Resources >> Browse Articles >> Everyday Ethics
Will You Make History in Education?
Will your writing go down in educational history?
Margaret Mead, American anthropologist said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Throughout history the drafting of a powerful document of intent by a small group of impassioned people has been the first step to a radical and long lasting change in the world. In 1774, a group who might have been hanged as traitors if caught sat together on many long nights in the cold to draft a document that rocked the world forever after. No less important is a document being written right now by a growing committee of educators from across the globe that come together on line and in person to take ownership of education and light the way to a better tomorrow. After many long years of frustration, marginalization, and anguish as they watch their schools and students suffer the limitations of a broken system, educators have tapped the power of the pen. The Declaration of Equity and Excellence in Education, being authored by the subject matter experts of education, educators themselves, is a blueprint for processes and methodologies that will stop leaving students, teachers, and schools behind on the world stage and scaffold them to success. This groundbreaking declaration, under construction now, will finally define for the world the expectations, recommendations, and standards that educators will finally and forcefully insist be implemented for the greater good of today’s valued students, the future heirs of the planet.
Educators who wish to right a system that has reduced them to mere disseminators of information and proctors of continuous testing, must now take their rightful place as academic navigators to a better tomorrow in education. The contents of the Declaration so far, has been gleaned from the focused brainstorming of educators who have identified what they perceive as the most significant issues in education and the practical, sensible solutions they have crafted through the wisdom of experience and on the basis of their training. This Declaration when fully detailed and developed can act as the map and divining rod for learning systems and programs of education that will fulfill the needs, hopes, and dreams of educators, students, and families all over the world. For the kind of pervasive change needed to happen, you are needed. You and millions of teaching peers who want to make a difference have perhaps the only opportunity of its kind and do their part to create this tool for change and then sign it.
Mother Theresa said, “Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person” to remind citizens of the world that the power to make changes in it was always in their hands. The myth that leaders will deliver to their constituents everything that is needed for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is defied and disproved every day in the headlines and evening news. Educators speak among themselves about ways in which education and learning can be improved, but this consultation and sharing has not changed the system in which they work, and never can. But the content of those conversations, united with those of millions of their peers can comprise the content of a practical and powerful tool, a declaration for change. “Ideals are thoughts. So long as they exist merely as thoughts, the power in them remains ineffective (Albert Schweitzer).”
If ever there was a time, as new yet un-chosen administration enters the White House of the USA, it is now for educators to gird their loins, unite their voices, and fight for what they know is perhaps the most important undertaking of this nation and all of it global neighbors. The importance of finally getting the system right surely reaches far beyond the classrooms of today. Quite literally, the future of the world is in the hands of the budding citizens of perhaps the most powerful world power, the United States and its allies, that is in the hands of students now being limited, pressured, and harassed supported by educators debilitated by disastrous federal programs such as No Child Left Behind.
John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, said “Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education.” If we are to be judged as a society and a nation in the global human community by progress in education, we would not fare very well. But there is time, and the time is now to take the reins and control the path that education takes from here forward. Yeats is quoted as saying “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” Now is the time for all good educators to light a fire for equity and excellence in education around the world, to unite their voices and roar, to come to the aid of their students, and all the generations of students to follow, as One Voice committed to positive change in education. This is your chance to be actually be a part of history in the making.
Join the movement at Elemental Ethics and The One Voice Declaration Writer’s Group here on TheApple.com.
