become so when seen as THE answer to all of our problems.  The latest gadget (not i Pad, but i Pad 2!, or whatever the megamothercorp pukes out next) rather than a useful tool, becomes the must have, the new engine for discovery learning, the road to pedagogical nirvana, the thing-without-which-we-cannot- live.  And those who happen to have a head start on others because of the idle hours they spent gaming in their recent youth, suddenly become the new swamis, and how stupid you are not to thoughtlessly follow them.  

The second theme is the unreflective reliance on the procedures and findings of 'science' as the one true road to educational wisdom.  The most suspect phrase in all of education is 'studies show...'  Dueling studies, rarely read but often adopted by lazy bandwagon jumpers, raise more questions than answers, and pose as authoritative pills to suppress healthy skepticism.  Studies show that studies show almost anything the reader wants them to.  Or, most often, they simply confirm the obvious. 

And the sacrificial lambs, the children, sit and wait for us to take their hands, offer a smile, offer a little bit of ourselves, and walk with them into an often cruel and confusing world.  But we'd rather be erudite than thoughtful, up-to-date rather than authentic, mechanical and systematic rather than human.