by Gabriel Rshaid (gabriel.rshaid@sanandres.esc.edu.ar)
March of 2009 was both the beginning and the end of an era in my life. As I do every year, I attended the ASCD Annual Conference, an 8,000+ gathering of educators from all over the world, that year taking place in Orlando. There are always hundreds of sessions to choose from, but we were all looking forward to hearing Sir Ken Robinson, who would be delivering one of the keynotes. Sir Ken had only recently acquired rock star educational status, after his TED talks became a viral phenomenon that had, for example, all kinds of people from outside the world of education sending emails to people they knew in schools urging them to watch him online.
And Sir Ken did not disappoint. Playing on the unique atmosphere that seems to be generated whenever thousands of likeminded people congregate together, he delivered one of his trademark speeches, alternately having me and my friends from work roaring with laughter and on the verge of tears, as he moved with that unique wit and charm of his from a hilarious and educationally self-deprecating joke to some profoundly touching truth about the need to completely rethink our school system so as to better serve our students to uncover and rise up to their full potential. It was our strongest emotional experience ever in a conference, and to this day I remember how we felt moved and inspired when leaving the massive lecture hall.
I say it was the beginning of an era for me because never before anyone could verbalize with such expressive strength what we all knew: that we had it all wrong and, unwittingly, school systems had deprived many of a chance to blossom and damaged their all too fragile child self-esteem irreparably. In a way, Sir Ken’s ability to resonate with so many unspeakably traumatic school experiences, was able to capture the general public’s imagination and he became a beacon for many of us who tried to do things differently. He was the voice that allowed us to unapologetically work towards a more inclusive, less rigid and structured school.
And, even if in a more trivial dimension, it was also the end of an era for me. We rented a car so that we could do some sightseeing in the big playground that is Orlando and I remember vividly that I refused to rent a GPS. Despite being a technophile, I prided myself in my sense of orientation, so, for the last time ever, I just relied on the venerable street map of Orlando that I had brought with me in my backpack and managed to drive around by looking up stuff on the map. In my next road trip a couple of months later, because I was at an unfamiliar place and landed late at night, I acquiesced to the GPS and never had a paper map again.
A few weeks ago, March of 2014, I heard Sir Ken live again at the same ASCD Annual Conference, this time in LA. He was his same enthralling self, and enraptured an audience of thousands of educators who gave him a well-deserved standing ovation. Some of the jokes are new, and his inimitable gift as an orator ensure that one can listen to him forever, but the message was the same, and the sense of urgency undiminished. The need to completely reform our school systems is as current now as it was in 2009, and, despite some well-intentioned efforts by some leading schools who are making true on some of these principles, the educational landscape remains largely unchanged. The No Child Left Behind debate of the recent past is now about Common Core implementation and assessments, and, overall, changes in school systems have, if anything, only been cosmetic.
However, my traveler habits could not be more different. Now I always carry a GPS with me in my backpack, just in case I don’t get a good data signal for Google Maps in my smartphone. I would never think of not using a GPS, and the mere idea of reading a map and following street signs seems to me laughably anachronistic.
It dawned upon me that this story of Sir Ken and the GPS was an apt, albeit if somewhat sad, metaphor about educational change. Despite the overwhelming popular support and consensus that Sir Ken’s ideas are right and a learning revolution is needed, in five years advances in making them happen have been almost imperceptible. In that same period, developments in technology and connectivity have been breathtaking and unstoppable, literally changing our lives. We can rationalize why this is so, and we educators are very good at finding explanations for everything, but we need to understand, for once and all, that unless we tackle educational reform with boldness and vision, the gap between real life and what happens in our schools will inevitably grow into a chasm, so much so that we will miss out on this once in the history of humanity opportunity to become a generation of joyful lifelong learners.
Leading Out 