“How” Trees In response to my last post, I’ve also been considering the best way to transform purposes and visions into tangible roadmaps. Organizations I’ve observed often do a poor job of scoping their goals, and do an even worse job articulating their purpose. Is there some process that can help organizations ensure that they… Read more How Trees
Philosophy drives education, so it’s important that we ask ourselves unanswerable, philosophical questions from time to time. Let’s start with this one: What is the purpose of education? Of course, there is no single answer to this question. Education serves many purposes, and these purposes will continue to evolve for a multitude of reasons. The reason… Read more The Purpose of Education
I was recently listening to Hidden Brain, and came across an episode about a metaphor from Alison Gopnik’s book, The Gardener and the Carpenter. The metaphor goes as follows: as a parent, you can either be a Gardener or a carpenter. The Carpenter: If you are a Carpenter, you have precise control over a final product —… Read more The Carpenter and the Gardener
I was thinking this morning about the central role of democracy in creating positive change. Democracy is a self-organizing, self-directing, and self-correcting process. As long as democracy is in place, positive change will be natural and continuous. Democracy builds this healthy renewal process into the system itself. That’s why I am so excited when we talk about strengthening and… Read more The measure of democracy
Just finishing up Hecht’s Democratic Education. Here is an excerpt that describes his view that democratic education is part of a larger paradigm shift towards the emergence of a true “democratic culture”: We are not in the midst of a passing wave, but rather in a process of changing stages or a quantum leap. If during… Read more Creating a true “democratic culture”
Here is a really interesting description of how a school in Israel created strong connections with the surrounding community by sharing space with other community organizations (from Yaacov Hecht’s Democratic Education): The unique processes that developed there included very strong ties between the school and its surrounding community, as it became a sort of regional community… Read more Building connections by sharing space
