A Mind Is a Wonderful Thing to Change
I admire someone who is willing to change his/her mind. I don’t mean fickleness. I mean changing one’s mind as in thinking deeply, allowing ideas to steep and evolve, finally realizing that thoughtful deliberation has changed one’s intellectual travel plan. The New York Times today documents just such a “U-turn” by Diane Ravitch, educational historian and scholar. If I were giving a project-based learning grade to Dr. Ravitch, she would earn maximum points for process and extra credit for risk-taking. For a professional “scholar” to change her mind is the most risky and admirable way to model true learning we could ever hope to witness.
Whether or not you agree with Dr. Ravitch’s current positions, her intellectual process of intellectual evolution is exactly what we need in our young people and leaders both now and into the future. Perhaps it is the willingness to change one’s mind that has been most lacking in recent years as ed reform has heated up and we have worried about the very future of learning in a new century. If teachers, schools, parents, communities, and policy makers are not willing to change their minds through carefully deliberate process, we are mired.
I have no idea how we make mind-changing an accredited process, component of adequate yearly progress, or a measurable datapoint, but it must somehow be part of the process of 21st century learning. Forget the trendy century label. A mind is a wonderful thing to change, no matter what the century.
The future of the students in the schools in the United States depends on change. Therefore, those unwilling to carefully deliberate on the process, are only postponing the inevitable in that change is a necessary component to the future leaders of America. In other words, the change must be forced, since most people are resistent and unwilling to change.
Comment by i instruct — March 8, 2010 @ 5:03 pm