Sometimes when people talk about education, they do so in terms of ideals. They measure the status quo against a notion of perfection – what the ideal school, teacher, student, and experience would look like.
Measuring anything against a fictitious perfection always seems futile to me. Sure, we should always measure, with the notion of getting consistently better, but we need to move away from notions of what could probably never be and towards the end product of great ideas.
Ideas have always fueled education. Ideas allow us to separate ourselves from what has stalled or simply never worked and to connect to things that can grow. Ideas grow beautifully in schools while ideals are static things. If we replaced one unattainable ideal in education with three workable ideas, what would this look like in a year, in three, in ten?
I, for one, would like to see much more of this happening day in and day out in our schools, for our kids.
Don Adams, Head of School