The Tree of Poisoned Apples

I recently attended a meeting of public school reformers.  As I listened to their list of demands I couldn't help but notice their myopic willingness to be content just shuffling the same old issues around the table as if the view would change enough from where they sit to make them comfortable.  I was perplexed and a bit miffed.  Not at them, but at the system they've inherited and poisoned by.

Like a family of drunks who wonder why they drink from the same bottle that polluted their parents, these people are all products of the very system they seek to change.  It is as if they willingly walk up to the tree of poisoned apples, pick one, take a bite and grimace.  From where they stand they cannot see the other orchards over the hill that many people are happily eating from.  So, resigned to their 'only' tree, and perhaps dulled in their thinking by the very poison they keep swallowing, they remain ignorant and unhappy.

The irony is that they are advocates for improved learning, and yet they do not open themselves up to the exploration and curiosity that drove the others over the hill to bliss.  The old tree cannot be made sweet and healthy by any means known to mankind.  The only solution it is worthy of is chopping, cutting, and burning.  While it rots and heads slowly in that direction, it continues to feed millions who don't know any better.

The current condition of our public schools warrants massive change, and revolutionary thinking.  Miles and miles of progress is needed and yet these advocates are content to battle over the inches the system is willing to discuss.  Crisis is the time for radical change because the masses can agree in their desperation that something must be done.  The danger here is that radical acceptance of poor alternatives does not improve our long term condition.  We are in real danger of desperately drowning administrators handcuffing themselves to a cement block that teeters toward the depths.

  

Isn't it funny that the very people who hold the power of creating change, the constituents of every district, are hindered in their ability to see better solutions because of how that same dysfunctional system taught them to learn?  It seems ludicrously ironic, and frustratingly tragic.