Deborah Meier on Education

Dear Readers,

I have been getting annoyed at the casual references to Occupy’s failure.

I think they were, by all and any measure, an incredible success.

Many years ago, my colleague Ted Sizer, when asked what he hoped the Coalition of Essential Schools’ influence would be five years down the line, said: “We’ll be having a better conversation about American schooling.” That was 1985. Maybe he was victorious five years down the line. We thought so, at the time. But alas today the important ideas that drove the Coalition of Essential Schools are decidedly less popular than they were when he made that point. We have moved very fast away from what Ted sso persuasively (we thought) was arguing for.

Now, I don’t know whether the founders of the Occupy movement expected to change the world, but they did what Ted had hoped for. They have had a remarkable impact on the language of the world, the conversation, the metaphors—the way we see things. They introduced, dramatically, the “99% vs 1%” thought! Now it, or variants of it, are on everyone’s lips and appear in all the pie charts, et al. They have made a powerful impression. Now we have to figure out how to capitalize on the fact that this dramatic unfairness is getting worse, not better. But, at least, it has been named.

Thanks, Occupiers of the world.

Filed under: 2015 Posts | 4 Comments »